The Culture of Fear (24 page)

Presumably the doctor himself would acknowledge the absurdity of his dictum, at least in retrospect. He’d gotten caught up in the fervor of the times, or more accurately, of the network on which was appearing. He made his comment during what ABC called its “March Against Drugs”—an unprecedented overdosing of antidrug propaganda throughout an entire month in 1997. Every news show and almost every other program as well, including sitcoms, soaps, and sports events, contained at least one advertisement, plot line, feature story, or interview segment cautioning against teen drug abuse. The onslaught concluded on March 31 with an interview with President Clinton in which he goaded parents to lecture their children about drugs and thanked ABC for providing “a great service to the country.”
²¹

Some groups of parents came in for particularly harsh criticism during the network’s MAD month. Boomers got bashed repeatedly, as did single mothers. News stories and entire episodes of entertainment programs focused on unmarried, addicted moms and on single women who abstain from drug use themselves but failed to pay attention to the early signs of abuse in their offspring. An episode of the sitcom “Grace Under Fire” brought a whole stew of such themes together when Grace, a casualty of the 1960s, finds drugs in her son’s room and has trouble taking a hard line with him.
²²

ABC’s harangue elicited criticism from media critics as well as from authorities on drug abuse. Pointing out that intensive scare campaigns usually fail to dissuade young people from taking drugs and may even backfire, they also criticized the network for biased news reporting. Instead of providing a variety of points of view about drug use, news programs stuck closely to the same story lines that ran in soaps and public service advertisements throughout the month. News correspondents and anchors, rather than provide level-headed examinations of America’s drug problems and plausible remedies, rambled on about how schoolchildren “can get marijuana faster than a Popsicle,” and how “more and more teens are falling for heroin’s fatal allure.”
²³

Critics understandably accused ABC, which had fallen from first to last place among the big three networks over the previous two years, of engaging in a ratings grab: “cause-related marketing,” they call it in the trade. In my view, however, the charge is not entirely fair. All of the scares the network put out that month had been promoted by the rest of the media as well over the past decade. In touting a resurgence in heroin use, for example, ABC was merely singing one of the media’s favorite tunes. Year after year, even though Americans reportedly accounted for only about 5 percent of the world’s heroin market and usage levels remained fairly stable, headlines proclaimed, “The Return of a Deadly Drug Called Horse”
(U.S. News & World Report,
1989), “Heroin Is Making a Comeback,” (
New York Times,
1990) or “Smack’s Back”
(USA Today,
1994).
²⁴

Most heroin users are neither middle class nor young, but those groups regularly serve as the pegs for stories about heroin’s resurgence. As far back as 1981
Newsweek
was reporting that heroin had migrated from the ghetto and created “middle-class junkies,” a muddled assertion repeated periodically ever since. As evidence of a “middle-class romance with heroin”
(New York Times,
1997), reporters and politicians concentrate on various high-profile groups: Wall Street stockbrokers, fashion models, professional athletes. And perpetually they proclaim that “heroin has its deadly hooks in teens across the nation”
(USA Today,
1996).
²⁵

Smack has become “the pot of the ’90s ... as common as beer,”
USA Today
declared; “The New High School High,” ABC titled a special edition of its newsmagazine, “Turning Point.” According to Peter Jennings on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the “disturbing comeback” of heroin among the young is “almost impossible to exaggerate ... a cautionary tale for all parents and all children.” Yet in support of these drastic contentions reporters offered only vague, emotion-laden evidence. On “Turning Point,” Diane Sawyer effused: “The statistics are heartbreaking. In the last few years, hundreds and hundreds of young people have died from heroin. Some were among
the best and the brightest—star athletes, honor students, kids with promise.”
²⁶

To come up with their few examples of such fatalities, her producers must have had to search far and wide. With less than 1 percent of high school students trying heroin in a given year and the bulk of heroin use concentrated among inner-city adults, heroin is one of the least common causes of death among teens.
²⁷

Michael Massing, an author who writes frequently about drug abuse, recounted in an essay in the
New York Review of Books:
“Not long ago, I had a telephone call from an ABC producer who was working on a program about the resurgence of heroin. ‘We’re trying to get some middle-class users—people who are sniffing, rather than injecting,’ she said, asking for some leads. I said that while middle-class use somewhat increased, most of the new consumption was occurring among inner-city minorities. ‘Oh, they’ve been around for years,’ she said. ‘The fact that heroin is spreading into other sectors is what people will sit up and listen to.’”
²⁸

Some journalists do make a point, of course, of combating exaggerations with facts. Christopher Wren, who covers drug issues for the
New York Times,
is particularly conscientious in this regard. When President Clinton joined in the teen heroin scare by telling a group of mayors in 1997, “We now see in college campuses and neighborhoods, heroin becoming increasingly the drug of choice,” Wren included the quote in his article about the speech, but immediately put the president’s comment in its proper context. Although there had been reports of heroin experimentation at certain colleges, Wren noted, alcohol still retained its title as the drug of choice among the nation’s high school and college students, with marijuana a distant second.
²⁹

As a rule, though, reporters maximize claims about youthful drug abuse rather than contextualizing them. Most of the major media ran stories about a survey released in 1997 by a research center at Columbia University headed by Joseph Califano, the former Secretary of
Health, Education and Welfare. There had been a huge increase in the use of hard drugs by young kids, several of the stories reported. Specifically, 23.5 percent of twelve-year-olds (more than twice as many as the previous year) reported use of cocaine, heroin, or LSD. In reality, the 23.5 percent figure represented the percentage of twelve-year-olds who said they
knew
someone who used those drugs, not
their own
drug use. While most reporters did not conceal that the question had been asked this way, they called the survey “an urgent new alarm to address what many label a growing crisis” (CNN), and their stories appeared beneath headlines such as, “Poll Finds Sharp Rise in Drug Use Among Youngsters”
(Los Angeles Times).
When I first read the alarmist statistic red lights went off in my head. General readers and viewers, however, would have to be uncommonly attentive to how the question is worded to register that the true finding isn’t as “alarming” (NBC) as the media made it seem.
³⁰

The Califano poll showed only that about one in four twelve-year-olds was willing to speculate about a friend or classmate having used hard drugs. Just a week earlier the results of a far larger and more trusted poll had come out, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. That survey asked people about their own drug taking and found teen drug use
down
almost 17 percent, with the steepest decline among twelve- to fifteen-year-olds.
³¹

Indeed, when Califano subsequently released more detailed results from his survey a month after his press blitz, it turned out that an overwhelming number of twelve-year-olds—71 percent—said their schools were entirely drug free. And as for use by friends, only 4 percent said that half or more of their friends even used marijuana, never mind hard drugs. Three out of four said that if someone were using illegal drugs at school, they would report them.
³²

In drug abuse surveys America’s adolescents report increases in consumption of particular drugs sometimes and decreases other times. More important in the long run is the most consistent finding in these surveys, one that the news media seldom mention: The great majority of adolescents never or hardly ever use drugs. Fully three-quarters of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds report, year after year, that in the past
twelve months they have not used drugs at all—not so much as a puff of pot. For hard drugs, only about ten to fifteen out of a thousand report using them as frequently as once a month. Even among college students drug use is less pervasive than the hype would have it. Half of America’s college students make it to graduation without having smoked marijuana; better than eight out of ten have not tried cocaine in any form.
³³

The vast majority of teens who do use drugs in high school or college give them up by their early thirties. A study that tracked more than 33,000 young Americans over an eighteen-year period found that drug use decreases dramatically when people marry. The only substance most users do not give up in early adulthood, the study found, is cigarettes. Of those who smoked half a pack or more a day as seniors in high school, seven out of ten were still smoking at age thirty-two.
³⁴

Drug scares are promoted primarily by three means: presidential proclamations, selective statistics, and poster children. The first two posit a terrifying new trend, the last gives it a human face.

The scare about adolescent drug use had several poster children, most of them teens whose sad stories were told only in their hometown newspapers and local newscasts, or in passing on TV newsmagazines. One notable exception, a young woman named Miki Koontz, attracted attention from the national media, where her story was told repeatedly for a couple of years. The
way
in which much of the media told Miki’s story—as a heart-pounding true-crime story (even with a chase scene) but with important details omitted—further illustrates something we have seen before. People’s stories seldom make the simple or singular point that journalists profess they do.
³⁵

A “homecoming queen, cheerleader, and above-average student whose bags were packed for college” (Associated Press), Miki inexplicably became a crackhead and lost her life as a result, the media reported. America has fallen far, the articles said or implied, when such a thing can happen to a “very, very nice”
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
girl
from Williamson, West Virginia, a town of 4,300 straight out of a Jimmy Stewart movie (the drugstore still has a soda fountain).

The villain of these pieces, Jerry Warren, a black man in his mid-forties, sold crack out of his home to the tune of $30,000 a month and enticed local white kids to get hooked. Miki and the chump of the piece, Chris Pennington, were among Warren’s customers.

Miki and Chris made for an unexpected but endearing duo, the story went. Homely, learning disabled, the son of a coal miner, Chris seemed an unlikely friend for a “petite brunette with hazel eyes” (Associated Press) whose father was a millionaire coal executive. But Miki and Chris had been buddies since sixth grade. “Miki never put me down when friends of hers did,” Chris recalled to a reporter. He had not wanted to put Miki in harm’s way, but he found himself in a tough bind. Unemployed and struggling to support a little boy he had fathered with a woman he picked up in a bar, Chris owed Jerry Warren $2,000—a debt that Warren offered to erase if Chris delivered Miki to him at a predetermined time and place.

So on August 25, 1995, Chris asked Miki to pick him up and drive him to go get some pot. Outside of town Chris reached into his pants, pulled out a knife, pressed it against Miki’s side, and told her where to drive. What followed was like a scene out of some rustic remake of
Pulp Fiction.
For more than an hour they drove around, Miki thinking Chris was joking with her, Chris growing increasingly anxious and insistent, until finally he instructed her to park the car near a sewer plant. There, Jerry Warren was waiting. Believing that Miki had been snitching on him to the police, he ordered her out of the car and commanded Chris to shoot her with a rifle. Chris tried to refuse, but Warren threatened to shoot them both if he did not comply. “Miki knelt on the ground and asked to pray. Saying nothing, Chris pointed the rifle at Miki’s head, closed his eyes, turned his head and fired,” an article in
Rolling Stone
recounted. The next thing he heard, Chris said, was “a gargling sound of blood running from her head. Like when you’re pouring water out of a bottle: gloop, gloop, gloop.”

The
Rolling Stone
piece, in line with other coverage of middle-class American kids undone by drugs, put much of the blame on the dealer.
Jerry Warren had “enormous power over ... previously untouchable middle-class white girls,” the magazine quoted an assistant U.S. attorney. But unlike other stories about Miki Koontz in the news media and on tabloid TV shows, the article in
Rolling Stone
provided some telling details: Miki was not, in fact, a Tipper Gore-in-training debutante living the ideal life in a bucolic hamlet. Nor did she suddenly become a crack addict, thereby proving that the same could happen to any mother’s child before she realizes that something has gone awry. Way back when Miki was still in kindergarten her parents had formally divorced but agreed to live together for the sake of appearances and to raise Miki and her sister. Not until Miki’s senior year in high school did her father finally move out of the house. By then he had long since lost his fortune and twice filed for bankruptcy in this gloomy Appalachian town where unemployment stood at nearly 14 percent and half of the population had left since the 1950s.