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> as published in:
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> Craig Reinarman/Harry G. Levine
>
> THE CONSTRUCTION OF AMERICA'S CRACK CRISIS
>
> "America discovered crack and overdosed on oratory." New York Times
> Editorial (10/4/88)1
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In the Spring of 1986 American politicians and news media embarked
> upon an extraordinary anti-drug frenzy. Newspapers, magazines, and
> television networks regularly carried lurid stories alleging that an
> "epidemic" or "plague" of drug use, crack cocaine in particular, was
> literally destroying American society. Politicians from both parties
> made increasingly strident calls for a "War on Drugs" and even
> challenged each other to take urine tests to provide chemical proof
> of their moral purity and fitness for high office. However serious
> America's drug problems are, we suggest that the period from 1986
> through 1992 was characterized by a high level of anti drug
> hysteria. We do not use the term "hysteria" as hyperbole. In this
> period the passions engendered by the fear of drugs lead to
> anti-drug extremism.
>
> We use the term "drug scare" to designate periods when anti drug
> crusades have achieved great prominence and legitimacy. Drugs scares
> are phenomena in their own right quite apart from drug use and drug
> problems. 2 Drug scares have recurred throughout American history
> independent of actual increases in drug use or drug problems. During
> "red scares," like the McCarthy period in the 1950s, leftists were
> said to be seriously threatening to destroy the American way of
> life. Similarly, during drug scares all kinds of social problems
> have been blamed on one chemical substance or another. Dominant
> elite's have typically linked a scape-goated drug with a subordinate
> group they perceive as a threat - working-class immigrants, racial
> or ethnic minorities, rebellious youth. This latest drug scare - the
> "crack scare" - tied cocaine, especially its derivative "crack,"
> with inner-city African-American and Latino young people.
>
> The crack scare that began in 1986 waned somewhat in the
> non-election year of 1987. But in 1988 drugs returned to the
> national stage as stories about the "crack epidemic" again appeared
> regularly on front pages and TV screens (Reeves and Campbell, 1994).
> One politician after another re-enlisted in the War on Drugs. In
> that election year, as in 1986, overwhelming majorities of both
> houses of Congress voted for new anti-drug laws with long mandatory
> prison terms, death sentences, and large increases in funding for
> police and prisons. This started a surge in the annual federal
> budget for antidrug efforts from less than $ 2 billion in 1981 to
> more than $ 12 billion in 1993. The Bush administration alone spent
> $45 billion - more than all other Presidents since Nixon combined -
> mostly for law enforcement (Office of National Drug Control Policy,
> 1992; Horgan, 1993). The budget for the Drug Enforcement
> Administration (DEA) quadrupled between 1981 and 1992 (Massing,
> 1993).3
>
> The drug war continued throughout 1989 and heated up again in the
> Fall when another major new federal anti-drug bill to further
> increase drug war funding (S-1233) began winding its way through
> Congress. In September President Bush's "Drug Czar," William
> Bennett, unveiled his comprehensive battle plan, the National Drug
> Control Strategy. His Introduction asks, "What ... accounts for the
> intensifying drug-related chaos that we see every day in our
> newspapers and on television? One word explains much of it That word
> is crack.... Crack is responsible for the fact that vast patches of
> the American urban landscape are rapidly deteriorating" (The White
> House, 1989, p. 3; original emphasis). The plan proposed yet another
> S 2.2 billion increase in drug war spending, 70% of which was to be
> allocated to police and prisons, a percentage unchanged since the
> Nixon administration (New York Times, 9/6/89, Al l). This new
> funding would be used to nearly double prison capacity so that even
> casual users as well as dealers could be incarcerated. The plan also
> proposed the sale of drug war bonds (reminiscent of World War II) as
> a means of financing the $7.9 billion first-year costs.
>
> On September 5, 1989, President Bush himself announced this plan for
> achieving "victory over drugs" in a major prime-time address to the
> nation, broadcast on all three national television networks. We want
> to focus on this incident as an example of way politicians and the
> media systematically misinformed and deceived the public in order to
> promote the War on Drugs. According to the New York Times (9/6/89,
> p. A1), Bush had returned to Washington early from summer vacation
> at his estate on the Maine coast to rehearse with his media
> advisers. He spoke to the TV cameras from the presidential desk in
> the Oval Office. During the address Bush used what the Times termed
> "a dramatic device" - holding up to the cameras a clear plastic bag
> of crack labeled "EVIDENCE. " He announced that it was "seized a few
> days ago in a park across the street from the White House"
> (Washington Post, 9/22//89, p. A1). It's contents, Bush said, were
> "turning our cities into battle zones and murdering our children."
> The President proclaimed that because of crack and other drugs he
> would "more than double Federal assistance to state and local law
> enforcement (New York Times, 916189, All). The next morning, the
> picture of the President holding a large bag of crack was on the
> front pages of newspapers across America.
>
> On September 22, 1989, the Washington Post, and then National Public
> Radio and other newspapers, broke the story of how the President of
> the United States had obtained his bag of crack. According to White
> House and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials, "the idea of the
> President holding up crack was first included in some drafts" of his
> speech. Bush enthusiastically approved. A White House Aid told the
> Post that the President "liked the prop....It. drove the point home.
> " Bush and his advisors also decided that the crack should be seized
> in Lafayette Park across from the White House, or somewhere else
> nearby, so that the President could say that crack had become so
> pervasive that men were "selling drugs in front of the White House "
> (Isikoff, 1989, A1).
>
> This decision set up a complex chain of events. White House
> communications director David Demarst asked Cabinet affairs
> secretary David Bates to instruct the Justice Department "to find
> some crack that fit the description in the speech. " Bates called
> Richard Weatherbee, a special assistant to Attorney General Dick
> Thornburghy. Weatherbee in turn called James Millford, the executive
> assistant to the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Finally, he
> phoned William McMullen, the special agent in charge of the DEA's
> Washington Office, and told him to arrange an undercover crack buy
> near the White House because "evidently, the President wants to show
> it could be bought anywhere" (Isikoff, 1989, A1).
>
> Despite their best efforts, the top Federal drug agents were not
> been able to find anyone selling crack (or any other drug) either in
> Lafayette Park, or anywhere else in the vicinity of the White House.
> Therefore, in order to carry out their assignment, DEA agents had to
> entice someone to come to the Park to make the sale. Apparently, the
> only person the DEA could convince was Keith Jackson, an 18 year-old
> African-American high school senior. McMullan reported that it was
> difficult to do because Jackson "did not even know where the White
> House was." The DEA's secret tape recording of the conversation
> revealed that the teenager seemed baffled by the request: "Where the
> [expletive deleted] is the White House?" he asked. Therefore,
> McMullan told the Post, "we had to manipulate him to get him down
> there. It wasn't easy" (Isikoff, 1989, A1).
>
> After it was reported that the U.S. government had lured someone to
> come to the White House to sell crack, National Public Radio's All
> Things Considered news show interviewed men from Washington D.C.
> then in prison on drug-selling charges. All agreed that, of course,
> nobody would sell crack in Layafette Park because, among other
> reasons, there would be no customers. The crack-using population was
> in Washington's impoverished neighborhoods some distance from the
> White House. Finally, The Washington Post and other papers reported
> that the undercover Drug Enforcement Agents had not, after all,
> actually seized the crack, as Bush had claimed in his speech.
> Rather, the DEA agents had purchased it from Jackson for $2,400
> dollars and then had let him go.4
>
> This entire incident is a perfect example of the way in which what
> we call a "drug scare" distorts and perverts public knowledge and
> policy. The idea of claiming that crack was threatening every
> neighborhood in America first appeared in the minds and speech
> drafts of Bush's advisers. Then, when they found that reality did
> not match the script, a series of high-level officials instructed
> federal drug agents to create a reality that would fit the script.
> Finally the President of the United States displayed the procured
> prop on national TV, announced its "seizure" as a victory, and
> suggested to the citizenry that the wholly manufactured event was
> typical and common. In the end, when all of this was revealed, none
> of it seem to cause politicians or the media to question either the
> President's policies or his claims about crack's persuasiveness.
>
> As a result of Bush's performance, and of all the other drug war
> publicity and propaganda, in 1988 and 1989 the drug war commanded
> more public attention than any other issue. And the media and
> political anti-drug crusade succeeded in making many Americans even
> more fearful of crack and other illicit drugs. A New York Times/CBS
> News Poll has periodically asked Americans to identify "the most
> important problem facing this country today." In January, 1985, 23
> percent answered war or nuclear war; less than 1 percent believed
> the most important problem was drugs. In September 1989, shortly
> after the President's speech and the blizzard of media stories about
> drugs which followed, 64 percent of those polled believed that drugs
> were now the most important problem and only 1 percent thought that
> war or nuclear war was most important. Even the New York Times
> declared in a lead editorial that this reversal was "incredible" and
> gently suggested that problems like war, "homelessness and the need
> to give poor children a chance in life" should perhaps be given more
> attention (9128189, A26). A year later during a lull in anti drug
> speeches and coverage, the percentage citing "drugs" as the nation's
> top problem had dropped to 10%. Noting this "precipitous fall from a
> remarkable height," the Times noted that "the alliance of Presidents
> and news directors" shaped public opinion about drugs. Indeed, once
> the White House let it be known that the President would be giving a
> prime-time address on the subject, all three networks tripled their
> coverage of drugs in the two weeks prior to his speech and
> quadrupled it for a week afterward (New York Times, 916190, A11).
> And, as we will show in the next section, all this occurred as
> nearly every index of drug use had been dropping.
>
> The crack scare continued in 1990 and 1991, although with somewhat
> less media and political attention. By the beginning of 1992 - in
> the last year of the Bush administration - the War on Drugs in
> general, and the crack scare in particular, had begun to decline
> significantly in prominence and importance. However, even as the
> drug war was receiving less notice from politicians and the media,
> it remained institutionalized, bureaucratically powerful, and
> extremely well funded (especially police, military, and
> education/propaganda activities).
>
> In this chapter we first briefly review the birth and spread of
> crack in the mid 1980s. We trace the media coverage of "the crisis"
> and summarize the core claims made about the destructiveness of the
> cocaine and crack "plague." Second, we contrast these claims with
> the primary U.S. government data on which they were purportedly
> based. We show that a gap existed between the official statistical
> evidence 5 and the prevalence claims of the media and politicians.
> We maintain that the media and politicians misrepresented or ignored
> the evidence and instead provided propaganda for the drug war.
> Further, we suggest that all of the attention and hype - the crack
> scare - raced well ahead of both crack use and problems related to
> it. The crack scare, in other words, was not merely a rational
> response to a new threat to public health and public order. It
> possessed its own causes and logic. By analyzing the scare on its
> own terms, we do not wish to deny the fact that crack use had
> terrible medical, psychological, social, and economic consequences
> on some users and in some inner-city neighborhoods. Rather, our
> ultimate focus in this chapter is on why, from 1986 to 1992, so much
> attention was given to drugs and why so many claims about drugs -
> exaggerated or not - achieved such prominence.6
>
> Third, to lay the groundwork for exploring this question we review
> the history of drug scares in America We note the way political
> elite's, moral entrepreneurs, and sometimes social movements have
> linked drug use with subordinate groups, and have blamed a variety
> of long-standing social problems on a drug and a group of alleged
> users (see, e.g., Szasz, 1974; Helmer, 1975). We suggest that much
> the same process of scape-goating has been at work in this drug
> scare: crack has become central to public discourse about many
> social problems which existed decades before crack appeared, and
> which have continued unabated since crack has declined in prominence
> as a public issue.
>
> Finally, we return to the historically-specific social and political
> context of this drug scare to show the political utility of the drug
> issue - for Democrats as well as Republicans - in a conservative
> political context. Politicians and the media, we suggest, have
> promoted the drug scare for political and economic purposes only
> remotely related to drug problems. We conclude by suggesting some of
> the problematic consequences of this drug scare, especially: 1) that
> the demonization of one drug diverts attention and resources from
> more fundamental problems underlying crack and other drug use; and
> 2) that the scare ran the risk of raising curiosity about crack and
> investing it with an allure that may have increased the actual use
> of crack.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Cocaine and Crack in the Public Eye
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The use of cocaine in powdered form by affluent people in music,
> film, and sports had been common since the 1970s. According to
> surveys by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), by 1985 more
> than 22 million Americans in all social classes and occupations had
> reported at least trying cocaine. Cocaine smoking originated with
> "freebasing," which was already increasing by the late 1970s (see
> Siegle, 1982; Inciardi 1987). Then (as now) most cocaine users
> bought cocaine hydrochloride (powder) for intranasal use (snorting).
> But by the end of the 1970s some users had begun to "cook" powder
> cocaine down to crystalline or "base" form for smoking. All phases
> of this form of cocaine use, from selling to smoking, tended to take
> place in the privacy of homes and offices of middle-class or
> well-to-do users. They typically purchased cocaine in units of a
> gram or more costing $80 to $100 a gram. These relatively affluent
> "basers" had been discovering the dangers of smoking cocaine for
> several years before the term "crack" was coined. But most such
> users had a stake in conventional life; they had valuable things to
> lose if they got into trouble with cocaine, and they also had the
> incentives and the resources to cut down, quit, get private
> treatment, or otherwise control and conceal their use.
>
> The orgy of media and political attention did not begin in the late
> 1970s when the prevalence of cocaine use jumped sharply, or even
> after middle- class and upper-class users began to experience
> trouble, especially with freebasing. Rather, the scare began when
> smokable cocaine, in the form of crack, made its appearance in a few
> poor urban neighborhoods. Like basers, crack users found that this
> mode of ingesting cocaine produced a much more intense and far
> shorter "high" because it delivered more pure cocaine into the brain
> far more directly and rapidly than by snorting. Many crack users
> found that crack's intense, brutally brief "orgasmic rush," combined
> with the painful "low" or "down" which immediately followed,
> produced a powerful desire to immediately repeat use - to binge (see
> Waldorf, Reinarman, and Murphy, 1991). This pattern of an immediate,
> intense, and brief high followed quickly by painful low is the
> pharmacological source of the short-term bingeing that is
> characteristic of much crack use (Morgan and Zimmer, forthcoming).
> However, crack's pharmacological power alone does not explain the
> attention it received.
>
> Politicians and the media focused on crack not because the cocaine
> was ingested in a more direct, dangerous manner. Cocaine freebase,
> the precursor of crack, had been smoked in the late 1970s and early
> 1980s, and the problems of freebasers were well known. But these
> people tended to be white and middle-class or affluent. At this
> point in history, the only movement in drug policy seemed to be the
> proliferation of for-profit treatment programs. Crack, on the other
> hand, attracted the attention of politicians and the media because
> of its downward mobility to and increased visibility in ghettos and
> barrios. The new users had a different social class, race, and
> status (see Duster, 1970; Washton and Gold, 1987). Crack was sold in
> smaller, cheaper, precooked units, on ghetto streets, to poorer,
> younger buyers who were already seen as a threat (e.g., New York
> Times, Aug. 30, 1987; Newsweek, Nov. 23, 1987; Boston Globe, May 18,
> 1988). Crack spread cocaine smoking into poor populations already
> beset with a cornucopia of troubles (see Wilson, 1987). These people
> tended to have fewer bonds to conventional society, less to lose,
> and far fewer resources to cope with or shield themselves from
> drug-related problems.
>
> Thus, the latest drug scare began in earnest when crack use became
> visible among this "dangerous" group. The earliest mass media
> reference to the new form of cocaine may have been a Los Angeles
> Times article in late 1984 (11/25/84:cc 1) on the use of cocaine
> "rocks" in ghettos and barrios in Los Angeles. By late 1985, the New
> York Times made the first specific reference to "crack" in the
> national media in a story about three teenagers seeking treatment
> for cocaine abuse (ll/17/85:B12). At the start of 1986 crack was
> known only in a few impoverished neighborhoods in Los Angeles, New
> York, Miami, and perhaps a few other large cities.
>
> When two celebrity athletes died in what news stories called
> "crack-related deaths" in the Spring of 1986, the media seemed to
> sense a potential bonanza "Dramatic footage" of black and Latino men
> being carted off in chains, or of police breaking down crack house
> doors, became a near nightly news event. Coverage skyrocketed and
> crack became widely known. In July 1986 alone the three major TV
> networks offered 74 evening news segments on drugs, half of these
> about crack (Diamond et al., 1987; Reeves and Campbell, 1994). In
> the months leading up to the November elections, a handful of
> national newspapers and magazines produced roughly 1,000 stories
> discussing crack (see Inciardi, 1987:481; Trebach, 1987:6-16). Like
> the TV networks, leading news magazines like Time and Newsweek
> seemed determined not to be out-done; each devoted five cover
> stories to crack and the "drug crisis" in 1986 alone.
>
> In the fall of 1986, the CBS News show 48 Hours aired a heavily
> promoted documentary called "48 Hours on Crack Street" which Dan
> Rather previewed on his Evening News show: "Tonight, CBS News takes
> you to the streets, to the war zone, for an unusual two hours of
> hands-on horror." Among the many shots from hidden cameras was one
> of New York Senator Alphonse D'Amato, in cognito, purchasing a vial
> of crack in order to dramatize the brazenness of streetcorner sales
> in the ghetto. All this was good business for CBS: the program
> earned the highest Nielsen rating of any similar news show in the
> previous five years - 15 million viewers (Diamond et al., 1987:10).
> Three years later, after 48 Hours was nearly killed by poor ratings,
> the series kicked off its 1989 season with a 3-hour special, "Return
> to Crack Street.
>
> The intense media competition for audience share and advertising
> dollars spawned many similar shows. Three days after "48 Hours on
> Crack Street," NBC followed with its own prime-time special,
> "Cocaine Country," which asserted that cocaine and crack use had
> gone beyond epidemic to become pandemic. This was one of over 400
> separate stories on crack and cocaine produced by NBC alone - an
> unprecedented 15 hours of air time - in the seven months leading up
> to the 1986 elections (see Diamond et al., 1987; Hoffman, 1987). By
> mid-1986, Newsweek claimed that crack was the biggest story since
> Vietnam and Watergate (6116186: 15), and Time soon followed by
> calling crack "the Issue of the Year" (9122186:25). The words
> "plague," "epidemic," and "crisis" had become routine (see
> Appendix). The New York Times, for example, did a 3-part, front-page
> series called "The Crack Plague" (6124188:A1).
>
> This media frenzy continued into 1989, with even the nation's best
> newspapers joining in. During the 12 months between October 1988 and
> October 1989, for example, the Washington Post alone ran 1565
> stories - 28,476 column inches - about the drug crisis. Even Richard
> Harwood, the Washington Post's own internal ombudsman editorialized
> against what he called the loss of "a proper sense of perspective"
> due to such a "hyperbole epidemic." At a time when almost every form
> of drug use was declining, Harwood (1989) wrote, "the press and the
> politicians are doing a number on people's heads."
>
> President and Nancy Reagan were only the most prominent of
> politicians to join in asserting that drugs, especially crack, were
> "tearing our country apart" and "killing ... a whole generation [of]
> ... our children" (Time, Sept 22, 1986:25). The latter claim was
> repeated as recently as February of 1994 by a prominent New York
> Times journalist who wrote that "An entire generation is being
> sacrificed to [crack]" (Staples, 1994). In the 1988 presidential
> primaries more and more politicians again claimed that crack was
> destroying American youth and causing much of the crime, violence,
> prostitution, and child abuse in the nation. Democrats and
> Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike called repeatedly for
> an "all-out War on Drugs."
>
> An April, 1988 ABC News "Special Report" again termed crack "a
> plague" that was "eating away at the fabric of America." This
> documentary, like others before and since, made a long series of
> provocative claims: that Americans spend "twenty billion a year on
> cocaine:" that American businesses lose "sixty billion" dollars a
> year in productivity because their workers use drugs; that "the
> educational system is being undermined" by student drug use; and
> that "the family" was "disintegrating" in the face of this
> "epidemic." In 48 minutes of airtime, millions of viewers again were
> given a powerful vocabulary of attribution: "drugs," especially
> crack, were destroying virtually every institution in American life
> - jobs, schools, families, national sovereignty, community, law
> enforcement, and business
>
> From the opening shots in 1986 to this 1988 television show and
> President Bush's national address in 1989, and through all the
> stories about "crack babies" in 1990 and 1991, crack cocaine was
> defined as supremely evil - the most important cause of America's
> problems. As in previous drug scares since the l9th-century crusade
> against alcohol, one of the core features of drug war discourse was
> what we call the routinization of caricature - worst cases framed as
> typical cases, the episodic rhetorically recrafted into the
> epidemic, and the epidemic into the pandemic.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Official Government Evidence
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On those rare occasions when politicians and journalists cited any
> evidence to support their prevalence claims, they relied on two
> basic sources, both funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse
> (NIDA). One source was the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), a
> monitoring project set up to survey hospitals, crisis and treatment
> centers, and coroners across the country about drug-related
> emergencies and deaths. The other was NIDA's national surveys on
> drug use among general population households and among young people.
> Other data sources existed, but these usually were either anecdotal,
> specific to a particular location, or based on a skewed sample.7
> Therefore, we will review what these two NIDA data sources had to
> say about crack because they were and remain the only national data
> and because they were and are considered by experts and
> claims-makers the most reliable form of evidence available.8
>
> The Drug Abuse Warning Network DAWN collects data on a whole series
> of drugs - from amphetamine to aspirin - that are thought to be
> present in emergencies or fatalities. This data takes the form of
> "mentions." A drug "mention" is produced when a patient, or someone
> with a patient, tells attending medical personnel that the patient
> recently used the drug, or occasionally if a blood test shows the
> presence of the drug.
>
> These data provided perhaps the only piece of statistical support
> for the crack scare. They indicated that cocaine was "mentioned" in
> an increasing number of emergency room episodes throughout the
> 1980s. During 1986, as the scare moved into full swing, there were
> an estimated 51,600 emergency room episodes in which cocaine was
> "mentioned" (NIDA, 1993a). In subsequent years the estimated number
> of such "mentions" continued to rise, providing clear cause for
> concern. By 1989, for example, the estimated number of emergency
> room episodes in which cocaine was "mentioned" had more than doubled
> to 110,000. Although the estimate dropped sharply in 1990 to 80,400,
> by 1992 it had risen again to 119,800 (NIDA, 1993a).
>
> Unfortunately, the meaning of a "mention" is ambiguous. In many of
> these cases the cocaine use was probably incidental. Such episodes
> included many cases in which people went to emergency rooms after
> being injured in home or auto accidents. Moreover, in most cases,
> cocaine was only one of the drugs in the person's system; most
> people had also been drinking alcohol. Finally, the DAWN data does
> not include information about pre-existing medical or mental health
> conditions that make any form of drug use, legal or illegal, more
> risky. For all these reasons one can not properly infer direct cause
> from the estimates of "emergency room mentions." Cocaine did play a
> causal role in some cases, but no one knows how many or what
> proportion of the total they were.
>
> The DAWN data on deaths in which cocaine was "mentioned" by medical
> examiners also must be closely examined. When the crack scare got
> underway in 1986, coroners coded 1,092 deaths as "cocaine-related"
> (NIDA, 1986b), and as crack spread this number, too, increased
> substantially. In 1989 the Secretary of Health and Human Services
> reported a 20% decline in both deaths and emergency room episodes in
> which cocaine was mentioned,9 but both indices rose again in l991
> and 1992. The 1992 DAWN figures showed 3,020 deaths in which cocaine
> was "mentioned" (NIDA, 1992).
>
> But, again, cocaine alone was "mentioned" only in a fraction of
> these deaths (e.g., 18.9% in 1986 [NIDA, 1986b]). In most of these
> cases cocaine had been used with other drugs, again, most often
> alcohol. Although any death is tragic, cocaine's role in such
> fatalities remains ambiguous. "Cocaine-related" is not the same as
> "cocaine-caused," and "cocaine-related deaths" does not mean "deaths
> due to cocaine." There is little doubt that cocaine contributes to
> some significant (but unknown) percentage of such deaths, but it is
> worth noting that media accoun