The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [84]
Then there’s the elderly. Thanks in part to careless prescribing and pressures put on doctors by insurers and HMOs to spend little or no time with patients, millions of elderly Americans are at risk of becoming dependent on tranquilizers. According to one recent study, 2.8 million women sixty years and older abuse psychiatric medications. Yet as an article in the Los Angeles Times observed, no one actually knows how many older Americans misuse drugs. In stark contrast to the torrent of statistics about teenage drug use, we know little about drug use in old age. Our relative lack of information speaks volumes about our national inattention both to the elderly and to prescription drug abuse.39
There is also the vital question of why women in the United States are twice as likely as men to be prescribed psychotropic drugs. Apart from coverage in feminist publications such as Ms., stories about sexism in the prescribing of drugs almost never appear. Moreover, how many of the 50 million Americans who take Prozac and similar antidepressants either do not need or do not benefit from the pills they pop each day? How many suffer side effects that exceed the benefits they receive from the drugs?40
Politicians’ dependence on the pharmaceutical industry for campaign contributions and the news media’s dependence on them for advertising revenues probably has something to do with which forms of drug abuse they most bemoan. In the 1996 election cycle alone drug company PACs dispersed $1.6 million to federal campaigns. And pharmaceutical companies, America’s most profitable industry, are among the nation’s biggest spenders on television, magazine, and newspaper advertising.41
For the abuse of a pharmaceutical to get star billing it has be recast as something exotic. The drug that helped put Kurt Cobain in a coma, for instance, received little attention in the media in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was a popular choice in parts of this country and Africa among people looking to get high. A single pill makes you feel as drunk and uninhibited as a six-pack of beer, Rohypnol enthusiasts said. “You don’t hear anything bad about it, like heroin or crack, where people die or anything,” the New York Times quoted a high school senior in Miami in 1995, in one of the few stories about Rohypnol that appeared in the national news media prior to 1996, and among a small number that ever took note of the most common reasons why women and men take the drug.42
In 1996 through 1998 stories about Rohypnol appeared by the hundreds, but use of the pill to get high was scarcely mentioned. Christened the “date-rape drug” and referred to as “roofie,” Rohypnol was presented to the American public as “a loaded gun ... a weapon used to facilitate sexual assault” (then senator Joseph Biden). “Rape Is Only Thing That This Drug Is For,” read a headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dubbed by reporters “the mightiest Mickey Finn ever concocted,” Rohypnol represented, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News, “all the fears of parents whose daughters have hit dating age packed into one white pill the size of a dime.”43
Every so often a journalist would do a follow-up report on a much-hyped “roofies rape” from the recent past and let it be known that Rohypnol had not actually been involved. Mostly, though, journalists heedlessly repeated vague assertions from the police (“lots of girls have been coming in ...”), and they proffered unfounded generalizations of their own. “Rohypnol has become a favorite tool of predators,” USA Today asserted in 1996, though