Crack in
Context:
America's Latest Demon Drug
by Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine
(This is chapter 1 of Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social
Justice.
By Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine.
University of California Press, 1997.
In the spring of 1986, American politicians
and news media began an extraordinary anti-drug frenzy that ran until 1992.
Newspapers, magazines, and television networks regularly carried lurid stories
about a new "epidemic" or "plague" of drug use, especially
of crack cocaine. They said this "epidemic" was spreading rapidly
from cities to the suburbs and was destroying American society. Politicians
from both parties made increasingly strident calls for a "War on
Drugs." They even challenged each other to take urine tests to provide
chemical proof of their moral purity. In one of the more bizarre episodes, the
president and vice president of the United States had their own urine tested
for evidence of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. It is certainly true that the
United States has real health and social problems that result from illegal and
legal drug use. But it is certainly also true that the period from 1986 through
1992 was characterized by anti-drug extremism.
We use the term "drug scare" to
designate periods when anti-drug crusades have achieved great prominence and
legitimacy. Drug scares are phenomena in their own right, quite apart from drug
use and drug problems. Drug scares have recurred throughout U.S. history
independent of actual increases in drug use or drug problems. During "red
scares," like the McCarthy period in the 1950s, leftists were said to be
serious threats to the American way of life. Similarly, during drug scares, all
kinds of social problems have been blamed on one chemical substance or another.1
Drug scares typically link a scapegoated substance to
a troubling subordinate group – working-class immigrants, racial or ethnic
minorities, rebellious youth. The period from 1986 to 1992 was in many ways the
most intense drug scare of the twentieth century. With few dissenting voices,
politicians and the media embraced the Reagan administration metaphor "War
on Drugs" and pronounced the "drug war" to be good social
policy. At dead center of all the hysteria was "crack."
Crack appeared in late 1984 and 1985
primarily in impoverished African-American and Latino inner-city neighborhoods
in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Crack is smokeable
cocaine. It gained its named from the "crackling" sound it makes when
heated. It is easily produced in a pot on a kitchen stove by "cooking
down" a mixture of powder cocaine, water, and baking soda. Crack is
typically sold in tiny vials or envelopes that cost between $5 and $20. Crack
was not a new drug; its active ingredient is entirely cocaine. Nor was it a new
way of using cocaine; smoking cocaine freebase had been practiced since the
1970s.
Crack was a marketing innovation. It was a
way of packaging a relatively expensive and upscale commodity (powder cocaine)
in small, inexpensive units. So packaged, this form of smokeable
cocaine (crack) was then sold, usually on the street by young African-Americans
and Latinos, to a whole new class of customers: residents of impoverished
inner-city neighborhoods. The marketing innovation was successful for at least
two reasons. First, there was a huge workforce of unemployed young people ready
to take jobs in the new, neighborhood-based business of crack preparation and
sales. Working in the crack business offered these people better jobs, working
conditions, and pay than any "straight" job they could get (and
better than other entry-level criminal jobs like burglary or stealing car
radios).2 Second, the marketing innovation succeeded because turning
powder cocaine into smokeable "crack"
changed the way cocaine was consumed and thereby dramatically strengthened the
character of cocaine intoxication. Smoking crack offered a very brief but very
intense intoxication. This inexpensive and dramatic "high" was much
better suited to the finances and interest in immediate escape of the inner-city
poor than the more subtle and expensive effects of powder cocaine.
Cocaine in any form is a stimulant, much
like amphetamine or even caffeine. When powder cocaine is sniffed in small
doses (as it usually is), it makes the user moderately alert and energized.
Thus, the typical psychoactive effects of sniffing powder cocaine are subtle.
Users report having to learn to recognize it. In the 1930s, songwriter Cole
Porter wrote that he'd "get no kick" from cocaine about powder
cocaine.
Cole Porter would have gotten a kick from
crack, but he probably would not have liked the experience very much. When
cocaine is smoked, it enters the bloodstream quickly, providing a powerful
rush. Crack is a strong, even harsh, drug. One experienced cocaine user said
that after smoking $10 worth of it, "I was so high I was frightened – and
I don't frighten easily... . I wouldn't bother with it again."3
Contrary to the media stories and drug war rhetoric, most of the people who
have tried crack or smoked cocaine have not continued to use it. From
its first appearance, crack has always been used heavily by the same population
that has always used heroin heavily: the urban poor. Daily crack smoking, like
daily heroin injecting, occurs mainly among the poorest, most marginalized
people in American society – and only among a small minority of them. In its
most popular year, crack was used heavily by only a small percentage of even
the people who used cocaine. Crack never became a popular or widely used drug
in the United States, or anywhere else in the world.
This, however, is not the way the mass media
and politicians talked about crack from 1986 to 1992. Rather, crack was
portrayed as the most contagiously addicting and destructive substance known.
Politicians and the media depicted crack and other illicit drugs as virulent
diseases that were attacking American society. Beginning in 1986 and continuing
into the early 1990s, major American institutions – churches, schools, media,
political organizations, voluntary groups, advertisers, foundations – carried
on what amounted to a huge national educational campaign about drugs in general
and crack in particular. One might expect that, as a result of all this
attention, Americans would be among the most knowledgeable people on earth about
crack and other illicit drugs. But the campaign did not increase understanding
because virtually all these institutions took up the tasks of promoting the
policies of the War on Drugs and of single-mindedly and simple-mindedly
demonizing illicit drug use. Rather than report the complicated truth, the
media joined politicians in producing drug war propaganda. In so doing,
reporters found "experts" who provided scary anti-drug sound bites
and presented frightening, false generalizations as fact.
Consider some of the stories reported in six
months in 1986, the first year of the crack scare. On March 17, in a cover
story called "Kids and Cocaine," Newsweek quoted, without
skepticism, a drug expert who announced that "crack is the most addictive
drug known to man." He also said that smoking crack produces
"instantaneous addiction." As a result, Newsweek asserted,
crack "has transformed the ghetto" and "is rapidly spreading
into the suburbs." On March 20, the New York Times explained (in a
front-page story) that crack was spreading from the inner city to "the
wealthiest suburbs of Westchester county." "'It's all over the
place'" said an official from the New Jersey Health Department. A month
later, the Times printed another front-page story about crack spreading
from the city to suburbs. "If we don't stop crack now, it will destroy our
young people" said a politician from Westchester. On June 8, the headline
of yet another front-page Times story announced that "Crack
Addiction Spreads Among the Middle Class." On the same day, another Times
story reported that on the suburbs of Long Island "the use of crack has
reached epidemic proportions." On June 16, Newsweek published a
full-page editorial titled "The Plague Among Us." It began:
An epidemic is abroad in America, as pervasive and dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times. Its source is the large and growing traffic in illegal dings ... a whole pharmacopoeia of poisons.... [The epidemic] has taken lives, wrecked careers, broken homes, invaded schools, incited crimes, tainted businesses, toppled heroes, corrupted policemen and politicians.... [The epidemic] is a national scandal, and ... we seem powerless to stop it.
A week later the New York Times
announced the "growing use of crack" in three suburban and rural
counties in New York. With neither evidence nor skepticism, the Times
reported that in Westchester, Rockland, and Sullivan counties, the "per
capita use of cocaine is the heaviest in the state." On July 28, U.S.
News and World Report told readers that "illicit drugs pervade
American life ... a situation that experts compare to medieval plagues – 'the
No. 1 problem we face'". Two weeks later, Newsweek reported that
"nearly everyone now concedes that the plague is all but universal."4
On occasion, the same newspaper, magazine,
or TV show did a followup story that contradicted its
earlier accounts. For example, in 1990, after years of reporting that crack is
instantly addicting, Newsweek wrote: "Don't tell the kids, but
there's a dirty little secret about crack; as with most other drugs, a lot of
people use it without getting addicted. In their zeal to shield young people
from the plague of drugs, the media and many drug educators have hyped instant
and total addiction." Newsweek did not tell readers that it
had been among the first to have "hyped instant and total addiction"
and to have quoted, without questioning, the "drug educators" who
also did so. Similarly, in 1989, after being a crucial source for the news that
in the suburbs crack use was "epidemic" and "all over the
place," the New York Times quietly noted that just the opposite was
true. The Times reported that except for a few "urban pockets"
in suburban counties, "educators, law enforcement officials, and young
people say crack and most other narcotics are rarely seen in the suburbs,
whether modest or wealthy." Crack, the Times now said, "is
confined mainly to poor urban neighborhoods."
By and large, the media and politicians'
pronouncements about drugs spread exaggerations, misinformation, and simplistic
theories of cause and effect. They taught bad pharmacology, bad sociology, bad
criminology, bad urban anthropology, and even bad history. During this time,
some writers, journalists, commentators, TV and radio reports, news articles,
and some whole publications provided thoughtful and accurate information about
drugs. But such good reports were vastly outnumbered by the misleading and
false ones.
This was not the first time the press,
politicians, and supposed medical and scientific "experts" in America
have blamed an array of social problems on a drug and linked the drug with a
"threatening" group. Indeed, American history has had more than its
share of drug scares and anti-drug crusades.
DEMON DRUGS AND DRUG SCARES IN U.S. HISTORY
The first, largest, and most influential of
all anti-drug crusades was the American temperance movement's campaign against
"demon" alcohol. Indeed, the modern history of concern about
"drugs," and of anti-drug crusades, begins in America in the late
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century with the temperance movement's
battle against alcoholic drink In effect, alcohol was "the first
drug." It was the first substance to be regarded as inherently and
inevitably addicting (just as heroin and crack are viewed today). It was the
first drag to be the focus of a mass movement that sought to eliminate its use
and prohibit its production and sale. It was the first drug to be regarded as
causing violence and crime. It was the first drug to be blamed – scapegoated – for problems whose complicated origins lay in
broader political and economic conditions. Throughout the nineteenth century
and into the twentieth, the temperance or antialcohol
movement claimed that alcoholic drink was responsible for most of the nation's
poverty, crime, violence, mental illness, moral degeneracy, "broken"
families, and individual and business failure. Temperance was an eminently
respectable, mainstream, middle-class movement – the largest enduring movement
of the nineteenth century.
In the first two decades of the twentieth
century, America's new corporate elite increasingly joined with the
middle-class supporters of temperance to create a new single-minded
prohibitionist movement. Industrialization brought to America ever growing
numbers of working-class and peasant immigrants with different cultural,
religious, and drinking practices. The period between 1900 and 1920 was riddled
with class, racial, cultural, and political conflict having little to do with
drinking problems. As in the nineteenth century, alcohol was offered as a
scapegoat; but, more than ever before, prohibition was offered as a panacea.
Prohibitionists promised that a constitutional amendment banning alcohol would
eliminate social problems, empty prisons and asylums, lower tastes, and ensure
permanent prosperity.
Many corporate supporters of prohibition
argued that working-class drinking interfered with the rhythms of the modem
factory and thus with productivity and profits. To earlier fears of the barroom
as a breeding ground of immorality, prohibitionists added the idea of the
saloon as alien and subversive. They argued that saloons were where unions
organized, where socialists and anarchists found new recruits. For the
corporate and political elite, and for much of the old business middle class
and the new professional middle class, clamping down on drinking and saloons
was part of a much broader strategy of social control – a quest for
"order" at a moment when industrialization was transforming American
life. Prohibitionists proudly claimed that the passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution in 1914 was a blow against Bolshevism and anarchy
and that it would usher in a kind of golden age. On January 16, 1920, the day
before constitutional Prohibition went into effect, the evangelical preacher
Billy Sunday articulated the utopian dream at the heart of temperance and
prohibitionist ideology: "The rein of tears is over. The slums will soon
be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses
and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and the children
will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
Other demon drugs and drug scares have had
similar roots and equally outrageous claims. The first law against opium
smoking in the U.S. was much more the result of anti-Chinese agitation in
California in the 1870s than it was of troublesome opium smoking. Chinese
immigrants had been brought in as "coolies" to help build the
railroad and work the mines. Some brought the practice of opium smoking with
them. But when the railroad was completed and the gold ran out, recession set
in. White workers found themselves competing with lower-paid Chinese workers
for scarce jobs and viewed the Chinese as an economic threat. The campaign
against smoking opium (but not against other, non-Chinese uses of
opiates) included lurid, fictional newspaper accusations of Chinese men
drugging white women into sexual slavery. The law against opium smoking was
only one of several repressive laws designed, at least in part, to control the
Chinese and thus assuage the economic cum xenophobic anxieties of
whites.
Broader political and racial issues were
also factors in the first cocaine scare, which led to the first federal anti-drug
law, the Harrison Act of 1914. Just as the crack scare blossomed only after the
practice of cocaine smoking spread to lower class, inner-city African-Americans
and Latinos, so did class and racial fears fuel the first cocaine scare. At the
turn of the century, the opiate addict population was shifting from white,
middle-class, middle-aged women to younger, working-class men and other
"disreputable" groups. Sensationalistic press accounts linked drug
use with blacks, prostitutes, criminals, and transient workers. There was no
evidence that African-Americans used even as much cocaine as whites, and the
actual number of opiate addicts was probably diminishing when the Harrison Act
was being debated. Nonetheless, white politicians used race to incite public
reaction against opiates and cocaine, at least in part for political purposes.
For example, in an effort to overcome the objections of Southern congressmen to
a federal drug law that might infringe on "states' rights," anti-drug
crusaders spread the myth that cocaine induced African-American men to rape
white women. Some Southern sheriffs even switched from .32 to .338 caliber
pistols because they claimed that their old guns could not stop the
"cocaine-crazed" Negro. As Yale medical historian David Musto has shown, this first cocaine scare was not primarily
a response to cocaine use or opiate addiction, or to any drug-related crime
wave. Rather, says Musto, it was animated by
"white alarm" about "black rebellion" against segregation
and oppression.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, in
1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. This first federal law against
marijuana was the result of a "reefer madness" scare orchestrated by
the quintessential moral entrepreneur, Harry Anslinger,
a former Treasury agent who had enforced alcohol Prohibition and who was
appointed chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics before repeal of
Prohibition. Before Anslinger began to paint
marijuana as a great scourge, there was no evidence of widespread marijuana use
and almost no coverage of marijuana in the press or public agitation for a
clampdown. However, in the midst of the Great Depression, the bureau had
endured four straight years of budget cuts, and opiates and cocaine had already
been outlawed. Anslinger circulated to newspapers and
magazines across the nation alarming propaganda about how marijuana had caused
a Texas hitchhiker to murder a motorist, a Florida youth to murder his entire
family with an ax, and a West Virginia man to rape a nine-year-old girl. In
addition to stirring general fears about crime, Anslinger
relied on specific racial fears with his claims that marijuana made Mexicans in
particular violent. He then told policy makers and all others who would listen
that the use of this "killer weed" was spreading among Anglo youth,
who would soon spread violence across society.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of
drug warriors made marijuana the focus of a much broader crusade – not because
it made users aggressive and violent but, in a curious way, because it didn't.
These new crusaders did not view marijuana as the "killer weed," but
rather as the "dropout drug." They claimed that marijuana was
"causing" youth to lose the achievement ethic and to become
un-American (for example, by opposing the war in Vietnam). In this case, drug
crusaders regarded marijuana as a threat not because it was used by a
"dangerous class," but because they believed it was turning an entire
class of youth in a direction that dominant groups defined as
"dangerous." In contrast to Anslinger's
crusade thirty years earlier, this time there was substantial evidence of the
widespread use of marijuana. However, virtually none of the claims about the
horrid consequences of marijuana use were supported by evidence then or now.
Nor was evidence of ill effects the real issue. Here, too, a drug provided a
useful symbol in an essentially political conflict between cultures and
generations.
The anti-crack frenzy of 1986 to 1992 was
the latest in a long line of drug scares that were about more than drugs. In
the next chapter, we lay out the ingredients in the crack scare in more detail.
Like other demon drugs, crack became a scapegoat – it was blamed for a range of
enduring and intensified urban problems that its use sometimes exacerbated but
did not cause.
MORE THAN MOLECULES: SET, SETTING,
AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF DRUGS
We began this book with a critical
historical overview of demon drugs and drug scares to show some of the
similarities between the crack scare and its predecessors. In the heat of the
crack scare, policy makers, the media, and much of the public seemed to suffer
from historical amnesia. For over a hundred years, U.S. drug policy has been
forged by symbolic politics and special interests, by moral entrepreneurs and
media magnification, and by efforts of dominant groups to control
"threatening" others from different races and lower classes. These
policies have not saved us from our drug-related problems. They have, however,
pushed drug use into deviant subcultures and made users into criminals. They
have added drug-policy related problems to our drug-related problems by
creating a harm-maximizing context for drug use. In this book, we argue that
this criminalized context has influenced how illicit drugs are used, by whom,
what their effects are taken to mean, and to a significant degree even their
behavioral consequences.
The idea that the social context of drug use
has helped create our drug problems is heretical, but it is heretical largely
because discourse about drugs in American culture is dominated by what we call pharmacological
determinism. One cumulative consequence of our anti-drug crusades and
punitive policies has been a thoroughgoing demonization of drugs. This
demonization invests the substances themselves with more power than they
actually have. Citizens and scientists alike have been inculcated with the
notion that illicit drugs are inherently dangerous like contagious diseases.
But drugs, unlike viruses, are not active agents; they are inert substances.
They do not jump out of their containers and into people's bodies without the
people in those bodies actively deciding to ingest them. Many Americans
understand that drug abuse is more likely among some types of people and under
some conditions than others. Yet, because of our history, American culture lacks
a vocabulary with which people can speak about drugs in this more complicated,
qualified way.
There is another way of thinking and talking
about drugs that reveals more than malevolent molecules "causing" bad
behavior. This perspective focuses on the psychological, sociological, and
cultural factors shaping users' motives, experiences, and behaviors. Certainly
pharmacology matters a great deal; crack is profoundly different than alcohol.
But the pharmacological properties of a drug do not by themselves determine
even a drug's effects, much less the behaviors that sometimes accompany those
effects.
This perspective was most clearly formulated
by the late Norman E. Zinberg, professor of
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The basic premise of this theory of drug
effects is that, in addition to the interaction between the molecules of the
substance and the cells of the human body, drug effects are shaped by the psychological
mindset of the user – his or her expectations, mood, mental health,
purposes, and personality – and by the social setting of use – the
characteristics of the situation of use, the social conditions that shape such
situations and impinge upon the users, and the historically and culturally
specific meanings and motives used to interpret drug effects. All of us who
contributed to this book have found that to understand crack and other drugs,
we needed to employ this theoretical perspective.
In his book, Drug Set and Setting, Zinberg wrote that after years of clinical and historical
research on drug abuse and treatment, he had become convinced that "in
order to understand how and why certain users had lost control," he
"would have to tackle the all-important question of how and why many
others had managed to achieve control and maintain it." Zinberg began to develop his theory in 1968 when he was on
a Guggenheim Fellowship in Britain observing their heroin maintenance system,
in which addicts were prescribed heroin by their doctors or special clinics. He
found many addicts who functioned successfully and lived quite normal lives. He
also found others who did not function well, but, unlike many American
"junkies," even they were not engaging in crime or creating problems
for anyone but themselves. Zinberg "came to
understand that the differences between British and American addicts were
attributable to their different social settings – that is, to the differing
social and legal attitudes toward heroin in the two countries."
Dr. Zinberg also
learned about the importance of set and setting in shaping the nature and
consequences of drug use shortly after his return to the U.S. There was a new
"terror" about a "heroin epidemic" coming from all the
soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam. As a consultant to the U.S. Army, Zinberg visited Vietnam, studied the soldiers, and
hypothesized that their heroin use was in part attributable to the social
setting of a "destructive war environment." The army's generals
rejected this understanding, but pathbreaking
follow-up research on Vietnam veterans by Dr. Lee Robins demonstrated that
nearly nine in ten of those who had been addicted to heroin in Vietnam had not
become readdicted three years after returning to the
U.S. This was a landmark study because until that time drug researchers and
heroin addicts alike had believed "once a junkie, always a junkie."
Professor Zinberg went on to do further research on
controlled heroin users that supported Robins's
finding that heroin use did not inevitably lead to addiction and that showed
the significance of psychological set and social setting in explaining why some
become addicts while others remain controlled users.
Zinberg deserves credit for articulating the "drug,
set, and setting" model, especially at a time when scientists and funding
agencies were hostile to it, but he was not the only one to discover the
importance of set and setting. Many other scholars also contributed to a more
social-scientific understanding of drug use and abuse.5 In 1947,
Alfred R. Lindesmith discovered the crucial cognitive
element in heroin addiction. His depth interviews with addicts about their drug
careers showed that they became addicted only after they experienced
withdrawal symptoms, recognized them as such, and then decided to ingest more
heroin to relieve them. Without this shift in mindset, heroin use alone did not
always result in addiction.
Another early contributor to this
perspective was Howard S. Becker. His classic text on deviant behavior, Outsiders,
contains two sections on marijuana that call analytic attention to sociohistorical, cultural, and social-psychological
variables. "Becoming a Marijuana User," first published in a
scholarly journal in 1953, followed Lindesmith's
lead. Becker analyzed life history interviews with marijuana users and found
that the marijuana high was not merely a reflex response of the human body and
mind to the active ingredients in marijuana smoke. Rather, the high was learned
in interaction with knowledgeable smokers. To be able to experience marijuana
intoxication, neophyte users first had to learn how to smoke so they would
ingest the active ingredients, then to recognize the initially ambiguous
effects, and finally to interpret these as pleasurable. Only after people had
taken all three of these steps successfully could they decide to become a
"marijuana user." Becker's second piece explained how the
construction of new rules and norms creates deviance. He traced how a
"moral entrepreneur" orchestrated a crusade to criminalize marijuana
in the 1930s. By redefining marijuana as "the killer weed,"
criminalization changed the broad setting in which marijuana was understood and
used thereafter.
A few years later Becker published a study
of LSD-induced "psychotic episodes" that even more powerfully
demonstrated the importance of set and setting. He drew upon the history of
drugs to predict – accurately – that as more people tried LSD, there would be a
lower rather than a higher incidence of "bad trips." Becker theorized
that drugs produce a variety of effects, some of which can seem subjectively
frightening, but that with experience users learn to focus on the positive or
desired effects and not on others. This learning would occur because the number
of experienced users would grow over time and a user culture would develop in
which positive interpretations of the drug's effects would spread. As users
came to learn and to teach each other what to expect from a drug, how to use it
so as to minimize risks, and so forth, the drug-induced experience would be
interpreted as positive rather than "going crazy." And so it was.6
Two years after Becker's article on LSD, the
theory that drug effects had to do with learning and culture rather than just
pharmacology received a major boost, this time from anthropological research on
a legal drug. MacAndrew and Edgerton's classic study
of drunken comportment across different cultures found that alcohol's effects
on human behavior are highly independent of its effects on human physiology.
Although drinking substantial quantities of alcohol always and everywhere
eventually produces altered states of consciousness, the behavior of people in
such states varies markedly according to the "limits" specific to
each culture. In some cultures, alcohol use leads to aggression and sexual
arousal, in other cultures, to one but not the other, and in still different
societies, to neither. Americans tend to attribute much violent crime to
alcohol use, but many other cultures do not. Despite the strong association
between drinking and crime in the U.S., other societies have higher alcohol
consumption and far less violent crime. Through MacAndrew,
and Edgerton's cross-cultural lens, one can see that the link between drinking
and crime has more to do with American culture (setting) and character (set)
than alcohol's direct chemical effects on the human organism.
The causal significance of set and setting
also has since been demonstrated in a variety of laboratory experiments on the
effects of alcohol. These showed that the mere belief that alcohol has
been ingested is sufficient for the experience of altered consciousness and
behavior culturally associated with drinking. These experiments have
demonstrated that when people believe they have ingested alcohol (even when they
have really ingested a placebo), they exhibit higher levels of sociability,
aggression, or sexual arousal. Conversely, people who ingest real alcohol
believing it to be a placebo often exhibit no behavioral change at all. This
point was nicely summarized by Robin Room in his introduction to Drinking
and Disinhibition, a research monograph published
by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism:
In recent years evidence has been building up from a number of disciplinary areas to suggest that the link between alcohol and disinhibition is a matter of cultural belief rather than of pharmacological action. Alcohol is certainly a psychoactive drug; we feel different when drunk than when sober. But how we interpret those feelings, and in particular how we act on them, is largely determined by culture and circumstance; thus what is pharmacologically the same drug can make us aggressive or passive, ebullient or morose, frenetic or immobile. In this view, psychoactivity does not determine whether behavior is disinhibited or controlled: it simply provides an empty vessel of altered consciousness for culture, circumstance, and personality to load with meanings and explanations.
One need not resort to rigorous laboratory
experiments to understand the influence of set and setting on drug effects.
With respect to users' psychological sets, for example, our students report
that at their "keggers" or beer parties,
everyone gets high on the same beer, but a few people end up dancing on
tabletops, one or two others might quietly cry in the corner, and most just
dance, talk, and flirt. With respect to the social settings of use, most people
have noticed that two drinks at a New Year's Eve party have very different
effects than the same two drinks at a relative's wake. Most people understand
from their own everyday experience that the felt effects and behavioral
consequences of a drug vary according to how users' psychological sets interact
with the social settings of their drug use. The mindset and drinking patterns
of an office worker joining her colleagues for a beer after work are quite
different from those of a bored, alienated, sixteen-year-old high school
dropout using malt liquor to get through the day. But because of America's long
history of drug demonization and pharmacological determinism, public debate and
policy do not usually consider the social and psychological effects of set and
setting.
In the case of crack cocaine, the most
important psychological sets and social settings are the ones shaped by poverty,
racism, and the range of other human troubles that flow from them. We do not
mean by this that cocaine smoking has not occurred among the white and the
affluent indeed, the forerunner of crack, freebasing, first became widely known
because it was associated with rock stars and Hollywood celebrities. As we note
in Chapter 4, there is no doubt that there was considerable experimentation
with and even some heavy use of crack and freebase by some white affluent
suburbanites in the 1980s. In this book, we emphasize the distinctive mind-sets
and settings of the inner-city poor because heavy crack use has been highly
concentrated among and most consequential for them. Further, it was the use and
sales of crack by young, urban African-Americans and Latinos that animated the
crack scare and much of the drug war's imagery.
All forms of licit and illicit drug use,
abuse, and addiction can be found in all classes, races, and regions. The
sociology of set and setting is just as important for understanding why white youth
find LSD a temporary antidote to suburbia's spiritual impoverishment, why
stressed-out affluent professionals savor an MDMA or "ecstasy" trip
as if it were a chemically induced Club Med weekend, and why so many American
men of all classes and races assault or batter women after drinking alcohol.
But whatever constellations of sets and settings shape drug use among the broad
middle strata of the U.S. population, these people tend to be employed and
ensconced in lives that anchor them in the conventional order. Middle-class
people whose lives become too difficult often have psychiatrists who prescribe
them antidepressants like Prozac. When middle-class Americans become addicted,
they have many more resources to use to pull themselves out of trouble and many
more opportunities to make a successful life. When some middle-class Americans
began having trouble with cocaine freebase in the early 1980s, for example,
treatment industry entrepreneurs expanded their services to help them stabilize
their lives.
By contrast, the inner-city poor and working
class are far less often employed and more often live at the margins of the
conventional order. When their lives become too difficult, they rarely have
psychiatrists, but they sometimes self-medicate, escape, or seek moments of
intense euphoria with what might be called antidespondents,
such as crack. When some of them become addicted, they have far fewer resources
to use to pull themselves out of trouble and far fewer opportunities to make a
successful life. And when some of the inner-city poor began having trouble with
crack, politicians declared a drug war that did not help them stabilize their
lives.
We have sketched this alternative
theoretical framework because the drug war rhetoric and scare stories of
politicians and the media have consistently attributed devastating consequences
to crack, as if these consequences flowed directly from its molecular
structure. Such rhetoric squeezes out of public discourse any serious
consideration of the social, cultural, economic, and psychological variables
that are essential for understanding drug use and its behavioral consequences.
If we are to forge more effective and humane responses to our drug problems,
then we must move beyond demonization and pharmacological determinism. What we
have called the drug, set, and setting perspective is the best theoretical
sensibility we have found for this difficult task, and it informs each of the
chapters in this book.
From the beginning, we, as editors,
conceived of this book as a kind of expert commission report. We asked
prominent drug scholars in a variety of fields to write chapters on various
dimensions of the crack problem. Understanding all the issues raised by the
crack crisis was beyond any one or two individual scientists. There is simply
too much to know, too much research to be done. We designed this book to have a
thematic and conceptual unity that is uncommon in edited collections. This is
in large part because we and so many of our fellow contributors have worked out
our ideas together over the years, shared leads and findings, tested hunches,
and arrived at the sociological understanding of drugs outlined previously. All
the contributors agree about the central role played by poverty and racism in
shaping the sets and settings that created the crack crisis, and all believe
that American drug policy can be both more effective and more humane.
NOTES
1. Scares have not been limited to drugs and
communists. For example, in 1920, there was a ouija
board scare of several months duration that shared some characteristics with
the crack scare. Newspapers spoke of "a wave of insanity" caused by ouija boards that had grown to "national
prominence." A typical front page article in the San Francisco
Chronicle read, "Breaking into a house at El Cerrito,... police
officers yesterday took into custody several persons who had become insane from
playing with ouija boards." It seems a
fifteen-year-old girl had used the board to "induce unknown power"
over the others. Two days later in another raid, other "victims,"
including a policeman, were found to have been transformed "from a state
of normality to that of madness" under the influence of this parlor game.
In a fit of what appeared to be superhuman strength usually attributed to a
drug, the policeman had "knocked down two guards," escaped, hijacked
a car, and "dashed into the Central National Bank in a nude
condition." Before the ouija board scare had run
its course, many others had been arrested and jailed or committed to asylums,
and "experts" held serious discussions about "abolishing 'seances'." For an excellent theoretical analysis of
such scares, see Goode and Ben-Yehuda.
2. See, for example, Fagan for a strong
empirical study showing that the youth drawn into crack and other drug sales in
"distressed neighborhoods" were not drawn away from legal employment
into the crack economy. Rather, most were unemployed and lacked the "human
capital" necessary to break into the legal labor market. Thus, for these
youth, the drug world provided economic opportunity as well as recreation.
3. From interviews conducted by Pat O'Hare
and Peter McDermott, personal communication.
4. When we have pointed out to journalists
these sorts of exaggerated and distorted claims, they have often defended their
colleagues by saying that such sentiments were merely journalistic hyperbole.
But these statements are not hyperbole. Hyperbole is a rhetorical device
employing exaggeration that lets the audience in on the joke – for example,
saying that the ice cream was "piled a mile high." Statements that
the drug "plague is all but universal," that crack is
"instantaneously addicting," and that crack is "all over the
place" in affluent suburbs earnestly reported as fact what was actually fiction.
5. Although we have drawn in particular on Zinberg, theoretical formulation, we have also benefited
greatly from many other scholars whose research on drugs fits within and has
contributed to this perspective. They are too numerous to name, but we cite
them throughout this book. Deserving of special mention in this regard is Zinberg's Harvard Medical School colleague, Professor
Lester Grinspoon, M.D. See especially his book, Cocaine:
A Drug and Its Social Evolution, co-authored with James Bakalm.
6. Bunce
subsequently tested Becker's prediction with data on the prevalence of
"bad trips" on LSD and found it correct. Bunce
also added the useful insight that the extraordinarily conflicting amounts of
LSD's effects (e.g., insanity producing vs. mind expanding) helped create a
cultural setting and psychological sets that increased the likelihood of such
"bad trips."
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