Introduction

In this paper I will use media images of the drug problem to illustrate an important point for drug reformers. This is that drug law reform is aided by use of the media to show the public a more rational image of drugs and drug users. Regardless of patterns of use drug policy can be manipulated for partisan purposes. Presenting the drug user as alien and dangerous, out of control and preying on the young, offers a useful enemy to rally the people and gain political points. For those convinced that treatment of drug problems is more effective than repression the use of the media can be a useful tactic. Through an historical analysis of drug law reform I will illustrate how past reform movements have succeeded in redirecting the nâtion's drug policy thinking to a more liberal and realistic direction. The analysis focuses on the reform movements begun in the late 1950s and culminating with the decrease in penalties in the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act and the movement toward decriminalization of marihuana at the state level.

Early Developments

The early ideology of drug abuse emerged in its association with narcotic drugs and "alien" users (Bonnie and Whitebread, 1974; Musto, 1973). Use of drugs allegedly caused the release of inhibitions; producing hallucinations, violent crime, and insanity. It was rumored that drugs were pushed on innocent children by non-using adult dealers to create addicts and increase their profits (Anslinger and Cooper, 1937). Later Harry Anslinger claimed drugs were being sent here by communist China in an attempt to "demoralize people of the free world" (New York Times, 1954: 8). Within this political context, the FBN and its allies in the Congress easily amended the Federal laws to the most severe level in the nation's history, including minimum mandatory sentences, restricted probation and parole, and use of the death penalty.

While there has always been some sympathy for the user, there also were those who felt that once hooked on the drug she was no better than the pusher. M.L. Harney, Assistant Commissioner of Narcotics, in 1951 said "we shouldn't coddle our drug addicts [because] the view of the addict as a sick person is overdone" (New York Times, 1951: 33). Addicts should be declared "fugitives from health" and forced to submit to compulsory hospitalization (New York Times, 1952b: 17). The FBN believed that "it is the young addict who contaminates other youth with his dreadful vice [and] must be plucked from society and quarantined" (New York Times, 1952a: 36). The relative societal disregard for the typical user, primarily minorities and "Bohemians," perhaps explains why the bridge between the rehabilitative ideology found in other areas of criminal justice did not exist here.

Some expressed doubt as to the wisdom of the repressive regime. Dr. Murray Diamond, director of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospitals, called for community aid, not incarceration for the drug abuser who was not a pusher. Diamond characterized the drug addict as suffering from a "weak personality" which when combined with family problems force him to turn to drugs (New York Times, 1952b: 17). Another medical doctor claimed that the addict:

comes from a poverty stricken home or a home marked by domestic strife. Frequent nightmares, enuresis, and other symptoms of emotional tension and disturbed interpersonal relationships are typical of his early childhood history (Ausable, 1958: 99).

In 1963 the liberal Prettyman Commission suggested reform of federal drug laws. The Commission brought greater clarity to the notion of the drug user. The view of the mentally ill user was reasserted. Specifically, the marihuana user is described as a "... hopeless, estranged, and dependent" person who suffers from "profound" personality disturbances. However, the Commission concluded that reliance on criminal sanctions to control the use of illegal drugs was useless since the user was so far beyond reason that the fear of long years of imprisonment could not deter (1963: 1-3). The report shows a dramatic shift in the rationale governing the use of punishment. The Commission assumed that severe penalties had made rehabilitation virtually impossible and emphasized rehabilitation.

Illustrative of the growing acceptance of this particular ideological stance, the New York Times editorialized:

the narcotics controversy long ago boiled down to these questions: Is addiction a crime or is it an illness? Should there be punishment or treatment? Both sides have now given emphatic (sic) answer: the addict is a sick, weak person who needs help with his illness, like any other patient (quoted in Fixx, 1971: 573).

As increasing numbers of middle class youths began to use marihuana it became the central drug of public concern. Groups began to mobilize to change public attitudes and the law. In 1964 James R. White III, an ultraconservative lawyer, formed the Committee to Legalize Marihuana (LeMar) in San Francisco (Anderson, 1981: 55). By the end of the year LeMar had spread to chapters throughout the entire country. Among the themes that were found in LeMar groups were the personal liberty theme of White as well as the avant garde mysticism of Allen Ginsberg (Geller and Boas, 1969: 32). Ginsberg had been an irritant to the FBN since his infamous 1961 television appearance with Norman Mailer in which they spoke of the pleasures of marihuana. By 1966 the FBN began a campaign to stop the incipient pro-marihuana lobby with a setup drug arrest of the poet (Sloman, 1979: 222).

LeMar faded out of existence in 1968 but provided useful tactical information for the leading pro-marihuana group, the National Organization for the Reform of Marihuana Laws (NORML). Most important was the need to appear legitimate. NORML was explicit in not advocating the legalization of the drug and maintained at all times a decidedly middle class demeanor and orientation. A NORML spokesperson said that the group's goal was to:

...remove the marijuana field from the freak and hippie culture. We are not encouraging use of marijuana. We are not advocating legalization of its sale. We are simply out to decriminalize the laws. Marijuana users are not traditional criminals, and they shouldn't be treated so (Soll, 1974: 8).

Keith Stroup, founder and national director of NORML, was against the oddball pro-marihuana lobbyists such as found in LeMar. Gordon Brownell, an Amorphia official and who had earlier been an aide at the Nixon White House, referred to the membership of Amorphia as "very much what you would stereotype as hippies, freaks, dope users and so forth" (Cahill, 1974: 56) while Stroup called such groups the "biggest setback to marihuana reform since Harry Anslinger" (Anderson, 1981: 90). Stroup knew that in order for decriminalization to succeed the public had to be presented with an image of the user as someone like themselves or their children. Stroup's major task was to make marihuana reform the cause of the middle class.

Because of a dramatic reappraisal of the user and dealer of marihuana there were 1965 and 1970 significant changes in the Federal law. While there was a growing sentiment that young users should not be sent to prison for their transgressions, they were most certainly pressing this opinion to its limits. Reflecting the trend that began in the early 1950s the modern day child savers within the medical and criminal justice professions began to reject incarceration. For example, Dr. James Goddard, director of the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control was supportive of the legislative failure in 1965 to make possession of LSD a misdemeanor and advocated as well the elimination of the penalty for possession and sale of marihuana as a way to protect college students (Bonnie and VVhitebread, 1974: 235).

The spread of marihuana into the middle class and "respectable" segments of society made reform urgent. This element of the controversy reached its zenith on July 10, 1970 when the sons of Robert Kennedy and Sargent Shriver were arrested for possession of marihuana (Kovach, 1970: 14). This arrest, more than any other in the preceding thirty-three years, solidified the place of marihuana in the general concern for youth so much that William F. Buckley said "[i]f the sons of Ethel Kennedy and Sargent Shriver are caught smoking pot why should it surprise us if the son of Francis of Assisi smokes pot" (quoted in Himmelstein, 1983: 107).

The "Pothead"

During the middle 1960s the image of the user of marihuana was similar to that of the narcotic addict. A significant difference was, however, that the marihuana user was not thought to be a victim of ghetto life as much as the result of modern society. As one social worker put it the problem was:

in the suburbs [where] the overprivileged kids are getting dissociated from the tools of living. They're not being taught to fend for themselves, to make their own way (Tolchin, 1965: 47).

A psychologist observed in these youthful marihuana users a "genuine feeling that life has little to offer them ... [as] they speak continually of the dreariness and drabness of everyday life" (Kifner, 1968: 18). According to some observers, parents who were providing a less than ideal home life were the principle culprits in the turn toward marihuana. Bored with material possessions and neglected by parents, these new affluent users began "experimenting" with marihuana rather than heroin because of its relatively easy means of administration (Fenton, 1965: 59).

The search for negative consequences from marihuana use moved some to take the "hang loose" attitude of youth as a sign of a new form of harm. The withdrawal from society, rejection of conventional notions of success and happiness, and other aspects of the "hippie" ideology were construed to be the result of excessive marihuana use and given the name "amotivational syndrome" (Smith, 1968). The condition was described as one in which the chronic user "loses his desire to work, to compete, and to face any challenges" (Smith and Mehl, 1970: 75-6). It was assumed that a compulsive urge existed which pushed the user in deeper contact with other users. The result of this type of use was a loss of sex drive, lack of personal hygiene, and the eventual dropping out of society.

The newly created Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs shifted its position on the danger of the drug from overt violence to subtle wasting away similar to that alleged to be associated with heroin addiction, with marihuana as the gateway drug. These claims were supported by anecdotes offered by FBN sponsored traveling ex-junkies on the drug education circuit. Said one such expert:

all I did was start with pot .... Will you believe me whenI tell you that I don't know any junkie that started on horse (heroin), that they all started on pot? I don't know statistics, but I know a thousand junkies, and I tell you they all started on marihuana (quoted in Goode, 1970b: 183).

In the face of challenges to its hegemony the government also tried a tactic that centered on the symbolic méaning drug use. President Nixon and Vice President Agnew emphasized the links between political radicalism and drug use and the debate over the health dangers of the drug moved to the background. A Gallup poll in November 1969 showed that 84 percent of respondents were opposed to legalization of the drug (Gallup Opinion International, 1969: 8), but a Gallup poll in 1970 showed that there was support for decreased penalties for marihuana possession (1970: 11). The reason for the shift in opinion was the new perception of the marihuana user and growing legitimacy of the "social cost" issue rather than the effects of the drug.

It was the new definition of the user as a normal person, not the crazed alien, nor the victim of psychological and sociological trauma, which advanced the liberalization movement toward de facto decriminalization. As has been pointed out, the facts about the drug were in a very real sense unknown (Himmelstein, 1983: 147). For the reasons presented above the lack of such facts did not matter; the concern was now with the user and the harmful effects of imprisonment. The effect of a view of the marihuana user as normal in some general way was both relieving and troubling. If sick or otherwise compelled toward a life of drug abuse, the dominant medical and sociological theories implied the hope of a cure and future health. Yet when larger and larger percentages of youth in the middle class began to use drugs, deeper concerns as to their motivation arose. In Soul on Ice (1968) Eldridge Cleaver said:

when these young people, having decided emphatically that the world, and particularly in the U.S.A., was unacceptable to them in its present form, began an active search for the roles they could play in changing the society.... The characteristics of the white rebels which most alarm their elders — the long hair, the new dances, their love for Negro music, their use of marihuana, the mystical attitude toward sex — are all tools of their rebellion. They have turned these tools against the totalitarian fabiic of American society — and they mean to change it (1968: 75 and 77).

By 1967 newspaper articles began to call attention to the "drug culture" which was the haven for "potheads" and "hippies" dedicated to a lifestyle of hedonism and sloth (Golden, 1967: 36). Competing now with alienated suburban teenagers were political rebels whose disillusionment with the "Establishment" stimulated the creation of a "mirror-opposite value system of the middle class ... system" (Bingham, 1967: 76).

According to some the threat posed by potheads posed was two pronged. First there was the indirect threat to American values; second the direct threat of political radicalism. The former threat was the result of the new "laid back attitude." Typical of this attitude was this exchange between a pothead and a reporter. "When asked 'How do you live?' the pot head replied: 'From meal to meal. I have no money ... its a hangup'" (Thompson, 1967: 123). A Yale student described this new ideology more eloquently. He said:

we are disenchanted with the ideologies of the adult population today, with the belief that a large Buick says something important about one's self. The urge of people for self aggrandizement repels us. Furthermore, we don't go along with the 'hard work mystique' — the notion that if one works hard he is therefore a good person (New York Times, 1969a:39).

Because of the vitality of the old imagery of the drug addict as social and psychological misfit it was initially believed that these new users were principally hedonists who were more concerned with sensual gratification than social consciousness. For instance, a protester against the Viet Nam War complained that potheads were useless for his cause as all they do is "sit around and puff, puff, puff, [they] won't work to change society" (Lukas, 1968: 22). Within a few months the second threat of the marihuana users became obvious.

When Students for a Democratic Society leaders Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd were arrested for possession of marihuana fellow revolutionary Jerry Rubin proudly proclaimed:

[s]moking pot makes you a criminal and a revolutionary — as soon as you take your first puff, you are an enemy of society (quoted in Bonnie and Whitebread, 1974: 227).

This political threat was felt most acutely by the new Nixon administration. Marihuana was a particularly useful problem for the new administration as it found in the use of marihuana both a symbolic and a practical vehicle for the president's law and order policies. For many months to follow President Nixon used the drug issue for political purposes. One example of this concerns how Vice President Spiro Agnew was dispatched to warn the population of the dangers of the drug culture.

As FM radio stations were taken over for "progressive" programming by hippies and college students, and as the "underground press" moved away from avant garde art and toward leftist politics, fear arose that radicals would now have a useful medium from which to spread their message. Vice President Agnew warned that these stations, and the music they programmed, were attempting to seduce youngsters into drug use so that they would be "brainwashed [into joining] a depressing lifestyle of conformity that has neither life nor style" (Naughton, 1970: 18). On this tour he linked political radicals "with pot in [their] knapsacks" (Charlton, 1970: 70), the rock music industry and hippies in a conspiracy of promoting songs which glorify drug use and sought to tear down society. This musical threat so alarmed the Administration that it pressured the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to remind broadcasters of their responsibility to keep off the air any song "tending to promote of glorify the use of illegal drugs" or face "serious questions as to whether continued operation of the station was in the public interest" (New York Times, 1971: 26).

Some saw the drug culture as just another expression of youthful irreverence and excess similar to that of the "beats" in the 1950s and the bohemians of the century before. These authorities held that the drug culture would fade away and "some of the drug users of today will be the leaders of tomorrow" (Brecher, 1972: 507). But this attitude was a minority opinion among the larger segment of the population. They saw the user of marihuana as a dropout, bored with life and caring little about the world (National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, 1972: 898). However, this negative image of the marihuana user could retard the development of liberal legislation for only a short time. As mentioned above, the arrest of the best and the brightest of the baby boom, the sons of Robert Kennedy, Sargent Shriver and later that same year the arrest, twice, of the son of New Jersey Governor Cahill and the daughter of Vice President Agnew, began to convince a large segment of the middle class that indeed "normal" children did use marihuana and by implication they could use it responsibly.

It became obvious that drug use was creeping up the social ladder in ways unimagined. A student at Harvard said:

it would be embarrassing for a student now to admit that he hadn't at least tried pot — just as it would be embarrassing for a Harvard student to admit he was a virgin (Kifner, 1968: 18).

Arrest and opinion poll data appeared which clearly revealed the full extent of middle class use. The arrest data showed that family income was positively related to the probability of arrest for violation of marihuana laws (Johnson, 1973: 187). Interpol produced data. showing that the typical U. S. drug smuggler was "usually aged about twenty-five ... comes from a middle class or wealthy background and from parents who are responsible and productive." It continued that it "is the children of affluent Western society who are involved" in drug smuggling (New York Times, 1970: 34).

Perhaps because of the emerging perception of the pothead as a typical middle class teenager new sympathy for, and categorizations of, the user and dealer emerged. At a Senate hearing Judge Charles W. Halleck said:

If I send [a long-haired marihuana smoker] to the jail even for thirty days, Senator, he is going to be the victim of the most brutal type of homosexual, unnatural, perverted assaults and attacks that you can imagine, and anybody who tells you it doesn't happen in that jail day in and day out, is simply not telling the truth.... How in God's name, Senator, can I send anybody to that jail knowing that? How can I send some poor young kid who gets caught by some zealous policeman who wants to make his record on narcotics arrests (Senate Special Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics, 1969: 105-106).

Other means emerged to destigmatize the marihuana user. For example, at an evidentiary hearing challenging the legal/pharmacological classification of marihuana the prosecuting attorney drew clear distinctions between a "chronic" user who has an "unstable personality" and is "marginally adjusted," and the "experimenter" who is a "reasonably well educated individual from middle and upper income groups" (St. Clair, 1968: 42, 45). The dealer of marihuana was trichotomized into the "trader" who sells only marihuana for little or no profit to a small circle of friends, the "dealer" who sell marihuana for profit to friends and friends of friends, and the "pusher," in its most pejorative sense, who sells to all, actively proselytizes and seeks maximum profit (Johnson, 1973: 72-4). It is important to note that the "pusher" was shown to embody only about five percent of all marihuana salespersons (Goode, 1970a: 251).

The clear implication of these distinctions is that use and sale were being reconceptualized to accommodate the fact that sale and use were inter mingled and common. What this meant was that children were not going to hardened criminals to get the drug but rather to their friends. The image of the typical drug dealer, the aforementioned "pusher," as a profit motivated and non-using adult was nearly totally discredited.

This new evidence, chiefly in the form of sociological studies of the drug subculture, was widely circulated (Blum, 1968; Goode, 1970a; Johnson, 1973). The specifics include first a view of marihuana dealing which is best characterized as friendly barter. In his study of marihuana smokers Goode found that 44 percent sold marihuana to get their supply for free; pricing the drug just barely above cost would keep them high for free and their friends happy (1970: 251). Second, it was also shown that crossing class and city lines to procure to drug was equally rare; "heads will figure to sell to heads, Hell's Angels to Hell's Angels, professors to professors" (Carey, 1968: 73). In other, more extreme words, the ultimate fear of a white parent imagining his or her child running off to a ghetto alley to buy marihuana was, according to the proponents of change, unfounded. No longer could the Federal authorities make the unchallenged claim that outsiders, communist, blacks or otherwise, preyed on unsuspecting youth. As one dealer put it, "Where do people get the idea we have to push grass? ... I have to turn guys away" (Hellman, 1975: 20).

Reformers produced evidence that marihuana was spreading to America's older elite and becoming "the great leveler" (Arnold, 1968: 26). In the newspapers surveyed during this time it was common to find feature articles on the new professional drug user. The drug's appeal for these older users was its value as a sexual disinhibitor and mind expander (Blum, 1970: 55). Said a Manhattan businesswoman: "I once stayed in bed for three days with a man ... smoking pot to enjoy myself." A 57 year old man said; "I can see things more clearly when I'm smoking a joint." In fact for some the drug was too good to share, said an attorney; "I would favor legal marihuana, but not for the masses" (Arnold, 1968: 26).

In 1973 Rolling Stone magazine reported that the middle class adult marihuana user had come out of the closet (Cahill, 1974: 53). Gordon Brownell, president of the marihuana reform group Amorphia and a former White House aide in the Nixon administration recalled:

there were ... a number of people working for both Nixon and Reagan that I knew smoked marihuana. The phenomenon is no less wide spread among young Republicans than it is among young Democrats... [and] there was considerable marihuana use among congressional aides and young government officials. I knew a few at the White House who smoked, but it was very hush-hush (Cahill, 1974: 56).

Legislative Change

The Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act (1970) reflects a significant shift in federal policy, and exemplifies the demise of the old FBN paradigm, the changing political symbolism of marihuana, and the extent to which marihuana use had penetrated the middle class. Said Nixon:

I thought the answer was simply enforce the law and that will stop people from the use of drugs. But its not that .... When you are talking about 13 year olds, 14 year olds, and 15 year olds the answer is not more penalties. The answer is information. The answer is understanding (Grose, 1969: 37).

President Nixon previewed the proposal to Congress on July 14, 1969, noting the difference between the "casual user" who is "rash and foolish" and the "psychologically dependent regular user" who is "genuinely sick" (Reed, 1969: 1 and 18). In presenting the proposal to the Congress Attorney General John Mitchell said the bill would "especially benefit our poorer citizens who may be induced to use drugs [as an escape] from the bleakness of ghetto life" (Robbins, 1969: 51).

Due to congressional criticism that centered on continued use of prison sentences John Ingersoll, director of BNDD, presented a new proposal saying that the punishment should fit the person and that reduced penalties were necessary (New York Times, 1969b: 30). Attorney General Mitchell, sounding like a modern day Beccaria, echoed this opinion, saying he favored "sentences reasonably calculated to be deterrents to crime and which also give flexibility to tailor sentences to the requirements of the drug violator" (New York Times, 1969c: 24). In a most dramatic shift in opinion Dr. Egeberg cast the blame for drug abuse not on rock music and political radicals intent on destroying America, but on a society "that is failing many of our young people" (New York Times, 1969c: 24). Also by this time the middle class was beginning to wake up to the law. As more and more of their children were arrested demands were made to go after the trafficker but to leave kids alone (R.osenthal, 1969: 19). Said one narcotics official:

It's the middle class family that is being hit now, and they're the ones who wield the power, they're the ones demanding the change in the law (Charlton, 1970: 70).

In its first report, Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding (1972), the Shafer Commission was in basic agreement with the other comprehensive studies that preceded it which found there was only minimal harm associated with marihuana use. The testimony concerning marihuana use by many successful individuals and the review and evaluation of the extant medical research caused the Commission to alter its earlier conservative position. Importantly, the Commission learned of the possibility of moderate use by "normar and successful individuals.

The Commission rejected the assumption of the immorality of marihuana users (1972: 102). Said the Commission, "faill of our data suggest that the moral views of the overwhelming majority of marihuana users are in general accord with those of the larger society" (1972: 131). Second, and perhaps most important for policy considerations, the hope for total elimination of marihuana use was rejected (1972: 611). The Commission was forceful in its view that marihuana use was more a symptom of this alleged social and moral decay that a cause and asserted that traditional American values were too deeply entrenched to be overthrown through the use of this drug (1972: 82).

The final report held that the user of marihuana was a bright, involved individual, whose threat to society lay in his being criminalized and ostracized from society rather than his use of the drug. Further, the Commission reported that the drug did not interfere with academic performance (1972: 13) and that users were "essentially indistinguishable from their non-using peers by any fundamental criterion other than their marihuana use" (1972: 41). The true marihuana problem was with the "irresponsible use" in which only about one percent of the using population engaged and the more common "responsible" use pattern dictated that authorities act to simply keep the behavior within "reasonable bounds" (1972: 128- 30).

Conservative Retrenchment

By the middle 1970s the decriminalization trend at the state level became dominant. This movement in law was based on the need to conserve criminal justice resources and to protect young drug users from the stigma of a criminal conviction. The power of this argument is evident in that states as diverse as Oregon and Mississippi decriminalized possession and nearly all other states began "de facto" decriminalization (DiChiara, 1989). During this time conservatives began to reconstruct some of the old imagery that had been lost with the rise of the middle class drug user. Still marihuana was the drug of greatest concern, and the hearings at the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of The Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws these old views were reintroduced.

Marihuana use was associated with "personality changes and mental illness," and a "falling off of moral character" (U.S. Senate, 1972: 201, 213-14). Furthermore, research was presented that indicated that heavy use of marihuana led to progression to hard drugs since it "increases suggestibility and shares svith heroin the ability to produce euphoria and analgesia" (1972: 209). Presaging the current situation, it was alleged that 95 percent of the psychiatrists in New York City were users of drugs while use was reported to be rising at both the Albert Einstein School of Medicine and Columbia University Law School (U.S. Senate, 1973: 306). One witness claimed this widespread use was attributed to "a militant pro-marihuana propaganda campaign conducted by many New Left organizations and the entire underground press" (Ohicago Tribune, 1974: 10). She said that the drug problem was the result of "political subversives" and the "parasitism" of the younger generation. Drug use should not be blamed on a failing society but rather was brought on by a excessive affluence and the lack of ways to spend leisure time ((U.S. Senate, 1972: 74).

The aging of the baby boom began the demise of the reform movement. At this time it became less credible to suggest that drug taking was a part of youthful mischief, as 30 year olds could be said to 'know better.' The end of the liberalization movement began with the reported cocaine use by Dr. Peter Bourne, President Carter's Special Assistant for Mental Health and Drug Abuse. Bourne acknowledged there was "high incidence" of drug use in the Carter White House (Wooten, 1978: 1) and later another Carter advisor, Hamilton Jordan, was also accused of cocaine use. Finally, 26 members of the U.S. House of Representatives admitted to the use of marihuana. The user was now not a teenage experimenter but rather an adult, often in important positions (in 1979 marihuana was twice found in missile silos) in society. These reports led one commentator to say it was "time to put a halt to the 1960s" (New York Times, 1979: 60).

With Reaganism came a new level of moral reaction and new of evidence of drug use by younger children and professionals. The user was again made socially foreign. Urban ghetto dwellers, rock and movie stars, and international drug dealers are individuals most Americans cannot really know. Being so removed, drug use by these people is less easy to understand and becomes the stuff of reifications and imprecise analysis. For example, cocaine, a powerful drug that is difficult to cope with (socially and personally), easily dominated public thinking on drugs. Thus, marihuana, a mild drug, became associated with more dangerous drugs. Complementing the fast paced and business oriented 1980s, cocaine and crack emerged as the new drugs of choice. Rather than having to deal with the user as cultural rebel, the nations faced poverty stricken users and international drug cartels. In 1986 a new drug law was passed in which about $300 million of the $1.7 billion was to be spent on drug education.

Indeed, politicians began to use this imagery to rally the people. Use was beginning to be presented as uncontrollable and the drug trade as a blood thirsty operation that tore at the heart of the nation. President Reagan blamed the rock music and film industries of glorifying drug use as Nixon and Agnew did in the 1970s (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1985: 1). This was confirmed by news reports indicated increased cocaine use in the entertainment and sports fields. For example, Tony Orlando claimed that entertainers were given cocaine as part of their contracts. The user was now out of control; according to one user quoted in Time: "I was afraid of everything" (1986: 61).

This change in the drug of choice and the perception of the user are significant in the return to repression. Evidence indicates that there was a decline in drug use during this time (except for cocaine and alcohol), and there were few of the overt threats to society that characterize past examples of repressive drug laws. For reformers to succeed in creating rational drug policies this paper suggests that they use the media to emphasize to the public that the user of illegal drugs is neither immoral nor crazed. They are citizens who have chosen to use drugs, for whatever reason, that are illegal. The key is to work to keep the drug user in the social fold, to offer rehabilitation when desired and to allay fears of impending social doom that politicians often exploit for partisan purposes. The record seems clear that when the public is presented with an accurate image of the drug user legal repression loses its appeal.

Albert DiChiara is a professor in the Department of Sociol-ogy, University of Hartford.

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