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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

The Return of Heroin

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