‘Monkey Dust’ and the Anatomy of a Tabloid Drug Scare Story

Newspapers distort the truth and dehumanise society’s most vulnerable people when they report on drug scares, a new scientific study has found.

Public health experts at Liverpool John Moores University used the Monkey Dust “epidemic” in England during the summer of 2018 to pick apart how the media invokes the “marmalade dropper” drug scare story – one that shocks Middle England’s newspaper readers into dropping their marmalade at breakfast – in order to sell papers.

The study analysed 368 newspaper articles about the “terrifying new drug” – in reality not one substance but a variety of potent, addictive synthetic cathinone stimulants such as MDPV and MDPHP that have been around for a while.

Researchers found that the media frenzy around Monkey Dust had all the inaccurate, hyped-up ingredients of a classic drug scare story: a brand new drug, more potent than any other, spreading to a town near you and with the power to transform people into violent sub-humans. It found that this kind of reporting not only exploited the poorest and sickest people in society for shock factor, but also made it harder for them to get help and put them in increased danger.

A swathe of 2018 newspaper reports, complete with lurid images, told readers that Monkey Dust was turning homeless people into zombie-like savages with superhuman powers. Vulnerable drug users were compared to the Incredible Hulk, while Stoke-on-Trent, the West Midlands city at the centre of the deluge of media reports, was like “a scene from the ‘Night of the Living Dead’”.

Monkey Dust – originally the name of a satirical cartoon show in the early 2000s – first appeared in a 2013 article in local Staffordshire newspaper The Sentinal about a murder case in which the perpetrator was alleged to be high on “the drug known as monkey dust” when he battered a man to death with a baseball bat. The drug was mentioned again in a couple of national papers in 2015, when a traveling salesman who chucked a cigarette through an elderly person’s letter box and a robber dressed as Cruella de Vil were both said to be high on it.

But it was in the summer of 2018 that the Monkey Dust media feeding frenzy began. Sensationalist reports in the local and mainstream media ­– including the BBC, Daily Mirror and The Telegraph – began referring to the drug as “evil”, “demon-like” and “abhorrent”.

They were not sure what Monkey Dust actually was, but it was “ten times stronger than coke”, “worse than heroin” with “cravings similar to meth”. One local paper described it as “the terrifying new street drug that turns users into zombies for just £2”.

But drug users were not just zombies. According to many newspapers they were also “cannibals”. Alongside pictures of Hannibal Lecter, a series of articles suggested cannibalism was an effect of intoxication because it “can make people who take it want to eat other people’s faces off”.

Like escaped zoo animals, Monkey Dust users, newspapers said, were a highly unpredictable threat to the public who were “unable to feel pain”, “deranged” and could “lash out at any time” with unnatural strength. Sky News reported about a video showing one man, apparently high on the drug, leaping off the roof of a house onto a car, before getting straight up and attacking a police officer. “They are just not of this world,” said the Daily Mail.

Problem was, as VICE News reported at the time, and the study confirmed, the “Great British Monkey Dust Panic” – while creating widespread clickbait alarm – was not quite what it seemed.

The study found the media exaggerated the levels of use of the drug, its effects and the geographical extent of its use. Stories said people committed acts while high on Monkey Dust with little evidence they had taken it. The viral video of the man “high on Monkey Dust” jumping off a roof turned out to be from 2014, with no proof of what he’d taken, while the line about the drug causing users to eat people had been cut and pasted from another, long ago debunked scare story from America.

Like most drug scare stories, from PCP and crystal meth to mephedrone and hippy crack, the study said local and national newspapers fed off each other. Once a false piece of information, or an outrageous quote was published, it spread across the media unchecked.

The media erroneously turned what was in reality a very localised story – and a small group of disadvantaged people – into a national threat. Far from “plaguing the streets of the UK”, Monkey Dust was largely confined to the Stoke area. Nevertheless the Daily Mail reported that “all too many grim pockets of Britain were being transformed into the Incredible Hulk”.

What most concerned the study’s authors however was that drug scare stories such as the one about Monkey Dust have a direct, negative impact on society’s most socially excluded people. Newspapers used anonymised photographs of homeless people and images of monsters to make drug users look a threat, instead of people struggling with serious problems.

“Vulnerable groups were presented as the ‘other’ and a group that should be excluded from city centre locations,” said the study. “People who use drugs were positioned as a drain on resources, through the pressures placed on public services, their perceived lack of economic contribution to society, and the negative effects of their physical presence in town centres as damaging to local economies.”

Very few articles gave any explanation as to why people in Stoke-on-Trent might be getting high on drugs such as Monkey Dust, the study said. There was little mention of the austerity-fuelled social conditions, such as rising poverty and cuts to local services, that may have led to people becoming homeless and addicted to Monkey Dust in the first place, observed the study.

It might seem like harmless tabloid fun painting society’s most socially excluded people as “not of this world”, but the study authors said these dehumanising stories have grave consequences. The study said that stigmatising drug users makes them less likely to seek help and means the authorities are less likely to give them it. Worse, it can put them in increased danger from members of the public and the police. In America, media myths about the power of drugs to make people superhuman have had a huge impact – such as the killing by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis – on the over-violent, and sometimes deadly, policing of drugs there.

The development of the “meth zombie” image in America, popularised by the use of dehumanising Faces of Meth mugshots, has been used to sew panic and injustice in communities, stigmatise the poor and hand down thousands of overly harsh sentences. The same can be said for crack in the US and for heroin in the UK. In Britain, the portrayal in the media of Spice users as inhuman zombies has made it easier for the public, police and the authorities to ignore why these people are taking drugs in such harmful way – and for some to see them purely as objects of derision and disgust.

“Media reporting has real life impact in that it can lead to increased police action, and in turn the further criminalisation of people who use drugs. It can have real life impact on the lived experiences of drug users by influencing public perceptions and attitudes,” concluded the report.

“It is important to change these narratives to prevent the negative effects of media reporting, and the need to ensure journalists report drug issues in ways that are better informed to prevent further harm to people who use drugs, and for policy makers to reconsider reactions to news media reporting that reproduce ineffective policy responses.”