THE DRUG WAR'S DOPEY MEDIA

Critics of "big government" point to the alleged excesses of Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society programs of the 1960s to make their case. The
critics have prevailed: by the late 1990s a Republican backlash aided
by Democratic capitulation succeeded in dismantling the Great
Society's "War on Poverty." By the mid 1990s the poverty war had
become, in the words of sociologist Herbert Gans, the "war on the
poor," with Project Head Start, Medicare, and Medicaid the only major
surviving programs.

The now almost 30-year-old "War on Drugs" is one of the biggest
government programs in the history of the nation, requiring taxpayer
contributions at the federal, state and local levels. Premised on the
idea that the user is the moral equivalent of the dealer, and that a
street punk delivering a bag of pot is the same as an international
drug lord, the War on Drugs ushered in an era of dramatic increases in
the prison population. We now have 35 million (!) felons in the United
States, with drug crimes constituting an ever higher percentage of
that. Huge increases in prison spending coupled with a belief in
prison as a cure for all social ills became the foundation of what
journalist Eric Schlosser in 1998 called the "prison industrial complex."

The dismantling of the war on poverty could not have happened without
the cooperation of the corporate media. Criticisms of "welfare
queens," "freeloaders," and the "culture of dependency" never failed
to get prominent space in broadcast or print media. When it comes to
the war on drugs, corporate media have been mostly dopey. We need
sober analysis (pun intended), yet too often get sensationalism.

In preparing this rant I shared some email with UW Oshkosh Criminal
Justice Professor Stephen Richards, PhD. A drug war veteran, Richards
before earning his doctorate was charged with "conspiracy to distribute
marijuana" and sentenced to nine years in federal prison. He has
co-authored two books with Jeffrey Ian Ross, the bestselling Behind
Bars: Surviving Prison (Alpha/Penguin) and Convict Criminology
(Wadsworth). I asked Dr. Richards to comment on the elite media's
responsibility in the drug war:

The elite media has for the most part aided and abetted the military
style of the war on drugs, which has really been a police war on poor
people who publicly consume recreational chemicals. The mainstream
media was and is all too ready to report almost word for word what
they receive from drug czars, drug squad police reports, and
prosecutors.

The corporate media has spent most of the 20TH Century using drug
stories to attract an audience. Mass-market media venues are all about
revenue, market share, and corporate profit. As far back as the 1920s
newspaper reporters were writing copy about musicians and pot
addiction. In the 1960s, San Francisco became the place to get stoned,
trip out and see God. Since 1980, when Ronnie Reagan officially began
the "war on drugs," the media has run countless accounts that
sensationalized crack epidemics, crack babies, drug whores, meth labs,
date drugs, ecstasy and other designer drugs.

Defendants are declared guilty by the media before they ever enter a
plea in court. Their names and faces are paraded across local
newspaper pages and television screens. The media has participated in
the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of millions of Americans for
use and abuse of small quantities of exotic substances.

I asked Richards what role the mass media should play in the drug
war:

I wish the media would run stories about people who experiment with
illegal substances, get bored, and eventually give them up, without
legal intervention, and return to an occasional beer or glass of wine.
In effect they tried and probably liked it, but like most of us just
got too busy with work and family obligations. Maybe they wished they
had more free time to get stoned, high, and wasted, but have bills to
pay, schedules to keep, and no vacation till next summer. So, they
look forward to their next trip to Jamaica, or the once a year camping
trip when an old friend has a joint. Meanwhile, they make do with
alcohol, the legal liquid drug, the most dangerous of all.

Dr. Richards paints a bleak picture of drug war USA:

Most of the advanced industrial nations must think we Americans have
gone mad. It reminds me of our nuclear weapons strategy, remember MAD,
mutually assured destruction. The Europeans think of drug abuse as a
medical problem, while we call it a crime. Maybe if we had European-
or Canadian-style national health care we could convert some of these
silly prisons into hospitals.

We grow up in urban and suburban communities of concrete and lawn,
march to school and work, and lose our minds watching junk on TV.
Reality is manufactured and imposed on each one of, and then, when we
try to challenge or change our consciousness, the thought police come
and bust us, cart us off to jails and penitentiaries, all in the name
of what, protecting the children we never were, or if we were, for far
too short a time. Whatever happened to Peter Pan? Is she (he) in
prison for flying too high once too often?