Twenty years of media coverage of drug consumption rooms: A discourse analysis of the Belgian French-speaking press (2002-2023)

This research explores the media coverage of drug consumption rooms (DCRs) in the Belgian French-speaking press. A frequency analysis, a correspondence analysis (CA) and a descending hierarchical classification (DHC) were conducted on a corpus of 599 articles. The results reveal the presence of five lexical domains divided into two groups. The first group describes the daily operations of DCRs for the urban neighborhood, for people who use drugs, and for the care of users. The second group deals with the management and political decisions regarding DCRs at both global and local levels. These findings provide new insights through a different methodological approach.