Abstract
Contradictory views of addiction as both sickness and moral failing have resulted in a broken system in which famous substance users (like their everyday counterparts) are bounced between overcrowded jails, prisons, and rehab centers, all with little expectation of "success."
On any given day, more people in the U.S. read celebrity gossip blogs than the top three newspapers combined. Celebrity gossip bloggers often report on celebrity “deviance,” which they usually interpret in the language of disease and addiction. On July 6, 2010, when actress Lindsay Lohan was sentenced to 90 days in jail followed by 90 days of inpatient rehabilitation for a probation violation stemming from a DUI conviction, several celebrity gossip blogs reported this story. The photo of Lohan crying and looking in shock at her lawyer when she heard this sentence was accompanied by stories about her drug problems. Many blog readers were eager to react, posting their thoughts on Lohan’s addiction and the court’s response to her probation violation. The verdict of the blogs was as clear as the presiding judge’s: Lohan was an addict who needed to be jailed and forced into rehabilitation if she were ever going to get clean and sober. The criminal justice system should respond to Lohan with severity, both for her own good and as an example to others addicted to drugs and alcohol and scornful of the law.
The coverage of Lohan’s courtroom appearance and impending incarceration helped reinforce the common idea that habitual substance use necessarily signals addiction and that addiction is a hybrid form of moral failing and sickness best managed through incarceration and treatment. This idea of addiction is not the creation of the celebrity gossip blogs; it reflects theories of habitual substance use that root its origins in the brain while remaining focused on abuse as a behavioral problem that leads to criminality. This seemingly contradictory view of addiction—as a compulsion outside of one’s control that can only be cured through one’s control—is reflected in our institutional responses to habitual substance use. While the U.S. increasingly medicalizes addiction, searching for pharmaceutical cures, it simultaneously criminalizes drug use, leading to a system in which some addicts are managed by both rehabilitative and punitive measures, treatment and incarceration, in an effort to achieve the goal of sobriety.
This confused conception of addiction is a cultural and historical triumph. Social problems scholars study how knowledge is used to define particular kinds of problems like addiction; they pay attention to moral entrepreneurs within the fields of science, medicine, and the law who help advance prevailing ideas about deviance. These ideas, however, are embedded within a culture that is receptive to the increasing medicalization of human life and the notion that punitive responses can be the best medicine for repeated deviance. Gossip blogs, with millions of daily readers, have become key sites where ideas about what is normal or deviant play out through stories of celebrity drug use.
Actress Lindsay Lohan at a 2011 arraignment hearing in Los Angeles, CA.
Take, for example, the coverage of Lohan’s July jail sentence by Perez Hilton, a blogger read by some 7-10 million people every month. “Lindsay Lohan sentenced to jail!!! Damn!!!…The hard-pAArtying actress was also ordered to serve an additional 90 days at an in-patient rehab treatment…jail AND rehab will do her good!” Over two hundred readers quickly posted responses to this story; 98 percent expressed support for the judge’s ruling.
One reader wrote: “this could save her life!! She should be going to jail” and another argued: “Maybe this will straighten her out. She needs help and maybe after this she will learn her lesson. I feel for her but tough love is what she needs.” These and other readers expressed support for Lindsay (several readers called her “ill” or “sick”), echoing the idea that addiction is a disease that requires a rehabilitative response such as jail. Others were decidedly less sympathetic towards Lohan as an addict, while extremely supportive of her incarceration. As one explained: “It’s about time. She thought she was above the law. Time for them to set an example of her” and another wrote “good. If she was black or Hispanic, she’d already be in jail. This is bullshit!” Several readers acknowledged the unfairness of the criminal justice system and a few its clear racial bias, yet most were nonetheless supportive of it as a response to rulebreaking. The problem as readers saw it is not that we incarcerate “commoners” for probation violations, but that everyone should face “justice” equally (justice here being synonymous with jail). Overall, Perez Hilton and his readers expressed support for incarceration to both punish and heal drug users, though it’s just this practice that has helped propel the U.S. to the forefront of incarceration rates in the world and left African Americans and Latinos the most adversely affected by the “War on Drugs.”
While celebrity blogs are important sites where dominant definitions of deviance and its control are reinvigorated, they also reinforce the equally dominant idea of deviance’s incurability. On January 3, 2011 Lohan was released from the Betty Ford Center where she served her sentence of inpatient rehabilitation. Not unlike others on probation, Lohan is frequently drug tested and meets regularly with her probation officer. Unlike countless others, though, she is also closely monitored by the celebrity gossip blogs. Perez Hilton recently wrote “Lindsay’s Random Drug Test All Come Back Clean!” to which the majority of readers who responded expressed skepticism. One wrote “…clean for now…when she thinks they aren’t watching as close she’ll be back on the shit…wait and see. Nothing is ever real with this bitch.” Another questioned “who’s urine is she using?” and a third wrote “not including all the prescription drugs she’s ‘allowed’ to take…she’s probably just as plastered as before, but through an ‘acceptable’ medium.” While the majority of comments expressed doubt about Lohan’s ability to stay “clean”, far fewer readers commented on this story; 18 compared with the 248 who weighed in on her probation violation hearing. Lohan is only interesting when she’s playing the addict; her long-term sobriety would prove that our prescription for addiction—jail and treatment—works. Ironically, we maintain a faith in this medicine while intensely monitoring those subjected to it (presumably premised on the assumption that it won’t work). But, if and when it doesn’t work, we hold addicts responsible, punishing them without questioning these sanctions’ efficacy.
The insistence that addiction is a disease that should, but can’t, be fixed has done much to fill jails and rehab centers.
There is strong evidence that incarcerating and continuously monitoring drug users leads rarely to prolonged sobriety but frequently back to prison. If Lohan’s drug tests come back positive we should expect a call for her to spend more time in jail and rehab centers, but silence on the efficacy of these responses to substance use. The insistence that addiction is a disease that should, but can’t, be fixed leads to a prolonged cycle of surveillance that has done little to stop drug use but much to fill jails, prisons, and rehab centers in the U.S. Celebrity gossip blogs serve to reinforce and reinvigorate support for a punitive response to addiction, despite their own coverage that also attests to this approach’s failure.