ABSTRACT
Drawing on the thinking of Michel Foucault and others, I analyze The Meth Project (TMP) to argue that TMP is a biopolitical exercise that helps maintain neoliberal standards from the internal threat of unruly subjects. The campaign does so by drawing from and extending existing associations among addiction, crime, madness, and disease. While lacking institutional “teeth” with which to enforce discipline, TMP deploys an exclusionary narrative that creates a disciplinary subject-position, the meth addict, who is a despised Other symbolically banished from the safety and security of the polis. This symbolic banishment constitutes the thanatopolitics of TMP by positioning the methamphetamine user as bare life that can be “allowed to die,” which serves as a warning and threat to potential users. In the process, TMP articulates a particularized truth of both methamphetamine and the people who use the drug that creates meth users as sources of social ills, threats to stability, and despised subjects worthy of destruction.
