'Zombie drugs': How the use of dehumanising metaphors in news reporting on drugs increases stigma
A longer blog piece by Prof. Harry Sumnall.
Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later is set to hit screens later this year, and reminds us that tales of zombies remain as popular as ever. Almost all cultures have storytelling traditions of the dead returning to life, or the terrors of people who are neither alive nor dead. In the West, films like White Zombie (1932) established an early template of the zombie that is created or controlled by a sorcerer to do their bidding through the administration of a mind-altering drug or poison. The Last Man on Earth (1964) and the Night of the Living Dead (1968), reconfigured this to the zombie-ghoul we are most familiar with today. No-longer were zombies only created through ritual and potions. Now, all of us were at risk of becoming a zombie through infection or physical attack.
With this shift, zombies in films began to be used by directors as a metaphor to criticise aspects of modernity, including consumerism, environmental damage, and fears of migration.
The use of zombie characters and metaphors are not just limited to entertainment media. They’re also commonly used in news, opinion pieces, and factual reporting to describe situations or phenomena that refuse to go away, persist in a weakened or problematic state, or exhibit mindless or destructive behaviour. Whether that’s ‘zombie’ companies, policies, cultural trends or phone apps, the metaphor is a shorthand that is quickly and easily understood by audiences.
Whilst the worst that can be said of this metaphorical framing is that it’s become somewhat clichéd or provides a lazy analysis, it becomes more troubling when the zombie label is applied to groups of people.
Stigma towards people who use substances contributes to social isolation, prejudice and discrimination, and poorer quality of care. Stigma has been identified in the UK national drug strategy, and national action plans to reduce alcohol and other drug related deaths as a significant barrier to reducing substance harms. This is why one of the founding principles of the Anti-Stigma Network is to call out stigma and discrimination whenever it is encountered.
One influential theory (attribution theory) that tries to explain why stigma arises, suggests that it’s a result of the beliefs that people hold about the causes, controllability, and dangerousness of other’s behaviour. This can lead to emotional responses such as anger and fear, which then leads to stigma and a preference for discriminatory or punitive responses. This can affect interpersonal and professional interactions and relationships, but also influences how the public believes substance use should be prioritised in policy and spending decisions. Understanding how underlying beliefs about substance use are formed is therefore important in anti-stigma work.
For those readers who might use substances themselves, support others affected by use, or work in the field, then its sometimes easy to forget that most members of the public have limited familiarity with substance use. Here’s where media representations of substances and the people who use them become important. We shouldn’t assume an over-simplistic view of cause and effect, but research we have undertaken with the UK public shows that TV, films, news, and documentaries – and not personal contacts - are the most frequently reported sources of familiarity with people experiencing substance use related problems.
Stigmatising labels and attributional beliefs about the causes of behaviour can also lead to dehumanisation.
This is where members of a particular group are denied the experience of uniquely human emotions or even humanness itself by the general public. In our own work, for example, we found that people who use heroin were dehumanised compared to the general population, people who used other drugs like cannabis, and all the other stigmatised groups that we asked participants about. Dehumanisation is expressed through metaphors and analogies comparing people with threatening, thoughtless, and emotionless non-human entities, or animals and objects that evoke disgust. When individuals and groups are dehumanised in this way empathy, concern, and helping is reduced, and there is stronger support for punitive responses.
And as with stigma, when people believe that others perceive them in a dehumanising way, it can be internalised, leading to a reduced sense of self-worth and reduced likelihood of seeking help when needed.
This brings us back to zombies. Historically, there have been a wide range of dehumanising media representations of people who use substances. Framings of substances and populations change with time. For example, in the 1930s the focus was on purported links between cannabis, violence and psychosis in Mexican immigrants to the USA, whereas legal cannabis markets are now big business. The targets and subjects of dehumanising representations currently include substances popularly and stereotypically associated with societal ‘problems’ such as crack cocaine, opioids (e.g. heroin, fentanyls), and novel psychoactive substances (e.g. synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists, Spice). This is especially true when use of those substances is associated with people who face additional life-challenges, such as experiencing homelessness, or who use some types of drugs in public.
Recent news reporting has focused on the identification of xylazine, a non-opioid sedative, in the illicit drug supply in North America and Europe, including the UK. This is frequently described in the news media as a ‘zombie drug’ or producing ‘zombie-like’ effects in humans, due to its psychopharmacological effects of sedation, and association with necrotic skin ulcerations in people who inject it (e.g. ‘Zombie’ drug xylazine found in cannabis THC vapes in UK). Reporting on xylazine is also sometimes accompanied by images that reinforce this metaphor (e.g. tissue damage, tooth decay, public intoxication). This language is not just limited to the media. Indeed, when the UK Government issued a press release announcing plans to control xylazine under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, it was also described in such terms (Britain takes decisive action to ban 'zombie drug' xylazine).
From the perspective of journalists and headline writers, use of zombie metaphors might be understood as a way to create newsworthy and sensational content to attract an audience’s attention and online clicks, or to provide a familiar reference point to help explain a new drug topic. There might also be the intention to scare readers about the effects of drugs and deter use in a misguided approach to drug prevention. It might also be used as an editorial signal to audiences (and policy makers) what the news title thinks the appropriate responses to drugs should be (i.e. a ‘tough’ or punitive response).
But as anyone who has ever seen a zombie on TV or in the cinema knows, the only response to zombies is either to run away (extreme ‘social distancing’) or killing the infected. This is not in any way to suggest that journalists are calling for violence towards people exposed to ‘zombie drugs’, but if audiences are learning about drugs and the people who use them through these metaphors, then does this affect their attributions and beliefs, and does this lead to public stigma?
We decided to investigate this link in an experiment. You can read about our research in detail here. Briefly, we created six different news stories based on UK reporting of the detection of xylazine in the UK in early 2024. Our stories didn’t specifically mention xylazine in case our research, participants had already seen news reporting about it, which would bias their responses. Instead, we created a fake drug called Pedril using an online random medicine name generator. We made the stories look as if they were published on the BBC news website. This was firstly because the BBC had run one of the ‘zombie drug’ stories that caught our attention, but also because, despite the rise of short video reporting on sites such as TikTok, the BBC remains the most frequently accessed and trusted news source by adults in the UK.
The stories differed in important ways on the basis of the text used and the photo that was used to accompany it. In our ‘control’ text condition, we used neutral and scientific language to describe the detection of Pedril on the UK drugs market, its effects, and the concerns of experts. The other stories described Pedril either as producing ‘zombie-like effects’, or as a ‘zombie drug’, suggesting that it turned people into zombies. We thought this latter description would be the most stigmatising. Zombie metaphors were emphasised in headlines, ledes, and photo captions. For these two types of stories, instead of using scientific descriptions of drug effects, we referred to language that had been used in news reporting on xylazine, such as ‘skin rotting’, or leaving people ‘frozen in zombie states’. For the image used to accompany the article, we either used a photo of a laboratory, or of immobile people (non-identifiable) under the influence of drugs, which are typically used in UK reporting of street-based drug use that uses ‘zombie’ headlines and non-human metaphors and framing. If you’ve ever seen local news reporting on issues related to Spice, for example, you’ll have seen these kind of images before.
Our research participants were a random sample of the general public, that reflected the makeup of the UK adult population. They were randomised to read one of the story conditions, tested to ensure that they had read and understood it, and then asked to complete a number of questions, including an assessment of stigma towards the people depicted in the stories.
Just as we had predicted, there were statistically significantly higher levels of stigma in those participants who had been exposed to the zombie framing. Interestingly, there were no effects of the different images we used, or differences between the two kinds of zombie story. This suggested to us that simply using zombie metaphors in news reporting is enough to increase stigma in audiences.
Readers may think that our findings are obvious, and of course it makes sense that dehumanising metaphors and framings will be stigmatising. But we think research like this is important as it is the first study to show that this is indeed the case, and it provides solid evidence to help people challenge stigmatising representation in the media. As we used a random sample and experimental design, we are also confident that there is a causal relationship caused by exposure to the news stories, and the link is not just a correlation explained by other factors such as differences in political or moral beliefs.
Many resources and language guidelines have been published internationally to support the use of person-first language, neutral imagery, and more nuanced explanations of substance use in the media. However, unfortunately, there is currently little evidence to date to suggest that these have been widely adopted, or if they have led to changes in practice. The wider body of news reporting on substance use is also routinely negative in tone (e.g. sentencing in local court, focus on perpetrators of violent drug-related crime, drug related deaths), and even if this is not always directly stigmatising or dehumanising, suggesting there are likely to be significant challenges in changing reporting norms.
However, I do think reporting on substance use has got better over recent years, and there are many good journalists currently working in the field who produce respectful and sensitive articles that reflect the complexity of substance use. Changing media reporting is a slow process, but it can be done – look at positive developments in how related issues such as HIV or common mental health disorders are now often presented. So, whilst we should always call out stigmatising or dehumanising representations, we should also reach out to journalists and reporters and be available to share our experiences and expertise. As someone who is in the privileged position of frequently being asked by journalists or producers to provide quotes, background, or interpretation of substance use issues, I always make myself available. With a few exceptions this has always been a positive experience, and I hope I have made a contribution -however small - to changing public perceptions.