The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [77]
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.”7
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.8
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.9
Drugs to Ease Collective Guilt
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