Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Len Bias has been called ‘the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs’.2 Although the coroner’s report concluded that there was no clear link between Bias’s drug use and his heart failure, this precious detail was lost on the press. In the month following his death, the news networks of the United States aired seventy-four evening news items about crack and cocaine, routinely confusing the two forms of the drug, and often stating that it was crack that had killed Len Bias. The crack scare that followed set the benchmark for every irrational, hysterical and moralizing panic the American media has cooked up since. The advertising industry and the main broadcasters even donated a billion dollars’ worth of ads and airtime to the anti-drugs movement, saying that ‘on this issue we’re ready to go over the top!’3 As the head of the DEA office in New York put it, ‘crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam War’.4 Police footage of their raids on alleged drug dealers’ homes appeared in a quarter of all drug stories over the following two years. The police and the DEA encouraged the use of their footage because it was dramatic, and by its very nature it put the viewer in the place of the raiders as they went ‘over the top’. Though the raiders’ point of view was only one among many, the press adopted it as their own.

  Selective or erroneous coverage of drug-related stories was nothing new. A good example of how the press created stories to fit the demand for a drug scare is ‘Jimmy’s World’, the title of an article published in the Washington Post in September 1980, which described the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict who lived in a housing project in Washington DC with his drug-addicted parents. Jimmy’s mother was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t really like to see him fire up. But, you know, he would have got into it one day anyway. When you live in the ghetto, it’s all a matter of survival. Drugs and black folks been together a long time.’5 This stew of youth, drugs and the hopelessness of the inner city was sufficiently compelling for the writer of the article, a black journalist by the name of Janet Cooke, to win the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her story the following year. So embarrassing was ‘Jimmy’s World’ that Marion Barry, the then mayor of Washington DC, sent out search parties to look for child drug addicts. A $10,000 reward was offered to anyone who could find one, but it went uncollected. Then it emerged that there was no Jimmy. Janet Cooke had made the whole thing up. The Pulitzer Board had had its doubts about the ‘Jimmy’s World’ story, but had been persuaded of its veracity by Roger Wilkins, a distinguished black journalist who had said that he could easily find pre-teen drug addicts within ten blocks of where the Pulitzer Board sat at Columbia University in Manhattan. With press and politicians united in fear of a drug epidemic that they barely understood, and many black journalists as keen to stoke those fears as their white colleagues, the facts had been sacrificed to a convenient fiction.

  Six years later, evidence of a drug epidemic was again twisted to suit the perceived expectations of readers. This time the press’s wunderkind was the crack baby. Both Time and Newsweek magazines ran stories in which paediatricians were quoted as saying that ‘the part of the brain that makes us human’ had been ‘wiped out’ in babies born to crack-addicted mothers. Each crack baby born, they reported, would cost a million dollars to bring to adulthood. The prospect of a generation of (mainly black) babies born addicted to cocaine, and destined to become an intellectually and emotionally stunted ‘biological underclass’ had newspaper editors across the country clamouring for copy. Eric Sterling watched as panic gripped the politicians. ‘Senator Chiles of Florida said “I seriously wonder if America can survive crack cocaine.” I mean, we survived Pearl Harbor! But that was the level of hyperbole that was going on. And of course, part of this was that “they’re all black”. It was perceived and reported as a black phenomenon.’ Like Jimmy, the eight-year-old lead in what might be termed ‘Janet’s World’, the crack baby didn’t exist. Taking cocaine while pregnant, like smoking cigarettes, increases the risk of low birth weight and premature delivery, but it is not associated with any pattern of birth defects.6 Heavy drinking during pregnancy causes foetal alcohol syndrome, but nobody wanted to hear about the dangers of drinking while pregnant. They wanted to hear, read and talk about how crack was ‘instantly addictive’ and how it was spreading from city to suburb on a tide of poor black ignorance and apathy.

  Thanks to this panic in the press, the stereotypical cocaine user was no longer rich, white and tragically misguided. She was poor, black or Hispanic, and criminally negligent of herself and her children. This invited intervention, not by service providers, but by what can best be described as a secular priesthood. The epidemic of problematic drug use sweeping across the US was regarded as akin to mass demonic possession. ‘Drug tsars’ urged ‘crusades’ against ‘drug barons’ and the ‘plague’ of drug use that they had unleashed. Journalists fulminate about drugs in such medieval language because they consider drug use to be a sin not a vice; they certainly don’t see it as an essentially social or medical problem. Most American Christians consider drug-taking to be morally wrong. They regard the human body as the vessel for the God-given soul, of which the bearer has only temporary custody. Human consciousness is a gift from God, and God and his gift can only be appreciated by a sober and drug-free vessel. Wrestling with the crack epidemic took many Christians back to a time when most Americans believed that the devil really was a supernatural being intent on tempting stray souls into hell. Christians had to practise endless vigilance, to defend their mortal souls from temptation by the devil, against whom they had to marshal all their reserves of goodness. If they succumbed to temptation, they might be possessed, leaving exorcism as a last resort. When the crack economy took root in the inner city, the official response seemed to be much influenced by these notions of an untended flock that had been led astray.

  American history provides another example of resolute defiance of the forces of evil, one invoked by Ronald Reagan in 1986. ‘My generation will remember how America swung into action when we were attacked in World War Two. The war was not just fought by the fellows flying the planes or driving the tanks, but also at home by a mobilized nation. Well, now we’re in another war for our freedom, and it’s time for all of us to pull together again.’7 Reagan issued a Presidential Directive, which called drugs ‘a national security concern’. George Bush Sr was still calling for vigilance three years later, when he told reporters ‘all of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs’.8 By 2002, George W. Bush deemed the threat posed by drugs to be all-encompassing, warning Americans that ‘drug use threatens everything. Everything.’9 Eternal vigilance was the aim of the ‘Just Say No’ campaign too, which succeeded in reducing the debate over how best to deal with mass drug abuse in the United States to a single word.10 At a Just Say No rally in 1984, Nancy Reagan led the kids in yelling ‘No!’ to drugs. ‘That’s wonderful,’ the First Lady said of this collective exorcism of moral corruption. ‘That will keep the drugs away.’

  ‘It’s a deadly and poisonous activity,’ former drug tsar William Bennett said of drug-taking. ‘People should be in prison for a long time for doing it. It’s a matter of right and wrong.’11 The harm that drugs can cause is obvious to users and non-users alike. It can be measured, and steps can be taken to minimize harm. But right and wrong cannot be measured by doctors, or evaluated by social workers. Ignorance and moralizing combined to ensure that the debate over how best to deal with widespread, dangerous and destructive behaviour soon succumbed to blind panic. A barrage of scare stories in the press had the whole country scared witless by crack cocaine. A poll conducted in 1986 found that 54 per cent of Americans believed that drugs were the single greatest problem facing the nation. Just 4 per cent cited unemployment.12 In 1980, 53 per cent of Americans had favoured the legalization of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. By 1986, only 27 per cent held that view.13 In 1989, ten years after the heyday of the American drug culture, and in spite of the cocaine-Contr
a scandal, the Republicans seemed to have been validated in their rebuttal of liberal America.

  In communities where drug abuse and drug sales were causing catastrophic harm, the conservatives’ Manichaean simplifications carried less weight. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore, became a pariah after suggesting that the crack epidemic in the city might be better tackled by decriminalizing drug use. ‘I once had the dubious distinction of debating the subject with drug tsar William Bennett at, of all places, the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California,’ Schmoke told me. ‘Sitting in front of me was Mrs Reagan. Most of the audience was upper-income, white and Republican. It dawned on me that friends of theirs have had problems with alcohol, and friends of theirs have recovered from addiction. Alcohol is something that they are familiar with. But most of their friends don’t take cocaine, at least not to their knowledge. Substance abuse is something done by “those” people, as opposed to “our” people. So I asked a rhetorical question. “If you found that your grand-daughter was addicted to cocaine, would you call the police or would you call a doctor?” I bet that most of you would call a doctor. You’d want her to get help to get off this stuff. But if you heard that two miles away, in the heart of the city, there’s a black kid or a Hispanic kid who has dropped out of school because he’s using cocaine, what would you think the intervention should be? Most of you would probably say “call the police.”’

  Jack Cole spent twenty-six years working as a narcotics police officer for the New Jersey state police before becoming executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. When I met him he too questioned the distinction made between those drug problems that require the intervention of a doctor, those that require the intervention of the police, and those deemed to require no intervention at all. ‘I was raised on movies like Reefer Madness and The Man with the Golden Arm, and I believed all that. I didn’t think that we had a drug problem in Wichita, Kansas. But of course we did. I had major drug problems. I used to get falling-down drunk with my friends when I was fourteen years old! I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for fifteen years! We had major drug problems. We just didn’t acknowledge them as drugs, that’s all.’

  For most Americans, the panic over the crack epidemic stemmed from their ignorance of illegal drugs and their latent fear of inner-city violence. But more level-headed politicians saw that a sensationalistic drug scare could be turned to their advantage. By making caricatures appear real and exceptions appear normal, the crack scare invited politicians to take a strong stand on a safe issue, and goaded the police into ‘getting tough’. Conservatives showed the public what they were defending them from, but also what they expected in return. They stressed individual responsibility for health and economic success, respect for the police, and resistance to peer-group pressure. They highlighted the importance of belief in God in recovering from drug abuse, and of sports and healthy activities as alternatives to drug-taking. They stressed the need for everybody to set good examples to children, the importance of children getting good grades in school and the threat drugs posed to those grades.

  Drug scares have lasting value for authoritarians of all stripes because they make pariahs of drug addicts, while flattering the credulous and the ignorant. The idea that a heroin addict might inject drugs into her eight-year-old son becomes credible, while the idea that the press might fabricate stories to sell more newspapers seems outlandish, or even ‘un-American’. Irrespective of the intoxicants flowing through their blood on any given day, every American could rally around ritualistic campaigns against drug users and their dealers, and the promise to deliver them a society cleansed of evil. Harry Levine, co-editor of Crack in America, has written that ‘the worsening of almost any social problem can be blamed on drugs. Theft, robbery, rape, malingering, fraud, corruption, physical violence, shoplifting, juvenile delinquency, sloth, sloppiness, sexual promiscuity, low productivity, and all-round irresponsibility can be, and has been, blamed on “drugs”.’14

  Blame is at the heart of the war on drugs. In retrospect, one can’t help but conclude from the politicians’ reactions to economic restructuring and the closure of many of America’s biggest factories in the 1970s and 1980s, that the crack scare obviated the need to develop effective policies to tackle mass unemployment. As long as the focus stayed on drug sales and drug abuse, inner-city residents could be blamed for the poverty they had been driven into. Endless scare stories about crack cocaine eased the passage of laws that restricted welfare payments to the unemployed and allowed penalties to be dressed up as incentives. Denying welfare to the unemployed only fuelled the drug economy, but that was deemed to be incidental, which in a sense it was. The inner cities were going to be abandoned either way; what the politicians had to do was convince the American public that the inner cities deserved to be abandoned.15

  Drug abuse has been a huge social problem in many parts of Europe and the United States for almost forty years, yet stories of how poverty, neglect and racism can cause depression and despair, and sometimes lead to self-destructive drug use still make for uncomfortable reading. At the same time, stories blaming drug addicts for a myriad of social problems are newsworthy because they chime with a broader perspective according to which the poor have only themselves to blame for their poverty. The political scientist James Q. Wilson is regarded as a ‘drug warrior’ by many, but he too has expressed shock at popular indifference towards the crack epidemic’s health effects. ‘What are the lives of would-be addicts worth? I recall some people saying to me “let them kill themselves”. I was appalled.’ In 1998, a study of probation officers found that the US probation service typically viewed crimes committed by black people as caused by personal failure, but treated crimes committed by white people as caused by external forces.16 The poor, particularly the black and brown poor, were regarded as being blinkered by ‘a culture of poverty’ which led them to seek, enjoy and perpetuate destructive lifestyles. Inevitably, such a dim view of inner-city dwellers encouraged the reader to champion the authorities charged with administering the inner cities, however brutal that administration might be.

  In this climate of recrimination, policing the inner cities was always likely to be harsh, but the very nature of drug laws made policing arbitrary as well. Between 1985 and 2002, the number of arrests made for drug offences in the United States more than doubled.17 In 2006, the police made 1.88 million such arrests, equivalent to one every twenty seconds, the highest rate ever.18 The annual budget of the DEA more than doubled between 1985 and 1990, and by 1994 it topped $1 billion.19 Since it was not physically possible to lock up the 19.5 million Americans who took illegal drugs in 2002, and the prison system would have been hard pushed to accommodate the 1.8 million Americans thought to be selling drugs, the drugs laws could only be enforced selectively. So the police had to pick and choose their targets.

  I spoke to a former police officer called David about his experience of street-level policing of the drugs business. ‘In 1990, I went from the detective tables to work South Bureau Narcotics, 77th Street, right in the middle of South Central Los Angeles. Our supervisor pulled us together and he said, “There’s only one thing that matters here, and that’s D.O.T.—dope on the table.”’ The focus was on arrests, confiscation and incarceration. Typically, arrests of drug dealers would be made by an undercover police officer as part of a ‘buy-bust’ operation, using ‘pre-recorded marked buy money [PRMB]’, while his fellow officers acted as ‘ghosts’, waiting nearby to arrest the dealer in possession of PRMB cash. ‘Were we effective at putting a dent in the narcotics trade? No. We were effective at putting dope on the table, and we were effective at arresting people. It didn’t matter how many people you arrested. For every one you arrested, there were two fighting to take his place. It was there, it was going to stay there, and it was coming in all the time.’

  The more impotent the police felt, the more aggressive their response became. Many police officers concluded that if a dent couldn’t be made in
the trade, at least they could strike some fear into the brazen, and recoup some sense of control. In 1997, a member of a police unit recounted their tactics to a researcher. ‘We’re into saturation patrols in hot spots. We do a lot of our work with the Special Weapons and Tactics unit because we have bigger guns. We send out two-to-four-men cars, we look for minor violations and do jump-outs, either on people on the street or automobiles. After we jump out, the second car provides periphery cover with an ostentatious display of weaponry. We’re sending a clear message: if the shootings don’t stop, we’ll shoot someone.’20 Another member of the same unit boasted: ‘When the soldiers ride in, you should see those blacks scatter.’21

  Jack Cole told me that after joining the New Jersey State narcotics unit in 1970, he watched as drug warriors increasingly pushed for military tactics and training to be used to police the inner cities. ‘It used to be that the ten largest cities had Special Weapons and Tactics teams, but we now have something like 4,500 SWAT teams in the United States. Every little village has its own SWAT team. I hate SWAT teams. I don’t mind them for what they were created for, which is a barricaded hostage situation, but what are they using them for? To serve warrants on somebody that got arrested for smoking pot!’ The war on drugs, like any war, needs soldiers, and soldiers wield force to subjugate the enemy. Policing fell hostage to a clumsy metaphor, but the militarization of policing was fuelled by more than belligerence, racism and the culture of blame. It gained further momentum with the end of the Cold War in 1989. The United States had been in a state of war readiness for half a century. Bound by bureaucratic inertia, it felt impelled to find new enemies, and turning on itself, it found them.