Drugs are in the news a lot this week. We’re on track to surpass last year’s record number of fentanyl overdoses only two thirds of the way into this year. We’re planning to criminalize fentanyl on a municipal level, hauling out the old “rehab or jail” ultimatum that hasn’t done much more to stop our overdose crisis than the jail part did on its own.
We’re worried about the soul of downtown. We’re worried about Little Saigon. And when we get worried about all of those things, one thing we are guaranteed to see is a lot of local journalists getting very, very worried about “open-air drug markets.”
A search for “Seattletimes.com open-air drug markets” results in 19 distinct articles, spanning a time period from 2005 to 2022. While I focus on the Times, as it is our daily newspaper of record, the term is ubiquitous across local broadcast media and even national media — New York Times journalists are also big fans of it. While none of those Seattle Times articles include the phrase in the headline, KOMO News has no such compunctions, recently celebrating “95 arrests as Seattle cops target downtown 'open air drug market.'”
In his most recent raising of the alarm about the corner of 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street in Little Saigon, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat — a frequent worrier about “open-air drug markets” — did actually drop the modifier, simply calling it a “drug market.” He did not reply to an emailed request for comment on whether that was a conscious choice. That said, the Seattle Times’ Wednesday Morning Brief writer, in blurbing Westneat’s piece, had no qualms about trotting out that tired piece of pablum. They jazzed it up by calling the corner a “lawless, open-air drug market.”
What does the phrase “open-air drug market” actually mean, though? Does it describe anything different than saying “drug market,” or does it just say that the place in question sees a lot of street dealing? Why do journalists have such an obsession with that modifier?
My suspicion is because it scares people. After reading enough of these pearl-clutching pieces, I can’t see any other reason for the modifier’s overuse. And how does it scare people? In perhaps one of the most insidious ways possible: by evoking Orientalism, a Western way of stereotyping and exoticizing peoples and cultures of Asia first described by literary critic Edward Said.
A drug market doesn’t sound terribly exotic. It sounds like a Walgreens. But an open-air drug market? That’s got a certain ring to it. It sounds sultry and foreign. Like a bazaar, perhaps. Funnily enough, a fear of the bazaar is something that features prominently in many Orientalist works by western writers.
Bazaars are places of, as scholar Umme Salma wrote in a paper on James Joyce’s Orientalism, “degeneration, depravity and despair.” Reflecting on Orientalism in Orwell’s characterizations of Burma, scholars S. R. Moosavinia, N. Niazi and Ahmad Ghaforian wrote that the British author described a Burmese bazaar as a “‘large cattle pen’ [with] ‘a cold putrid stench of dung or decay’” and had one of his characters observe that, “Everything's so horribly dirty.”
Closer to home, the University of Washington’s Amoshaun Toft, a professor of communications who studies media narratives around poverty and homelessness, has argued that, by closely associating our homeless neighbors with “dirtiness, drugs and danger,” the media attempts to brand them as social deviants, thereby excusing society itself for failing them. Toft does not quite call this Orientalizing those neighbors, but he does cite Said in arguing that our characterization of them is designed to “other” them.
Even closer to home, a note from a prominent local writer landed in my inbox recently, which read, “We are asking people to let Chief Diaz and City Hall know we adults of Seattle want the open air drug and fencing market at 12th and King and Jackson shut down before first day of school! Summit Public Schools is in close proximity. No child should ever have to pass through a corridor of filth and drugs and human vermin and think that this is normal.”
The fact that the word “vermin” is being employed alongside the phrase “open air drug and fencing market” says a lot about what kind of imagery that phrase is all about. The Nazis famously described Jews as vermin before the Holocaust, and the Hutus did the same to the Tutsis prior to the Rwandan genocide. This language is part and parcel of a dehumanization campaign, spearheaded by right-wingers but spreading even to “good” liberals. It should cause us as a city to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
But besides being more than a little xenophobic, describing these places — where people suffering from substance use disorders, untreated mental health issues and homelessness congregate — as “open-air drug markets” does nothing to help audiences understand why those people are there in the first place.
They are there because they are poor. They are there because they are desperate. They are there because they have nowhere else to go.
Another thing this type of framing obscures is that these highly visible instances of drug use are, in fact, a fraction of total drug use. By occuring in the open, where there is air, they are more visible than other drug use. But they are by no means the totality of drug use.
The Seattle Times just reported that we’re currently at 704 deaths involving fentanyl for the year, on the brink of breaking last year’s record and with four months left to add to it. While unsheltered people are at a significantly higher risk of dying from overdose, as of July, 146 out of the 218 total deaths on the King County Medical Examiner’s presumed homeless deaths report involved fentanyl. The point here is that a significant number of people using fentanyl are doing it inside. Why aren’t we as worried about them?
We are sinking deeper and deeper into the fentanyl crisis. More and more of our neighbors are dying from overdoses. Last year, I joined the unhappy club of people who have lost a friend or loved one to fentanyl. One thing I agree with Westneat and his fellow fearmongerers about is that we need action now.
But let me be clear: If we want to end the practice of openly selling and using illicit drugs in public, we need to give people private places to go do those things. If we want to end the overdose crisis, we need to give people safe consumption sites and a safe supply. If we want to help people end their addiction struggles, we need to make access to medically-assisted treatment free and easy.
We cannot arrest our way out of this, and the fact that nearly every use of the phrase “open-air drug markets” in news articles and broadcasts appears alongside quotes from housed people or business owners calling for more cops and, in opinion articles, alongside arguments from the author that we need more cops is not a coincidence. That is in fact the intended purpose of the phrase: to build consensus in favor of more police funding and harsher enforcement by using fear.
To truly face the fentanyl crisis we must reject fear, especially fear that is rooted in racism. We cannot keep Orientalizing and sensationalizing drugs and drug use. We cannot keep othering and criminalizing drug users. We need to be up front and honest with ourselves. And we need journalists, who have a professional duty to present the public with honest, factual information, to lead the charge on this.
A good way to start would be retiring the ugly, sneering phrase that is “open-air drug markets.”
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor at Real Change.
Read more of the Sept. 6-12, 2023 issue.