In Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country, drugs occupy a contentious space. Its geographical location means it has largely been a conduit for surrounding drug markets: opium and increasingly methamphetamine, mostly produced in Afghanistan, flow westward through the country. As a result, national drug use has also grown. A United Nations drug survey from 2013 identified 6.7 million people consuming drugs then; this represented roughly 6% of the population. While a more recent drug survey is still ongoing, it’s likely this number has only increased – and with it, the number of people struggling with addiction.
As in many countries, the media plays a key role in building and maintaining people’s views on drugs in Pakistani society. Drug coverage, often in English and Urdu, can have a serious impact on drug policies: they create a mediated reality of Pakistan and the “threats” it faces from the “menace” of drugs – in turn reinforcing state narratives around the problems that drug consumption, production and selling create. The effect is that there is little public resistance to prohibitive drug policies and the punishments exercised over those who use them.
In Pakistan, three leading English outlets with the widest circulation – DAWN, The News International, and The Express Tribune – frame drugs and people who use them in numerous ways. While English readership can be lower than Urdu publications given lower English literacy rates across Pakistan, English outlets cater primarily to educated and urban elites, whose opinions often have more sway on public opinion and leverage on policymaking. Understanding how they portray drugs and those who use them can be a valuable insight into how drug-related views are created and diffused.
Pakistan’s media focus on the consequences of youth drug use
Pakistan has a great youth bulge, with almost 67% of its population being under 30. As a result, outlets pay great attention to this group, urging their safeguarding from external menaces that may sacrifice their future productivity.
Most articles mentioning young people and drugs are about the consequences of use. The youth are cast as vulnerable, needing protection from the “menace” of drugs. Alarming headlines about young people using drugs (like “Alarm raised over deadly mix of youth, drug abuse”, or more simply “the curse”) incite general concerns about a looming national crisis. The notion that access to drugs could jeopardise the health and future of students is a common theme.
As The News International puts it: “This [student drug use] is a health issue, yes but it is also a national security issue, an economic issue and a moral one.”
This focus is also reflected in the plentiful articles that report on awareness-raising seminars and events on preventing drug use. According to the news reporting, many of these focus on protecting the youth. Oftentimes, these events are organised by law enforcement, civil society organisations, educational institutions and the state’s Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF), an organisation part of the Ministry of the Interior and Narcotics Control that oversees drug control operations. The youth are rarely given the opportunity to voice their own opinions or experiences with drugs. Most outlets’ mentions of youth and drugs often relate to their protection, with no attribution of any individual or autonomous thinking and decision-making.
Focus on policing rather than health
The ANF’s actions take up a considerable amount of media space. Across the three outlets, news briefs and reports highlight an array of state measures taken against growing trafficking concerns. From raids near educational institutions or drug seizures, to the arrest of notorious drug mafia members – their actions are routinely covered across all publications. These briefs often cast the ANF’s crackdown on drugs as an appropriate and celebrated response to drug-related issues in Pakistan.
What’s absent from most outlets are any deeper spotlights on the issues or concerns around the health harms – both physical and mental – that those using drugs face, and what wider efforts are being made to address them. While a few articles even suggest looking to other nations for emulating effective harm reduction measures, these are few and far between. Abstinence is often the preferred recommendation to dealing with drug-related harms. As The News puts it, “substances known to be addictive and damaging should be avoided altogether.”
The exception to this health-based focus is nicotine, a substance that is not explicitly prohibited by Islamic Sharia laws. This means that anxieties around tobacco use are legitimate issues to cover on media in health-focused and pro-regulation pieces. Some discussion of tobacco harm reduction occurs, although vapes have also been targeted as promoting use instead of reducing harms. This balanced coverage is never afforded to prohibited substances.
Abundance of emotive and war language
Drugs are cast as threats within themselves, even when their harms come from how they’re used. In one article highlighting police corruption, drugs are blamed for “infecting the young”, without focusing on misconduct among officers themselves.
There are consistent uses of emotive language across drug-related articles, often reinforcing moral panics around substances while rarely providing evidence behind their claims of drugs’ effects. Article titles raise hue and cry about youth paranoia, and an influx of new drugs and types of addictions, the societal threat of heroin and methamphetamine, and the mafias trafficking gutka, a chewing mix containing tobacco, betel nut and other spices sold across southern Asia.
These outlets also use war imagery, long associated universally with drug use. The News describes this as “Addressing the drug menace is not merely a security imperative; it is a battle to safeguard the future of the nation.” Drugs are seen as a menace and a threat to the solidarity and prosperity of the nation. As DAWN puts it: “In the shadowy realm of addiction, crystal methamphetamine casts a dark and insidious grip, trapping the youth in its unforgiving grasp”. Consumers are victims, vulnerable and weak, often in need of external rescue. The reinforcing language here once again emphasises punitive state measures and the importance of law enforcement measures above all in drug-related matters.
Drugs are seen as casting a “deadly trap”, especially for the youth, a hazard bringing darkness, eager to ravage through society. It is no surprise, then, that using such terms in newspapers repeatedly is effective in giving rise to and maintaining the moral panic of drug use in Pakistan.
What should be done?
Suggestions are also cited in these articles that hold different entities responsible to ensure protection against drugs. School administrations are told to ramp up awareness and prevention efforts. Parents are directed to monitor their children and intervene promptly, foregoing societal taboos that render drug use shameful, sinful, and to not be addressed. Law enforcement and the government are portrayed as the main actors responsible for controlling access and creating regulations.
By dispersing responsibility across multiple actors, the media reinforces the idea that drugs must be monitored and controlled by all. This leaves systemic factors that drive many to problematic drug use, like poverty, mental health, and barriers in accessing treatment, as an afterthought. With such attribution of responsibility, solutions offered in the media overlook broader societal or structural issues that could be critical in addressing the root causes of drug use.
What kind of environment is Pakistan’s media creating for drug discussions?
Such dramatic language creates a need for dramatic action. Consistently, The Express Tribune, The News International, and DAWN cast and reinforce the idea that drugs as a whole are a societal menace. To mitigate its threat, they hold varying entities responsible and portray the problem of drugs as one that needs urgent resolution and caution.
Examining these three leading news outlets underscore how the media plays into state narratives of the need to continually crack down on drug use to protect youth and maintain a productive workforce. The responsibility that gets dispersed in addressing the threat of drugs, whether that holds accountable parents, schools, law enforcement, or the government, achieves a critical outcome. Attention is shifted from addressing societal and structural factors pushing toward drug use and redirected toward individual blame and responsibility, minimising the role that policy making can hold.