Representation of Knowledge about Opioid Addiction between Criminalization and Medicalization

The debate on opioid addiction has become increasingly topical, especially in the United States of America. This study sets out to investigate the representation of opioid abuse in American newspapers with a view to identifying whether it is mainly framed within a criminal-legal or a health-medical paradigm. To this aim, an ad hoc corpus consisting of newspaper articles was collected over a two-year period (Oct 2016-Oct 2018) and analysed adopting a hybrid methodological toolkit comprising of Critical Discourse Analysis as well as Corpus Linguistics. Results indicate that the American newspaper discourse on opioid use primarily adopts a medicalization framework of the issue, which represents people suffering from addiction as ‘sick’ and therefore not accountable for their condition. Such an approach thus contributes to lifting the stigma from substance users and typically attributes much prominence to the members of the medical community, considered as the legitimate agents of control of the situation. However, the analysis reveals that a medicalization frame, although prevailing in the press, is merging with a legal-criminal one, as police officers and not doctors are portrayed as the legitimate and desirable agents of institutional intervention to tackle the crisis.