Media Studies and Drug Research

This volume offers a comprehensive outlook on the convergences between media and drug research. Bringing together media scholars and drug researchers to highlight the intricate interconnections of these two dynamic domains, the book explores the mutual entanglements, overlaps, and intersections between mediated practices and substance use, from representations and narratives to technologies, stigma, identity work, and policy regimes.

Through original contributions that traverse theoretical, empirical, and methodological terrains, the book highlights how media technologies and discourses, market structures, identities, and policies are co-produced across both fields. The collection opens with a cluster of chapters tackling the language of moral panics and stigma, emphasizing how media narratives fuel or challenge dominant framings of drugs and people who use them, before moving to discuss media representations―both legacy and digital―and their entanglement with narratives of criminality, celebrity, and harm. The volume then interrogates post-prohibition imaginaries, mapping out alternative visions and creative appropriations of drug cultures in digital spaces and the blurring of online and offline worlds.

Theoretical innovations and methodological reflections are interwoven throughout the collection, contributing to a transdisciplinary dialogue that spans media and cultural studies, linguistics, sociology, criminology, and drug policy. In doing so, this volume not only reflects the state of the art in two distinct fields but also carves out a new, shared territory―one where media studies meets drug research to map the terrain of mediated intoxication, regulation, resistance, and care.

Piotr Siuda works at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. His work focuses on internet studies and online drug markets, with publications in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and the International Journal of Drug Policy, among others. He is an associate editor for the SAGE Journal of Creative Communications.

Michał Wanke is a sociologist based at the University of Opole, Poland. Specializing in drug user cultures within non-liberalized contexts, he combines drug and migration studies while accounting for digital platform intermediaries. He co-edited Cannabis: Cultures and Markets (2024) and published papers on the subject.