Moral Panics

   

 

We know that the reality of crime, its real rates and actual occurrences, can account for part of the fear of crime. However much of it is caused by other subjective, perceptual and social structural factors. I have chosen to highlight one such fear that arose within American society from the mid to late 1980s.

The American Drug Panic of the 1980s

For some decades we have seen reformers, the public, legislators and in particular the media focus on specific types of drug issues. For example in the early 1990s it was the link between ecstasy and raves. However in the decade of the 1980s the drug focused on was crack cocaine.

Prior to this panic, particularly in the 1970s, drug use was largely tolerated by the public, perhaps highlighted by the following facts....

1. 11 states had decriminalised marijuana

2. 1/3 of high school seniors thought the drug to be harmless

However in the 1980s something happened to reverse that trend, and the evidence of a growing public concern exploded in 1985/6.

A poll was conducted by the New York Times and CBS news (2 large cogs of the American media) which asked the American public 'What was the number one problem facing America?? The answer provided great surprise in that the vast majority identified drugs, and in particular crack cocaine. At the beginning of 1985 crack was largely unheard of, yet by the end of that same year the drug was 'used extensively' and the press accorded mass coverage of its use. Concern by the public regarding this problem was fuelled by....

1. A barrage of network news programmes

2. A major speech by George Bush declaring war on drugs. His speeches were not only a measure of concern , but they     played on and exaggerated those concerns.

3. $2 billion in federal monies to fight the problem, of which $56 million put aside for national drug testing

The news programmes selected neighbourhoods where the use of crack cocaine was extensive, making it newsworthy, which ultimately gave the public the impression that a major drug crisis had happened overnight. This was also fuelled by celebrities such as Bob Hope, Jesse Jackson and Nancy Regan , acting as moral entrepreneurs, to speak out against drugs. The latter stated that 'Every drug user was an accomplice to murder and drug use is a repudiation of everything America is.' If that wasn't enough the Mayor of New York urged the return of the death penalty for any dealer possessing over 1kg of either heroin or coke (1986). In the same year the governor of the same city proposed a life sentence to anyone who sold three vials of crack .

The above was exacerbated by the deaths of two popular athletes, Les Bias and Don Rogers, in 1986. Cause of death B cocaine overdose. The US is a country which glorifies its sportsmen and women, and so their deaths were not only treated as a catastrophe by the media, but the source of their deaths was ultimately targeted.

Anti drug propaganda was pushed in the public domain...the media also warned the public of 'glass eyed Zombie's high of marijuana, cocaine sprinkled in popcorn at teenage parties and crack addicts invading every neighbourhood on mass.'

So what was the result of this huge coverage of crack. Well in September 1986 in the house of representatives an overwhelming majority (393 to 16) put forward a package of drug enforcement, stiffer sentences, increased spending in education, treatment programmes and penalties against drug producing countries. Politics had become as important as the subject. Crack addicts were targeted in a big way by the media, but when some studies brought to life the fact that expectant mothers who were on crack were likely to damage their babies, this was immediately jumped upon by the media, creating a panic within a panic. This resulted in a critical mass of articles on 'crack baby syndrome' and it became a fact that crack babies were to be a major medical and social problem. According to one article 375,000 crack babies were born in the US in the late 1980s, which accounted for 1 in 10 births for the country as a whole. Furthermore the medical cost of looking after a crack baby was 13 times more than caring for a normal one.

The media paid great attention to conveying the message that 'crack damaged unborn babies.' One journalist stated....

'The bright room is filled with baby misery, babies born months too soon, weighing little more than a hardcover book, babies that looked like wizened old men in the last stages of a terminal illness, wrinkled skin clinging to chicken bones, babies who do not cry because their mouths are full of tubes.'

Media stories such as the one generated above resulted in 70% of people polled to favour criminal penalties for pregnant women!! This surely emphasises the power of the media. So the facts speak for themselves, America was in the grips of a crack epidemic, or were they?? Was it a reality that crack had become so widespread overnight?? The number of articles in the major newspapers would suggest that it had.....

According to alternate research levels of drug use fell in the US during the 1980s. For these independent studies whilst public hysteria was reaching an all time high recreational drug use was actually in decline. So how do we have two contrasting patterns. To explain this we must first acknowledge the fact that at the same time as the crack issue, two other problems existed for the US...

1. Economic recession

2. Crisis and war in the Persian gulf

A further issue was that no sooner had the crack panic arrived, than it disappeared. Did this mean that the number of addicts had drastically declined overnight?? Was there some sort of social problems marketplace in which different issues compete for public attention?? It would seem that just as a moral panic can be easily constructed, it can be easily deconstructed.

The mass media is certainly the key player in constructing this particular panic. When estimating the scope of a problem they tend to use big numbers. For Orcutt and Turner (1993) through shocking numbers and graphic accounts newspaper and magazine articles distorted the extent of drug abuse in the US by making it more extensive than it actually was. Look at any graph and carry out the following....'by truncating the bottom of a graph and squeezing the y axis into a tighter, narrower space we can transform statistics that are not that significant into ones that contain striking peaks and valleys. Seeming increases in yearly use can be transfigured into threatening social facts.'

The media were not simply reacting to simple matters of body counts and overdoses though, but to an array of constructionist factors, including the novelty of crack, the powers of enslavement, the overdoses of a few prominent athletes and the role of prominent entrepreneurs. There was also the fact that it was later discovered that the use of crack by mothers did not directly harm new born babies. Interestingly little media attention was devoted to correcting the previous view of this issue.

Indeed for Levine and Reinaman the whole panic was concocted by the press, politicians and moral entrepreneurs to serve other agendas. The whole panic, fuelled by the media, appealed to racism, bureaucratic self interest, economics and scare mongering, or to put it bluntly scapegoating. What this issue of illicit drug use did was to focus attention away from structural ills like economic inequality, injustice and lack of meaningful roles for young people.

So how de we know that attention accorded to such an issues disproportionate to the threat that it poses. Well I can identify four indicators....

1. Figures are exaggerated

2. Figures are fabricated

3. Harmful conditions are highlighted (what about harm of legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco)

4. Changes over time

Therefore in relation to this specific panic the reality of crime was disproportionate to the fear provoked. The reaction to this issue was in a large part not to the actual threat, but a reaction by the control agencies and media to the perceived/symbolic threat to society that crack had. The American public were becoming dissolusionment with the societal and economic crises looming, and the elite had to convince the mass that the real enemy was not the crisis in capitalism, but the drug abusing criminal.

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