The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [82]
In drug abuse surveys America’s adolescents report increases in consumption of particular drugs sometimes and decreases other times. More important in the long run is the most consistent finding in these surveys, one that the news media seldom mention: The great majority of adolescents never or hardly ever use drugs. Fully three-quarters of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds report, year after year, that in the past twelve months they have not used drugs at all—not so much as a puff of pot. For hard drugs, only about ten to fifteen out of a thousand report using them as frequently as once a month. Even among college students drug use is less pervasive than the hype would have it. Half of America’s college students make it to graduation without having smoked marijuana; better than eight out of ten have not tried cocaine in any form.33
The vast majority of teens who do use drugs in high school or college give them up by their early thirties. A study that tracked more than 33,000 young Americans over an eighteen-year period found that drug use decreases dramatically when people marry. The only substance most users do not give up in early adulthood, the study found, is cigarettes. Of those who smoked half a pack or more a day as seniors in high school, seven out of ten were still smoking at age thirty-two.34
Poster Girl for the Drug Crisis
Drug scares are promoted primarily by three means: presidential proclamations, selective statistics, and poster children. The first two posit a terrifying new trend, the last gives it a human face.
The scare about adolescent drug use had several poster children, most of them teens whose sad stories were told only in their hometown newspapers and local newscasts, or in passing on TV newsmagazines. One notable exception, a young woman named Miki Koontz, attracted attention from the national media, where her story was told repeatedly for a couple of years. The way in which much of the media told Miki’s story—as a heart-pounding true-crime story (even with a chase scene) but with important details omitted—further illustrates something we have seen before. People’s stories seldom make the simple or singular point that journalists profess they do.35
A “homecoming queen, cheerleader, and above-average student whose bags were packed for college” (Associated Press), Miki inexplicably became a crackhead and lost her life as a result, the media reported. America has fallen far, the articles said or implied, when such a thing can happen to a “very, very nice” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) girl from Williamson, West Virginia, a town of 4,300 straight out of a Jimmy Stewart movie (the drugstore still has a soda fountain).
The villain of these pieces, Jerry Warren, a black man in his mid-forties, sold crack out of his home to the tune of $30,000 a month and enticed local white kids to get hooked. Miki and the chump of the piece, Chris Pennington, were among Warren’s customers.
Miki and Chris made for an unexpected but endearing duo, the story went. Homely, learning disabled, the son of a coal miner, Chris seemed an unlikely friend for a “petite brunette with hazel eyes” (Associated Press) whose father was a millionaire coal executive. But Miki and Chris had been buddies since sixth grade. “Miki never put me down when friends of hers did,” Chris recalled to a reporter. He had not wanted to put Miki in harm’s way, but he found himself in a tough bind. Unemployed and struggling to support a little boy he had fathered with a woman he picked up in a bar, Chris owed Jerry Warren $2,000—a debt that Warren offered to erase if Chris delivered Miki to him at a predetermined time and place.
So on August 25, 1995, Chris asked Miki to pick him up and drive him to go get some pot. Outside of town Chris reached into his pants, pulled out a knife, pressed it against Miki’s side, and told her where to drive. What followed was like a scene out of some rustic remake of Pulp Fiction. For more than an hour they drove around, Miki thinking Chris was joking with her, Chris growing increasingly