When a mass overdose event hospitalized nearly 30 people in Baltimore’s Penn North neighborhood in July, reporters descended upon the low-income Black community. Some photographed victims on gurneys while harm reduction workers and paramedics scrambled to save lives.
The resulting local coverage contained a barrage of misinformation and fearmongering at the expense of vulnerable Baltimoreans, echoing journalists’ longstanding failure to responsibly cover those who use drugs. False reports brimming with stigmatizing language flooded the internet and TV waves, illustrating what public health workers and researchers have long known: words matter.
“The media oftentimes relinquishes its role in public education and public awareness, instead fanning the flames of fear and hysteria that can lead to support for harsher penalties and more stigmatization,” Sheila Vakharia, managing director of research and academic engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance, a national drug policy reform nonprofit, said.
And, Vakharia added, this can have severe repercussions as the overdose crisis rages on in tandem with the War on Drugs: “It pushes people who might be using drugs underground, depicting people under the influence in ways that dehumanize and stigmatize them, lowering compassion and increasing disgust.”
The coverage of the mass overdose event in July and the reporting on the two additional clusters of overdoses that have taken place in Baltimore since are just the most recent examples of the news media’s more than century-long role in fomenting fear about drugs. In a 2019 study of media organizations, researchers found that the news industry “likely contributes to the widespread public stigma toward people with addiction that hinders advancement of public health policy solutions to the U.S. opioid epidemic.”
Changing the language used in media is a “public health priority,” the study concludes. In Baltimore, local reporters’ words may compound an already unprecedented overdose crisis.
After the incident in July, FOX45, whose owner bought The Baltimore Sun last year, cited anonymous police sources and community members in its claims that a new drug called “New Jack City” was linked to the overdoses. Without evidence, the outlet claimed that the batch of drugs may have contained antifreeze.
Around the same time, The Baltimore Banner added to the fearmongering, reporting that a woman on scene “was seen screaming that she is 'never coming back to Baltimore again.’” The excerpt was later deleted from the article without notice.
The Banner retracted reporting once again after the third and most recent mass overdose event on October 8 in Penn North. The article alleged that benzodiazepines, which were only confirmed present in the July incident, were “often” found in the city’s drug supply. The outlet cited state drug testing data to support its point that instead showed the drugs’ presence was almost nonexistent in said supply. The Banner ultimately issued a “clarification” and changed the language of its article to classify benzodiazepines as “emerging substances,” with city officials later confirming they were not present in drug testing samples after the incident.
Vakharia says this isn’t just misinformation, but a way to steer the conversation away from public health response and toward fear-driven police crackdowns.
“When something gets coverage, policymakers are often questioned by not only the media but also their constituents. The knee-jerk reaction is often, ‘Let’s ban it. Let’s criminalize it. Let’s make harsher penalties,’ without any pause for thinking,” she said.
The Baltimore Police Department has done just that. Even though studies have shown that interdiction can increase fatal overdose rates and violence, Baltimore police data covering January to September shows a 21% increase in arrests for misdemeanor drug offenses over the same period last year, and felony-related arrests increased by 12%.
In addition, police commissioner Richard Worley declared at a public hearing in September that “there’s no way around” targeting drug users for arrest. And, despite the increase in interdiction efforts, FOX45 published a piece in October lamenting a perceived lack of drug enforcement.
WBAL-TV, the local NBC affiliate, has also platformed residents questioning whether harm reduction initiatives “enable” drug users — an assertion studies have disproven. In that piece, the outlet described seeing people in a “drug-induced stupor” with “vacant” looks in their eyes.
Like many other Baltimore media outlets, WBAL-TV’s coverage referred to the overdose crisis as an “opioid crisis,” placing the entirety of the blame on a drug itself and oversimplifying a complex public health catastrophe. The article also did not attempt to fact-check claims about harm reduction, nor did a reporter include interviews from any people who use drugs.
“These depictions of drugs — used to the point it’s disrupting a person’s life — tend to emphasize criminal legal system involvement and all of the social challenges like homelessness,” Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a professor and researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said. “It’s less of an emphasis on the fact that we have solutions that work, and people can get better.”
While this reporting comes as Baltimore experiences a notable decline in fatal overdoses, the city has still struggled with the highest death rate of any major U.S. city.
Reporters are often ill-equipped to report on drugs, said Jonathan Stoltman, co-director of the nonprofit Reporting on Addiction and director of the Opioid Policy Institute.
“We know that language that’s associated with stigma, discrimination and dehumanization end up hurting those people in the stories you’re trying to tell, and that broader community you’re trying to help represent,” Stoltman said. “It drives them away from care, drives them further away from resources and creates barriers to their everyday life.”
Reporting on Addiction offers myriad resources for journalists seeking to tell the stories of drug users in a way that uplifts them rather than drives them further into the shadows.
Yet like Baltimore’s elected officials, the media has attempted to have it both ways: criminalization and compassion.
The Baltimore Sun published an article in July titled, “Residents fed up with drug addiction in Baltimore’s Morrell Park: ‘I want out’.” It referred to drug users as “addicts,” which Stoltman said dehumanizes individuals by failing to separate them from their substance use.
Less than two weeks later, the Sun published a separate article titled, “Fear, stigma of drug use blocks some Maryland treatment plans.”
Experts say the current media ecosystem has shifted from away from the days of the New York Times’ infamous “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a Southern Menace” article from 1914.
But, they add, for some, the media has simply couched its drug-war rhetoric in euphemisms while parroting police talking points. Drug users are often still portrayed as uncontrollable and subhuman, providing fodder to those who want to force them into treatment or jail cells.
As long as that continues, Vakharia said, some of Baltimore’s most vulnerable residents will be at a heightened risk.
“[Drug users] internalize these ideas that society has told them because they see themselves reflected in these images,” Vakharia said. “That creates more stigma, shame, blame and guilt. And, for some people, that can lead to more self-destructive behaviors.”
For those who use drugs, those behaviors can be lethal. Yet all of those deaths are preventable, and reporters must choose whether they will continue to be complicit in perpetuating long-standing patterns of harm.
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