Was Vice News Another Victim of the War on Drugs?
JS Rafaeli is a former contributor to Vice News and the author of three widely acclaimed books, including the first history of the UK's war on drugs, "Drug Wars", and "Good Cop, Bad War." In this piece, he digs into the recent collapse of Vice News.
In May, Vice Media Group announced it was canceling its flagship show, Vice News Tonight, winding up its global news division, Vice World News, and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US.
This meant I was out of a job, along with about a hundred deeply talented, serious minded journalists who had dedicated their lives to exploring stories other parts of the media didn’t understand or wouldn’t touch.
Since the announcement there’s been a lot of online rightwing chatter gloating, “go woke, go broke”, along with various news outlets making claims that Vice had been abandoned by its youth-oriented audience base.
These claims are, to use the technical journalistic term – speculative, unevidenced bullshit.
The fact is that Vice News was a victim of the same macro-economic difficulties that have killed Buzzfeed News, MTV News, Gal Dem, and plenty of other innovative, youth-oriented sites. This is not about “wokeness”, it’s about massive tech platforms eating all the ad revenue, and rising interest rates making it harder to borrow money.
But, in Vice News’ specific case, there was also something else at work – drug policy, and the infantile ways our society generally talks about drug use.
It’s no secret drugs were a big beat for Vice. The series I wrote, The War On Drugs Show, was an explainer series looking at different aspects of the global drugs war. I also presented a series called, News on Drugs, featuring in-depth conversations with experts in drug policy and organized crime.
And, contrary to the claims of the Twitter trolls, people were tuning in. Week-in, week-out our viewer numbers were excellent. Overall, shows I was involved in probably generated something north of 70-million views across our channels.
But here’s the problem. These shows were largely viewed on YouTube. And YouTube’s “community guidelines” dictate that content to do with drug use cannot be monetised through advertising.
On the one hand, perhaps one can understand this. One wouldn’t necessarily want dealers and cartels using YouTube to recruit or advertise their products.
But Vice was an accredited news organization doing serious explanatory journalism around global drug policy. But, the rule is that drugs are naughty. So naughty they cannot even be spoken of! So, YouTube wouldn’t let us monetize our content – denying the company a significant revenue stream.
This pearl clutching hysteria around even talking about drugs actually has a long history.
No matter that adjusting our consciousness with various plants and molecules goes back to the very roots of our evolution as sentient beings – for the past hundred years or so, since the start of what we now call the War on Drugs, the global conversation around drug use has been driven by absurd moralizing and straight out racism.
In the early 1900s, gutter journalists in America began attacking opium smoking as a way to drum up hatred of the Chinese community in California. A decade or so later, the New York Times was running front page stories about “Negro Cocaine Fiends” – claiming that coke was turning black men into superhuman brutes.
This has continued throughout the history of the War on Drugs – from the media promoting completely false, “gateway drug” theories about cannabis, to invented stories about drugs turning people into cannibals.
Flash forward to the present day, and even examining the drug trade in a serious journalistic way is deemed so “inappropriate” for YouTube, that news organizations cannot be paid for it.
And talking about global drug policy matters. Over 100,000 people died from overdose last year in the US alone – more than America lost in the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, combined. The global illicit drug trade is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year – driving misery, poverty, corruption and even climate change across the global south.
Amidst this crisis it is more crucial than ever that drug stories are reported with care, depth, accuracy and context. Vice was imperfect in many ways – but when it came to drugs reporting we were streets ahead of any other major outlet. Vice would report on street level drug trends months or years before places like the New York Times or Guardian – and The War on Drugs Show was almost completely unique in analyzing the drug war as a single global policy issue, giving context to the thousands of sensationalist drug headlines pouring out week after week.
Vice News shutting down is a serious blow not just for the digital media landscape – but also for the global movement to reform drug laws. Almost no one else in the mainstream reports these issues with any sort of clarity, care or accuracy.
To take just three examples from the two weeks or so since Vice News’ closure:
The Times published this piece in which their Investigations Editor, Dominic Kennedy, claims that ketamine is the “hidden campus killer” at UK universities, citing the fact that it has been implicated in the deaths of 41 students.
While all student deaths are horrific and the dangers of ket shouldn’t be downplayed – what Kennedy fails to highlight is that these 41 deaths have taken place since 1999. Less than two a year. He also fails to explain what ketamine being “implicated” in these deaths means. Was it used alone? In combination with other drugs? With alcohol?
All this essential information is missing because the rule of thumb in the media is that when it comes to drug stories, one can basically write anything – as long as it sounds as scary as possible.
Then there was this story on the BBC about the sedative Xylazine, using the awful description of it as a “zombie” drug.
This lazy, stupid phrase, “zombie drug” has a history in the UK media, particularly with reference to synthetic drugs like Spice or Bath Salts.
But stop and think a moment about what it means to label certain classes of drug users as, “zombies”. Zombies are inhuman monsters. They are terrifying and evil. They are to be destroyed – not helped or understood.
Drugs like Spice are most popular amongst street homeless and prisoners – people at the most vulnerable, marginalized end of the social spectrum. Do these people really need more stigma heaped upon them?
Finally– at the absurd end of things – comes a string of stories from San Francisco, claiming that the city’s dogs are getting addicted to eating the feces of human drug addicts.
This has been widely derided by scientists as not biologically possible – but it still made the news. And perhaps stories about eating literal shit are actually appropriate here, as when it comes to drug reporting, this is what so much of the mainstream media has been serving to its readers for over a century.
So, raise a glass, or spliff, or cup of sacred medicine to Vice News, and all those who have tried to elevate our global discussion around drug use to a more humane and mature level.
The fact is that people across the world are increasingly realizing the War on Drugs has failed, and that they have been lied to for a long time. Here’s hoping that as the stigma lifts, we can all finally start talking about drug use like grown ups.
About the Author
JS Rafaeli is a writer, journalist and storyteller based in London. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books, including the first history of the UK's war on drugs, "Drug Wars", and "Good Cop, Bad War", both written with former undercover detective, Neil Woods. JS currently writes the highly successful, long-running series, "The War on Drugs Show" with Vice World News, and presents the VWN series, "News on Drugs".
