The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [76]
The money has been spent almost exclusively on curbing illegal drugs, a curious policy given that abuse of legal drugs is a huge problem. More Americans use legal drugs for nonmedical reasons than use cocaine or heroin; hundreds of millions of prescription pills are used illicitly each year. More than half of those who die of drug-related medical problems or seek treatment for those problems are abusing prescription drugs. By the American Medical Association’s own estimates one in twenty doctors is grossly negligent in prescribing drugs, and according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, at least 15,000 doctors sell prescriptions to addicts and pushers. Yet less than 1 percent of the nation’s antidrug budget goes to stopping prescription drug abuse.3
The gargantuan disparity in spending reflects—and is perpetuated by—what the nation’s media and political leaders have chosen to focus on. Scares about heroin, cocaine, and marijuana issue forth continually from politicians and journalists. But except for burps when a celebrity overdoses, they have been largely silent about the abuse of legal drugs.
A White House Tradition
It all started on April 9, 1970. An event at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue inaugurated a new and lasting collaboration between presidents and the media. At Richard Nixon’s request, White House officials held a day-long meeting with producers and executives from the major television networks, production companies, and advertising agencies to enlist their support in curtailing illegal drug use. Many of the most influential decision makers in the TV industry participated.
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.4
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.5
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