The Culture of Fear (23 page)

Prior to the event, Jeb Magruder, a press secretary, described the approach he and his colleagues would take. “The individuals being invited think in dramatic terms. We have therefore tailored the program to appeal to their dramatic instincts,” Magruder wrote in a memorandum. And indeed, throughout the day undercover agents, pot-sniffing dogs, recovering addicts, and the president himself paraded before the forty attendees. Nixon gave a passionate speech about the need to “warn our youth constantly against the dangers of drugs.” Touted as “off-the-cuff,” it had actually been written by Patrick Buchanan, Nixon’s chief speech writer on social issues and himself a candidate for the presidency a couple of decades later. “If this nation is going to survive,” Nixon intoned, “it will have to depend to a great extent on how you gentlemen help raise our children.” The TV guys ate it up. At times “there was hardly a dry eye in the whole hard-boiled crowd,” according to a producer who attended. So successful was the White House event, not only did network news stories about drug abuse increase,
many of TV’s top dramatic series—“Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Mod Squad”—had episodes with antidrug themes during the next season.
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Presidents prior to Nixon had not made drug abuse a prime focus of concern for themselves or the media. But every subsequent commander-in-chief has actively solicited the media to the cause. “In the newsrooms and production rooms of our media centers, you have a special opportunity with your enormous influence to send alarm signals across the nation,” Ronald Reagan urged, and he has been proven right. After Reagan’s successor, George Bush, declared in his first televised address as president that “the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs,” the number of stories on network newscasts tripled over the coming few weeks, and public opinion changed significantly. In a nationwide survey conducted by the
New York Times
and CBS two months into the media upsurge, 64 percent of those polled selected drugs as the country’s greatest problem, up from 20 percent five months earlier.
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David Fan, a professor at the University of Minnesota, conducted a study in which he correlated the number of stories in major print media that included the phrase “drug crisis” with variations in public opinion from 1985 through 1994. At times during that period only one in twenty Americans ranked drugs as the nation’s most important problem; at other times nearly two out of three did. The immense variations could be explained, Fan showed, by changes in the press coverage.
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Psychologists call this the
availability heuristic.
We judge how common or important a phenomenon is by how readily it comes to mind. Presented with a survey that asks about the relative importance of issues, we are likely to give top billing to whatever the media emphasizes at the moment, because that issue instantly comes to mind. Were there a reasonable correspondence between emphases in the media and the true severity of social problems, the availability heuristic would not be problematic. When it comes to drug crises, however, the correspondence has been lousy, owing in no small measure to bad information from the nation’s top political leader. President Bush’s speech in 1989 remains the most notorious example. While addressing the nation live from the Oval Office via all three TV networks, he held up a sealed
plastic bag marked “EVIDENCE.” “This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park across the street from the White House,” Bush said. “It’s as innocent looking as candy, but it’s murdering our children.”
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The
Washington Post
subsequently corrected the president’s report. At Bush’s request DEA agents tried to find crack in Lafayette Park but failed, Post reporters learned. There was little drug dealing of any sort in that park, and no one selling crack. With Bush’s speech already drafted to include the baggie prop, the agents improvised. In another part of town they recruited a young crack dealer to make a delivery across from the White House (a building he needed directions to find). When he delivered the crack the DEA agents, rather than “seizing” it, as Bush would report, purchased it for $2,400.

In the aftermath of this sham one might have expected reporters and news editors to become leery of presidentially promoted drug scares; by and large they did not. Although irate about the phony anecdote, journalists generally endorsed the conclusion it had been marshalled to prove. “With the country and the nation’s capital ensnared in a drug problem of dramatic proportions, there did not seem to be a need to confect a dramatic situation to suit the needs of a speech,” wrote Maureen Dowd in a front-page article in the
New York Times
that summed up a predominant sentiment within the press.
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But maybe confection
had
been required. Over the previous decade drug use in the United States had declined considerably. And theatrics may have seemed particularly necessary when it came to crack cocaine. For the previous few years politicians and journalists had been presenting crack as “the most addictive drug known to man... an epidemic ...”
(Newsweek,
1986), though neither characterization was true. A year before Bush’s speech the Surgeon General had released studies showing that cigarettes addict 80 percent of people who try them for a length of time, while fewer than 33 percent of those who try crack become addicted. Never among the more popular drugs of abuse, at the height of its popularity crack was smoked heavily by only a small proportion of cocaine users.
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As a sociologist I see the crack panic of the 1980s as a variation on an American tradition. At different times in our history drug scares have served to displace a class of brutalized citizens from the nation’s moral conscience.

Flash back for a moment to the early 1870s in San Francisco. Chinese laborers, indispensable in building the transcontinental railroad during the previous decade, had become a superfluous population in the eyes of many whites. With an economic depression under way and 20,000 Chinese immigrants out of work, politicians, newspaper reporters, and union leaders all pointed to opium dens as evidence of the debauchery of Chinese men, whom they proposed to exclude from jobs and further immigration.

In actuality, opium dens, like British pubs, were genial gathering places where men shared stories and few participants were addicts. But as popularly portrayed, opium dens were squalid places in which wasted men fought with one another and defiled white women and children. “What other crimes were committed in those dark fetid places when these little innocent victims of the Chinamen’s wiles were under the influence of the drug, are almost too horrible to imagine,” Samuel Gompers, president of American Federated Labor (the AFL), wrote in a pamphlet titled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion.
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Out of that line of reasoning came the nation’s very first drug prohibition law, a San Francisco ordinance of 1875 that outlawed opium dens. Other antiopium and anti-Chinese laws followed in the coming decades, justified in part by the simple, chimerical precept: “If the Chinaman cannot get along without his ‘dope,’ we can get along without him,” as a committee of the American Pharmaceutical Association put it.
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Similarly, in the 1980s as poverty, homelessness, and associated urban ills increased noticeably, Presidents Reagan and Bush, along with much of the electorate, sidestepped the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens who had been harmed by policies favoring the wealthy.
Rather than face up to their own culpability, they blamed a drug. “Crack is responsible for the fact that vast patches of the American urban landscape are rapidly deteriorating,” Bush’s drug czar, William Bennett, decreed.
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A by-product of social and economic distress, crack became the
ex
planation
for that distress. American society still suffers repercussions of this perverse reasoning. In the late 1980s Congress mandated prison sentences one hundred times as severe for possession of crack, the form of cocaine for which African Americans are disproportionately arrested, as compared to cocaine powder, the type commonly used by whites. Partly as a consequence of that legislation, by the mid-1990s three out of four people serving prison sentences for drug offenses were African American, even though several times as many whites as blacks use cocaine. In federal courts 94 percent of those tried for crack offenses were African American. In 1995 the U.S. Sentencing Commission, whose recommendations had never previously been refused, urged greater parity and noted that there was no rational basis for the inconsistency in sentencing. The White House and Congress, rather than risk being called “soft on drugs,” aggressively opposed their recommendations, and by a vote of 332 to 83 they were struck down in the House of Representatives. That vote, along with the disparities in the justice system, prompted rioting by inmates in federal prisons, suspicions among African Americans of government conspiracies against them, and increased tensions between the races.
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It wasn’t supposed to be that way. When Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, won the White House in 1992, pundits predicted that ill-conceived drug policies and excessive fear mongering would die down. For a while it looked as if they were right. But then, in his bid for reelection in 1996, Clinton faced an opponent who tried to capitalize on his quiet. “Bill Clinton isn’t protecting our children from drugs,” the announcer on a Bob Dole-for-President TV ad exclaimed. “Clinton’s liberal drug policies have failed.” To which the president responded by upping the
ante, thereby positioning himself as more antidrug than his opponent. In the near future, Clinton warned, the “drug problem ... will be almost unbearable, unmanageable and painful” unless the Republican party, which controlled Congress, where Dole served as Senate Majority Leader, approved an additional $700 million to fight the problem.
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Clinton won reelection and got the money. But his continued occupancy of the White House afforded his political opponents and the media another hook on which to hang a drug scare. During Clinton’s second term his daughter, Chelsea, finished high school and began her college career—a peak developmental period for drug experimentation. Though there was no hint that Chelsea used drugs, the fact that Clinton and others of his generation had done so was taken as grounds for asserting that “Baby Boomers Tolerate Teen Drug Use”
(St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
1996).
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In tracing the history of scares several times I found that they stay around and reproduce themselves the way mosquitoes do, by attaching to whomever is available. By the mid-1980s, in line with the anti-1960s sentiment of the era, TV news programs had already started running reports that recycled footage of hippies in Haight Ashbury and characterized boomers as “dropping out and getting high” in the 1960s, only to drop back in as parents, “still getting high ... teaching the next generation to self-destruct, one line, one drink, one toke at a time” (CBS, 1986). That the negative image of “flower children ... educating their own teen-aged children about drugs” (as an article in the Detroit News put it in 1996) had little basis in reality mattered not at all. Only a minuscule portion of the baby boom generation ever qualified as “flower children” in the first place, and far fewer were potheads than myth would have it. But such facts did not stop news correspondents from rewriting boomers’ drug history and current attitudes toward drug use.
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“The children of the sixties have kids of their own and a new conflict with the generation gap. This time, it’s about their own drug use and what to tell their children about their past,” Deborah Roberts proclaimed on ABC’s “20/20” in 1997 as a Jefferson Airplane song played in the background and stock footage of hippies filled the screen.
Boomer parents who had gotten high in their youth are in a no-win situation, Roberts suggested. They can take a ”do as I say, not as I did” approach and risk being branded hypocrites by their children, or they can lie about their drug use and sacrifice any right to demand honesty from their kids in return.
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Roberts and her producers apparently paid no mind to evidence showing that few parents actually experienced that dilemma. A year before the “20/20” broadcast a nationwide survey found that 40 percent of parents had never tried marijuana, and more than three-quarters believed that a parent should never allow a child to take drugs. Fewer than one in ten said they felt hypocritical in forbidding their own children from using drugs. Most seemed to feel the way Bill Clinton did when ABC’s Peter Jennings suggested on another ABC program that ”a lot of people at home,” knowing he’s “a baby boomer president,” consider it hypocritical of him to tell Chelsea to avoid drugs. ”I think this business about how the baby boomers all feel too guilt-ridden to talk to their kids,” a slightly exasperated Clinton replied, “is the biggest load of hooey I ever heard.
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Although scares about boomer parents have popped up frequently, they boil down to a non sequitur: “Many baby-boomer parents of teen drug users probably used drugs themselves, and therefore have not offered stern enough warnings about the dangers”
(New York Times,
1996). The first part of the statement is true, but the second doesn’t follow; most boomers who have used drugs say they
have
cautioned their kids about the dangers. Should they have been more stern in their warnings? Not if adolescent drug use is a form of rebellion, as some experts believe. Parents who make a big deal about drugs might provoke more of the behavior they are attempting to prevent.
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Hectoring is exactly what parents have been told they should do. “Every time that a parent is with their child, it’s an opportunity for them to discuss drugs,” a physician from the American Academy of Pediatrics urged with a straight face on ABC’s “Good Morning America”
in 1997. Parents who took his prescription literally must have had some curious interchanges with their offspring:
“That’s great news about your straight A’s, let’s talk about LSD.
”
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