This is Your Net on Drugs

by Jon Katz

One of the best parts of my day is clicking on
my Claris email program and listening to the beeps, watching the
messages and subject headings pop up rapidly in a long row on my
monitor. I know within seconds if I'm about to be skewered or praised,
if I've touched a domestic or international nerve, or had no impact at
all. Or if the fiercely protective webheads and citizens of the
digital nation have spotted yet another assault on their beloved
culture.

When there's trouble, it reminds me of the citizens of Gotham City
throwing up the bat signal, alerting Batman to some new danger they've
detected, another mindless outrage being perpetrated. Friday, my email
program was beeping like mad, and almost every message included the
name or initials of The New York Times. This is a familiar, almost
weekly, ritual.

"Arrrrrgh," read last Friday's first email, from ThunderRoad, "Have
you seen the NYT today? Arrrggggh! Idiocy!" I hadn't seen the paper,
but I knew whatever they were reporting, it wasn't about the friends
kids made and stayed in touch with on the Net, the way the elderly and
the disabled were connecting to one another online, or the remarkable
global sharing of research or information now possible.

We were clearly dealing with another Webalarm story, rapidly becoming
an entire genre a specialty of mainstream journalism, especially at
the Times.

"Today's New York Times has another scare story about the Internet,"
warned Richard.

Some months ago, the Times sent a reporter to Dartmouth to report that
the Net had caused students there to forego sex, socializing, and
drinking for email. Then there was my personal favorite, a Week In
Review story on Internet addiction that offered tips for spotting your
own computer addiction, and reported that Internet addiction clinics
were opening at schools across the country. Neither the Times nor the
schools were even mildly deterred by the fact that none of the clinics
had been visited by any patients but then, these stories are always
long on selfseeking experts and politicians and very short on actual
victims.

We are all familiar, of course, with the wave of Internet perversion
warnings in the Times. A few weeks ago, the paper reported that the
Net fostered academic cheating, as free term papers and theses whizzed
through the ether. There was the Times story on thievery, the one on
hatemongers and bombthrowers, the one on easy access to sexy
pictures. There have been too many hackerintrusion stories to count.

So it wasn't surprising to see, on Friday's front page, the latest in
this series "A Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on the Internet,"
by reporter Christopher Wren, which reported that even as beleaguered
government officials and educators tried to stem drug use, the
Internet had become "an alluring bazaar where anyone with a computer
can find out how to get high on LSD, eavesdrop in on what it is like
to snort heroin or cocaine, check the going price for marijuana, or
copy the chemical formula for methamphetamine, the stimulant better
known as 'speed.'"

The drug culture on the Net is proliferating in many ways, found Wren.
"One is the tolerance or outright endorsement of illegal drugs,
especially marijuana, in online forums and chat groups. Another is in
explicit instructions for growing, processing, and consuming drugs."

The story included a word from every Washington reporter's most
indispensable and ubiquitous friend an expert from a nonprofit
Washington research or lobbying group, in this case the Center for
Media Education, which reported that nearly 5 million kids aged 2 to
17 used online services in l996, and that more than 9 million college
students use the Internet regularly. Notice that the funding and
ideology of these groups is almost never explained or explored, and
that their findings are invariably presented as gospel.

Like the Washington "expert," the numbers above represent another
integral part of the Webisruiningcivilization story, the
notsosubtle juxtaposition of large numbers of children with great
menace all these kids right next to all these dope heads clearly
meant to send already Netphobic parents rushing for their Cyber
Nannies, grateful to their daily paper for the headsup.

"We're really losing the war on the Internet," said Kellie Foster, a
spokeswoman for the Community AntiDrug Coalitions of America, which
plans to put up its own Web site next month. "We've got to get out
there." Note yet another vital ingredient of the Webalarm story the
enemy is nearly at our shores, and we have precious little time to
react.

Then there was the Washington reporter's secondbest friend the
chatty and alarmed bureaucrat, in this case, General Barry R.
McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy, ominously reporting in the story that he detected a "campaign
on the Internet to undermine the government's antidrug policies...."

Stand by. The Communications Decency Act will have barely been dead
before the Drug Protection Act comes along to make it a federal crime
to talk about drugs on the Net, where young people congregate.

Several things struck me as interesting about Wren's story (which
quoted me from a Wired magazine piece, saying the Net was the "freest
community in American life." The part where I explained that I meant
this as a good thing seemed to have vanished.)

I realized reading the Times how dull I, my family, and the vast
majority of people who email me every day and their families must be.
A diverse lot from all over the world, they seem to have jobs, go to
college, enroll in graduate schools, take vacations, play with their
kids, read books, go foodshopping. Hardly any of them ever mention
using the Net for sex or drugs, or even encountering either there.

"Did you know they are advocating drugs all over the Internet?" I
asked my 15yearold daughter, who's been online for five years.

"You're kidding!" she said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.
"Where?"

What's wrong with us? All this depraved and amazing stuff going on
right under our noses, and we're squabbling all day about censorship
and Bill Gates?

Katz, get a life! There's a wild world out there, just a Websearch
away. Why should New York Times reporters have all the fun?

People curious about the genesis of stories like this have to step
back and try to understand how journalism and politics collaborate to
produce our social and political agenda, independently of common
sense, rationality, or truth.

A politician like McCaffrey needs a story like this in the same way
that J. Edgar Hoover used to need murderous bank robbers. Danger means
purpose, budgets, publicity. The Internet is a gold mine for
bureaucrats, since few reporters or politicians seem to have a clue
what goes on here, and many are eager to trumpet the savecivilization
warning of the week. Nonprofit crusaders for decency need these alarms
as badly or worse, since they aren't on the government payroll and
have to continuously justify their existence. Without stories like
this, they'd have to leave the capital and go get real jobs.

And even worse, reporters would have to leave their offices and talk
to human beings, something that only happens in Washington journalism
every four years, when the first wideeyed scribes hit the snows of
New Hampshire and are stunned to learn the simple folk there are
worried about money and jobs.

So the system works symbiotically and well, at least for them.
Journalists get leaked good stories, politicians get to justify their
existence, the ideological mercenaries who spoonfeed reporters much
of their information get quoted. The only losers are truth and
perspective, and, for the bewildered people who work, play, or
communicate on the Web, more lost faith in an institution supposedly
committed to the truth.

People have been on the Net for some years now, and they know that
there are good and bad things here, just as there are out there. It's
possible to encounter all sorts of sexuality, drugmongering, hate,
and worse on the Internet if you want, as it is in most towns and
cities, and it's possible to never encounter any at all, as is the
case for the vast majority of Net users, young and old.

In other contexts, this reality is called life.

The most interesting thing about these stories is that there are
rarely any particular victims, just these "experts" and politicians
invoking unnamed ones. Everybody sounds the alarm and issues dire
warnings; missing are the names of actual people ruined and depraved
by their time on the Internet. There's a striking dissonance between
the stories we read and the reality we experience.

The answer, in all cases, is exactly the same, even though it never
seems to be heard: As in the offline world, small children need
supervision. They need to be taught basic commonsense rules of
safety. If they are, in the overwhelming number of cases, they do fine
on the Web. Hardly any have been harmed or damaged here, for all the
dead trees sacrificed in the name of Internet danger.

Notice too, the presumptions stories like this one contain; that our
national drug polices are sane, rational, and beyond question, and
that to challenge or undercut them, to raise issues like the
legalization of some drugs under some circumstances, is automatically
perceived by the socalled objective media as irresponsible and
treasonous.

On the Net, we can do what journalists won't or can't talk openly
about the catastrophe our national drug policies represent. How we
have the highest incarceration rate in the Western world. How, in some
states, more young African Americans are in jail on drug charges than
are in college. How rigid sentencing laws passed by hysterical
legislators have left tens of thousands of relatively harmless people
in prison for years, criminalizing them out of all proportion to their
crimes.

How urban police have been militarized, corrupted, and sometimes
killed as a result of the creation of militarystyle SWAT teams,
violent cultures, and extreme attitudes that frighten and alienate
local communities.

And how, despite all that, drugs pour into America because more and
more people want to use them, while those who want to stop using them
far outnumber the slots and beds available in treatment programs. It
seems that in a rational world with a functioning news media, General
McCaffrey would be answering some different questions than the ones he
was asked in Friday's story in The New York Times.

Since you won't read a coherent account of our drug crisis in your
local newspaper, if you're interested, click over to Amazon and order
journalist Dan Baum's Smoke and Mirrors, a brilliant and meticulously
documented book on America's failed drug policies published just last
year.

If the young are questioning and challenging our disastrous and
bankrupt drug programs and philosophies, good for them. If they are
exposed to a wide range of credible information about drugs, their
history, their use and abuse, effective treatments, then they are more
fortunate than most of us.

The idea that the Internet is a place where otherwise wellparented,
supervised children would become addicted to drugs, where a great war
for the soul of the young is being lost, is just as stupid and false
as the notion that they'll be turned into perverts and porn freaks.

Journalism, sadly, is mired in the past. But the young live in a new
world, the digital age, in which they are free to gather their own
information, and make more of their own choices. May their new freedom
help them shape a wiser, more rational and moral world than the one
they have inherited.