The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [78]
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. 10
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.11
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.12
A by-product of social and economic distress, crack became the explanation 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.13
Busting Boomers’ Chops
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.14
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