The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [83]
The Rolling Stone piece, in line with other coverage of middle-class American kids undone by drugs, put much of the blame on the dealer. Jerry Warren had “enormous power over ... previously untouchable middle-class white girls,” the magazine quoted an assistant U.S. attorney. But unlike other stories about Miki Koontz in the news media and on tabloid TV shows, the article in Rolling Stone provided some telling details: Miki was not, in fact, a Tipper Gore-in-training debutante living the ideal life in a bucolic hamlet. Nor did she suddenly become a crack addict, thereby proving that the same could happen to any mother’s child before she realizes that something has gone awry. Way back when Miki was still in kindergarten her parents had formally divorced but agreed to live together for the sake of appearances and to raise Miki and her sister. Not until Miki’s senior year in high school did her father finally move out of the house. By then he had long since lost his fortune and twice filed for bankruptcy in this gloomy Appalachian town where unemployment stood at nearly 14 percent and half of the population had left since the 1950s.
Miki fought frequently with her mother and had two friends in jail. Upon being named Homecoming Queen, she wrote a friend: “I really wish fucking some other prep bitch would have got it so it would be them and I could be myself... I’m not growing up, I’m just burning out.”
Well before her death Miki was using drugs and alcohol, sometimes heavily, but, significantly, crack was not her drug of choice. Casting her as a crackhead allowed for well-turned headlines such as “A Crack in the All-American Dream” (Post-Gazette) and for pseudosociological subplots about the migration of a big-city drug to the countryside. But Miki’s sister and others close to her said she had used crack only a couple of times. By and large she stuck to marijuana, alcohol, and Somas, a prescription muscle relaxant.
The Roofie Myth
If Miki Koontz’s story illustrates anything, it is reporters’ penchant for chalking up drug deaths to whatever substance they’re on about at the moment. The deaths of Kurt Cobain in 1994 and Smashing Pumpkins’ keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin in 1996 were catalogued as part of “a resurgence in heroin use in the ’90s,” though both musicians used a variety of legal and illicit substances, and Cobain died not from a heroin overdose but suicide. News reports asserted, without evidence, that Cobain “killed himself because he couldn’t kick his heroin habit.” But a month before his suicide, when he had come close to death from an overdose, the drug in question was not heroin. Cobain had fallen into a coma after overdosing on champagne and Rohypnol, a prescription sleeping aid.36
Why has there been no national hysteria over the mixing of alcohol and prescription medication, a commonplace in overdose fatalities—or, for that matter, simply over the abuse of prescription drugs, the category that sends adolescents to emergency rooms more often than cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and LSD combined?37
Exponentially more stories about drug abuse focus on illegal drugs than on legal drugs. The reason cannot be that there is little to report about prescription drug abuse. My examination of the relatively small number of investigative reports that have appeared in the major news media demonstrates this fact. An article in the Washington