ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study that explores the ways that press reporting made supervised chroming a controversial policy problem in early 2002, showing its significant role in policy-making on the practice of chroming or inhaling chrome-based paints. The chapter discusses the incidents that led to the Victorian Parliamentary Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee's recommendation that police be given the power to detain young people if they believed, on ‘reasonable grounds’, that the young person had recently inhaled a ‘volatile substance’. It draws on that scholarship to argue that journalism functions first and foremost as a form of storytelling so that one of the ways in which journalism ‘works’ is to draw on the mythic elements of storytelling. An alternative framing of the problem highlights the policy implications of the discursive strategies at work in this particular moral panic. The whole point of the harm minimisation approach in drug policy was to insist on this priority.
