The Culture of Fear (25 page)

Miki fought frequently with her mother and had two friends in jail. Upon being named Homecoming Queen, she wrote a friend: “I really wish fucking some other prep bitch would have got it so it would be them and I could be myself... I’m not growing up, I’m just burning out.”

Well before her death Miki was using drugs and alcohol, sometimes heavily, but, significantly, crack was not her drug of choice. Casting her as a crackhead allowed for well-turned headlines such as “A Crack in the All-American Dream”
(Post-Gazette)
and for pseudosociological subplots about the migration of a big-city drug to the countryside. But Miki’s sister and others close to her said she had used crack only a couple of times. By and large she stuck to marijuana, alcohol, and Somas, a prescription muscle relaxant.

If Miki Koontz’s story illustrates anything, it is reporters’ penchant for chalking up drug deaths to whatever substance they’re on about at the moment. The deaths of Kurt Cobain in 1994 and Smashing Pumpkins’ keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin in 1996 were catalogued as part of “a
resurgence in heroin use in the ’90s,” though both musicians used a variety of legal and illicit substances, and Cobain died not from a heroin overdose but suicide. News reports asserted, without evidence, that Cobain “killed himself because he couldn’t kick his heroin habit.” But a month before his suicide, when he had come close to death from an overdose, the drug in question was not heroin. Cobain had fallen into a coma after overdosing on champagne and Rohypnol, a prescription sleeping aid.
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Why has there been no national hysteria over the mixing of alcohol and prescription medication, a commonplace in overdose fatalities—or, for that matter, simply over the abuse of prescription drugs, the category that sends adolescents to emergency rooms more often than cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and LSD combined?
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Exponentially more stories about drug abuse focus on illegal drugs than on legal drugs. The reason cannot be that there is little to report about prescription drug abuse. My examination of the relatively small number of investigative reports that
have
appeared in the major news media demonstrates this fact. An article in the
Washington Post
made reference to studies suggesting that one in six physicians regularly uses opiates and one in nine regularly uses tranquilizers and sleeping pills. The article pointed out that long hours, coupled with stressful changes in the medical profession over the last several years and easy access to drugs make doctors vulnerable to addiction. A report on National Public Radio, meanwhile, noted that a significant number of doctors with addiction problems pretend otherwise and receive no treatment.
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Then there’s the elderly. Thanks in part to careless prescribing and pressures put on doctors by insurers and HMOs to spend little or no time with patients, millions of elderly Americans are at risk of becoming dependent on tranquilizers. According to one recent study, 2.8 million women sixty years and older abuse psychiatric medications. Yet as an article in the
Los Angeles Times
observed, no one actually knows how many older Americans misuse drugs. In stark contrast to the torrent of statistics about teenage drug use, we know little about drug use in old age. Our relative lack of information speaks volumes about our national inattention both to the elderly and to prescription drug abuse.
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There is also the vital question of why women in the United States are twice as likely as men to be prescribed psychotropic drugs. Apart from coverage in feminist publications such as
Ms.,
stories about sexism in the prescribing of drugs almost never appear. Moreover, how many of the 50 million Americans who take Prozac and similar antidepressants either do not need or do not benefit from the pills they pop each day? How many suffer side effects that exceed the benefits they receive from the drugs?
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Politicians’ dependence on the pharmaceutical industry for campaign contributions and the news media’s dependence on them for advertising revenues probably has something to do with which forms of drug abuse they most bemoan. In the 1996 election cycle alone drug company PACs dispersed $1.6 million to federal campaigns. And pharmaceutical companies, America’s most profitable industry, are among the nation’s biggest spenders on television, magazine, and newspaper advertising.
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For the abuse of a pharmaceutical to get star billing it has be recast as something exotic. The drug that helped put Kurt Cobain in a coma, for instance, received little attention in the media in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was a popular choice in parts of this country and Africa among people looking to get high. A single pill makes you feel as drunk and uninhibited as a six-pack of beer, Rohypnol enthusiasts said. “You don’t hear anything bad about it, like heroin or crack, where people die or anything,” the
New York Times
quoted a high school senior in Miami in 1995, in one of the few stories about Rohypnol that appeared in the national news media prior to 1996, and among a small number that ever took note of the most common reasons why women and men take the drug.
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In 1996 through 1998 stories about Rohypnol appeared by the hundreds, but use of the pill to get high was scarcely mentioned. Christened the “date-rape drug” and referred to as “roofie,” Rohypnol was presented to the American public as “a loaded gun ... a weapon used to facilitate sexual assault” (then senator Joseph Biden). “Rape Is Only Thing That This Drug Is For,” read a headline in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Dubbed by reporters “the mightiest Mickey Finn ever concocted,” Rohypnol represented, according to a story in the
Dallas
Morning News,
“all the fears of parents whose daughters have hit dating age packed into one white pill the size of a dime.”
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Every so often a journalist would do a follow-up report on a much-hyped “roofies rape” from the recent past and let it be known that Rohypnol had not actually been involved. Mostly, though, journalists heedlessly repeated vague assertions from the police (“lots of girls have been coming in ...”), and they proffered unfounded generalizations of their own. “Rohypnol has become a favorite tool of predators,”
USA Today
asserted in 1996, though almost any authority on rape could have told them that the percentage of all rapes committed with Rohypnol was a tiny number.
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There is good reason to suspect that in fact the total number of assaults accomplished with the aid of Rohypnol was small. I searched widely for sound studies of the true prevalence and found only one, but it was telling. From mid-1996 through mid-1998, while the roofie scare was in full bloom, Hoffmann-La Roche, the Swiss company that makes the drug, provided test kits to rape-crisis centers, hospital emergency rooms, and police throughout the country. Rape victims who believed they had been drugged were asked to provide a sample of their urine, which was sent to an independent laboratory for analysis. Of the 1,033 tests returned, only six contained Rohypnol. About one-third of the samples contained no drugs; the remainder contained a variety of legal and illegal substances, alcohol being far and away the most common.
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That other countries were not reporting outbreaks also says something. Hoffmann—La Roche takes in about $100 million annually from sales of Rohypnol, which has been on the market since 1975. Two million people in eighty countries worldwide swallow one to two pills a day by prescription. But in the United States the drug is illegal. Does it truly seem likely that the only place experiencing an “epidemic” (Los Angeles Times) of roofie rapes would be where molesters have to rely on a black market rather than simply reach into a medicine cabinet?
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Roofie stories did not contain great truth, but they did help redirect controversies in convenient ways. Rohypnol may have been utilized by
only a small proportion of rapists, and few abusers may have used it for sexual assaults. But for a range of people, from the President of the United States to jaded readers of local newspapers, roofies provided a tidy way of talking about matters that had become messy.

In his bid for reelection in 1996 Bill Clinton staged an event three weeks before voters went to the polls. Fighting a lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones, who said he summoned her to a hotel room, opened his pants, and asked her to kiss his penis, Clinton held a highly publicized ceremony at which he signed an antidrug bill. The drug in question was not marijuana, which Clinton had already confessed on MTV he wished he had inhaled. Standing on the tarmac at the Denver airport, a line of police officers as his backdrop, Clinton signed a bill providing a twenty-year prison sentence for anyone who used roofies or similar drugs to commit sexual assault, symbolically demonstrating his opposition both to drug abuse and to acquaintance rape.
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For journalists and their audiences of the mid- and late 1990s the roofie narrative served a somewhat different purpose. It afforded a clear and uncontroversial explanation for a phenomenon that had been hotly but unsatisfyingly debated for more than a decade. When studies came out in the 1980s indicating that one in three female college students is forced to have sex against her will, feminist groups played up the findings. Before long a backlash developed. Conservative columnists and politicians disputed the statistics, and in 1993 Katie Roiphe, a recent Harvard grad, launched her writing career with a polemic titled The Morning After. Condemning women she called “rape-crisis feminists,” Roiphe spoke of a “grey area in which someone’s rape may be another person’s bad night.”
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Compared to debates about how to define rape or whether radical feminists or rabid conservatives are more dangerous to women, stories about roofies were interesting and easy to follow. Graphic and mildly prurient, they focused on entirely blameless women, such as the fresh-man at Clemson University who was given a drink at a fraternity party and taken to three different locations where she was raped by at least thirteen men.
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In the media women like her supplanted typical victims of acquaintance rape, who are very much awake when they find themselves being
attacked by men they know. More recent research on date rape—research that defines rape more narrowly—still finds an appalling problem. One in five college women reports she has been forced to have sexual intercourse. Usually the attacker is a friend or a man she was dating, a fact obscured in the furor over date-rape drugs.
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Once the roofie scare began to die down media attention shifted to gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), promptly dubbed the “new” date-rape drug. Used for almost two decades by partygoers for a high and by bodybuilders as an alternative to steroids, GHB suddenly got depicted as “the Mickey Finn of the ’90s”
(Chicago Sun-Times),
more dangerous than roofies.
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And so the cycle continued.

How Not to Criticize the Establishment

I
n an essay on cancer and another on AIDS Susan Sontag documented the perils of thinking metaphorically about illnesses. Imagining viruses as invading armies instead of microscopic matter, or scientists as warriors instead of researchers, does little good and can cause considerable harm, Sontag urged. “My purpose was, above all, practical,” she has said of her book,
Illness as Metaphor.
“For it was my doleful observation, repeated again and again, that the metaphoric trappings that deform the experience of having cancer have very real consequences: they inhibit people from seeking treatment early enough, or from making a greater effort to get competent treatment.” Sontag cited as examples people who waive chemotherapy in favor of quackery that promises to change so-called cancer-causing personality traits.
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Continuing the line of argument I have been advancing, I propose a corollary to Sontag’s observations. Not only do we use metaphors to help us understand fatal illnesses that most of us are poorly equipped to comprehend scientifically, we also create certain illnesses, what I call “metaphoric illnesses,” to help us come to terms with features of our society that we are unprepared to confront directly. Historically, the most famous such illness was neurasthenia. Diagnosed in the United States mostly during the nineteenth century and disproportionately in women, the symptoms of neurasthenia were said to include extreme fatigue, muscle aches, mental confusion, chills, and fever. Like the people diagnosed with the ailments examined in this chapter, neurasthenics were not, by and large, hypochondriacs. They were verifiably sick, sometimes seriously so.
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But what caused their symptoms? Later research suggests a variety of familiar causes ranging from viruses to food poisoning to bad marriages. Back in 1881, however, George Beard, the physician known as
the “father of neurasthenia,” attributed the illness to modern technology and the education of women. Then as now, people believed in metaphoric illnesses partly owing to graphic stories about ordinary women and men being struck down, and partly because the illnesses helped them justify fears, prejudices, and political ideologies they held. The disease of neurasthenia provided living, breathing proof that newly developed technologies and women’s emancipation truly
were
pernicious. Similarly, metaphoric illnesses of the 1990s such as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), multiple chemical sensitivity, and breast implant disorders have served to confirm present-day doubts.
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Americans have yet to engage in a serious or sustained public discussion of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which was an unprecedented event in world history, a “deceptive war,” as the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard put it, in which “the enemy only appear[ed] as a computerized target,” never face to face. Depicted by the U.S. military and media as a swift, clean, nearly bloodless war won by “surgical air strikes” of buildings and munitions, in fact it was a brutally lopsided affair. One hundred forty-six Americans died, while allied troops killed upward of 100,000 Iraqis, many during the ground war inside Kuwait, but including about 10,000 Iraqi soldiers and 2,500 civilians who died directly from less-than-precise bombing operations. After the $61 billion bloodbath, tens of thousands of Iraqi children died as well, from poor public health conditions, food shortages, and Kurdish revolts that the war left in its wake.
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