During the second half of 1986, it appeared that the American government might finally take its rhetorical "war on drugs" seriously. Although the number of people smoking, snorting, swallowing, or otherwise injecting themselves with one drug or another had not changed dramatically, a new variable had been introduced into the drug-use equation. 1986 was the year that the national media discovered crack cocaine. For Newsweek, crack became the biggest story since Vietnam and the fall of the Nixon presidency; other media giants compared the spread of crack with the plagues of medieval Europe. By the end of 1986, the major dailies and weekly news magazines had presented the nation with more than one thousand stories in which crack figured prominently. Not to be outdone, network television offered hundreds of reports on drug abuse, capped by CBS's 48 Hours on Crack Street, a prime-time presentation that became one of the highest-rated documentaries in the history of television.
The media had accomplished two things: First, they inflamed public concern, then claimed to be reflecting it. Indeed, as purveyors of horror stories about new flavor-of-the-month drugs, such as crack, the media had become "pushers" in their own right. Second, they instigated politicians to react to the drug problem as "politicians." Knowing that the White House was planning a late summer initiative against drugs, for example, Democrats in the House and Senate hastily drafted their own approach to the matter--an antidrug bill that at first appeared modest, but gathered some rather expensive moss as it was rolled from one committee to the next. In addition, politicians on the election beat across the nation began vaulting over one another, hoping to reach the frontlines of the antidrug parade, attempting to demonstrate how thoroughly and unconditionally they disapproved of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and other illegal substances. It was politics at its best and politics at its worst; but curiously, some of it turned out to be a good thing. A new spirit of antidrug awareness began to gather momentum, backed by Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign as well as a $1.7 billion commitment to fund drug law enforcement, treatment, education, and indeed, a renewed war on drugs.
Now that more than a year has come and gone, do many people remember the drug crisis of 1986? Could it really be that the media and the American people were so obsessed with crack-cocaine? Was it only in September of 1986 that opinion polls were showing drug abuse topping economic problems and the threat of war as America's number one national concern? The answer to both of these latter questions is "yes," but revelation of the Iran-Contra connection followed by rising tensions in the Persian Gulf and the stock market crash of October 1987 shifted the focus of the nation's, and particularly the media's, immediate concerns. But what about official America? What happened to the commitment of those who had worked so hard to fund the renewed war on drugs? More than likely it was weak in the first place, a characteristic that has plagued American drug policy since its earliest days.
Supply and demand
Historically, the federal approach to drug-abuse control has included a variety of avenues for reducing both the supply of, and the demand for, illicit drugs. At the outset, the supply-and-demand reduction strategies were grounded in the classic deterrence model: Legislation and criminal penalties would discourage individuals from using drugs; by making an example of
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