The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [81]
To come up with their few examples of such fatalities, her producers must have had to search far and wide. With less than 1 percent of high school students trying heroin in a given year and the bulk of heroin use concentrated among inner-city adults, heroin is one of the least common causes of death among teens.27
Michael Massing, an author who writes frequently about drug abuse, recounted in an essay in the New York Review of Books: “Not long ago, I had a telephone call from an ABC producer who was working on a program about the resurgence of heroin. ‘We’re trying to get some middle-class users—people who are sniffing, rather than injecting,’ she said, asking for some leads. I said that while middle-class use somewhat increased, most of the new consumption was occurring among inner-city minorities. ‘Oh, they’ve been around for years,’ she said. ‘The fact that heroin is spreading into other sectors is what people will sit up and listen to.’”28
Good Numbers Gone Bad
Some journalists do make a point, of course, of combating exaggerations with facts. Christopher Wren, who covers drug issues for the New York Times, is particularly conscientious in this regard. When President Clinton joined in the teen heroin scare by telling a group of mayors in 1997, “We now see in college campuses and neighborhoods, heroin becoming increasingly the drug of choice,” Wren included the quote in his article about the speech, but immediately put the president’s comment in its proper context. Although there had been reports of heroin experimentation at certain colleges, Wren noted, alcohol still retained its title as the drug of choice among the nation’s high school and college students, with marijuana a distant second.29
As a rule, though, reporters maximize claims about youthful drug abuse rather than contextualizing them. Most of the major media ran stories about a survey released in 1997 by a research center at Columbia University headed by Joseph Califano, the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. There had been a huge increase in the use of hard drugs by young kids, several of the stories reported. Specifically, 23.5 percent of twelve-year-olds (more than twice as many as the previous year) reported use of cocaine, heroin, or LSD. In reality, the 23.5 percent figure represented the percentage of twelve-year-olds who said they knew someone who used those drugs, not their own drug use. While most reporters did not conceal that the question had been asked this way, they called the survey “an urgent new alarm to address what many label a growing crisis” (CNN), and their stories appeared beneath headlines such as, “Poll Finds Sharp Rise in Drug Use Among Youngsters” (Los Angeles Times). When I first read the alarmist statistic red lights went off in my head. General readers and viewers, however, would have to be uncommonly attentive to how the question is worded to register that the true finding isn’t as “alarming” (NBC) as the media made it seem.30
The Califano poll showed only that about one in four twelve-year-olds was willing to speculate about a friend or classmate having used hard drugs. Just a week earlier the results of a far larger and more trusted poll had come out, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. That survey asked people about their own drug taking and found teen drug use down almost 17 percent, with the steepest decline among twelve- to fifteen-year-olds.31
Indeed, when Califano subsequently released more detailed results from his survey a month after his press blitz, it turned out that an overwhelming number of twelve-year-olds—71 percent—said their schools were entirely drug free. And as for use by friends, only 4 percent said that half or more of their friends even used marijuana, never mind hard drugs. Three out of four said that if someone were using illegal drugs at school,