The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [85]
There is good reason to suspect that in fact the total number of assaults accomplished with the aid of Rohypnol was small. I searched widely for sound studies of the true prevalence and found only one, but it was telling. From mid-1996 through mid-1998, while the roofie scare was in full bloom, Hoffmann-La Roche, the Swiss company that makes the drug, provided test kits to rape-crisis centers, hospital emergency rooms, and police throughout the country. Rape victims who believed they had been drugged were asked to provide a sample of their urine, which was sent to an independent laboratory for analysis. Of the 1,033 tests returned, only six contained Rohypnol. About one-third of the samples contained no drugs; the remainder contained a variety of legal and illegal substances, alcohol being far and away the most common.45
That other countries were not reporting outbreaks also says something. Hoffmann—La Roche takes in about $100 million annually from sales of Rohypnol, which has been on the market since 1975. Two million people in eighty countries worldwide swallow one to two pills a day by prescription. But in the United States the drug is illegal. Does it truly seem likely that the only place experiencing an “epidemic” (Los Angeles Times) of roofie rapes would be where molesters have to rely on a black market rather than simply reach into a medicine cabinet?46
Mickey Finn to the Rescue
Roofie stories did not contain great truth, but they did help redirect controversies in convenient ways. Rohypnol may have been utilized by only a small proportion of rapists, and few abusers may have used it for sexual assaults. But for a range of people, from the President of the United States to jaded readers of local newspapers, roofies provided a tidy way of talking about matters that had become messy.
In his bid for reelection in 1996 Bill Clinton staged an event three weeks before voters went to the polls. Fighting a lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones, who said he summoned her to a hotel room, opened his pants, and asked her to kiss his penis, Clinton held a highly publicized ceremony at which he signed an antidrug bill. The drug in question was not marijuana, which Clinton had already confessed on MTV he wished he had inhaled. Standing on the tarmac at the Denver airport, a line of police officers as his backdrop, Clinton signed a bill providing a twenty-year prison sentence for anyone who used roofies or similar drugs to commit sexual assault, symbolically demonstrating his opposition both to drug abuse and to acquaintance rape.47
For journalists and their audiences of the mid- and late 1990s the roofie narrative served a somewhat different purpose. It afforded a clear and uncontroversial explanation for a phenomenon that had been hotly but unsatisfyingly debated for more than a decade. When studies came out in the 1980s indicating that one in three female college students is forced to have sex against her will, feminist groups played up the findings. Before long a backlash developed. Conservative columnists and politicians disputed the statistics, and in 1993 Katie Roiphe, a recent Harvard grad, launched her writing career with a polemic titled The Morning After. Condemning women she called “rape-crisis feminists,” Roiphe spoke of a “grey area in which someone’s rape may be another person’s bad night.”48
Compared to debates about how to define rape or whether radical feminists or rabid conservatives are more dangerous to women, stories about roofies were interesting and easy to follow. Graphic and mildly prurient, they focused on entirely blameless women, such as the fresh-man at Clemson University who was given a drink at a fraternity party and taken to three different locations where she was raped by at least thirteen men.49
In the media women like her supplanted typical victims of acquaintance rape, who are very much awake when they find themselves being attacked by men they know.