Media Depiction of Drug Use

It is widely believed that addiction is a compulsion that can take hold of anyone regardless of race, sex, age or nancial status. While that may be true, the way that society looks at or casts judgment upon victims of drug dependency is speci c, especially when it comes to race. In the early sixties, drug use became popular and even became mainstream amongst young and, speci cally, white adults. en, former President Richard Nixon was strongly opposed to this development, calling it “public enemy number one” and decided that the best way to handle it was to criminalize drug use by spinning the narrative and aligning it to what they described as ‘radical’ Black power movements. Drug use still has much harsher consequences for people of color. People of color receive longer sentences as well as more aggressive punishments for actions on par with or of a lower level than that of their white peers. e most notable example of this is an era and a political tactic known as ‘ e War on Drugs.’ is ‘war’ was o cially declared in 1971 by former President Ronald Reagan. Pitched as a government-led initiative, the ‘war’ aimed to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. ough the operation is technically the creation of Reagan, its real, nameless beginnings can be attributed to his predecessor. President Nixon worked hard during his time in o ce to appear tough on crime, as well concerned with foreign a airs, but always had underlying motives for his campaigns. ese motives included targeting Black people and the ‘anti-war le .’ “ e Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House a er that, had two enemies: the antiwar le and black people. We knew we could n’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to asso ci ate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then, crim in al izing them both heav ily, we could across television sets like livestock, branding them as drug distributors and addicts forced a narrative that Black people are only capable of crime and destruction. It is notions like these that the Black communities are still unable to shake. ese awed and governmentorchestrated perceptions of Black Americans have adapted

disrupt those communit ies. We disrupt those communit ies. We could arrest their lead ers, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night a er night in the even ing news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did, John Ehrlichman, former domestic policy chief under Nixon told Harper’s writer Dan Baum in a 2016 interview. is tactic of raiding homes and arresting leaders was not something the police force at the time took on lightly; they used this to cripple the Black Panther party and strike fear into an already fearful Black community. As Black leaders like Fred Hampton were killed in their homes, and activists like Angela Davis were put to trial, the nightly news vili ed them. Parading Black citizens and pushed its way further and pushed its way further and further into the media, now doing so in a way that is not too blatantly problematic. It, like many acts of racism in this country, remains hidden. In this case, it is hidden in the mind’s association with a certain language. While white race is not explicitly mentioned in drug stories, it shows itself in coded terms. As professor of urban studies at Queens College and City University of New York, Dana-Ain Davis notes: “When used indexically (a linguistic expression whose reference can shi from context to context.), code words or phrases are deployed to create racial meaning that generates a sort of pathological pro ling of groups without direct reference to race.” Most common among these code words in media coverage of drug use is ‘urban’ – code for Black or Latino and ‘suburban’ or ‘rural’ – code for white. Heroin users are usually cast as urban dwellers and therefore the appropriate targets for law enforcement and prosecution. ‘Suburban’, in contrast, is used to mark whiteness. is same media has convinced us to associate the word suburban with the American dream, the white picket fence in an a uent neighborhood. ese code words, while they can be used with good intentions, promote a harmful narrative that furthers the assumption and stereotype that Black people belong in dirty cities laced with drug use. While race is rarely mentioned explicitly in media coverage when it comes to drug use by white people, instead, being le unmarked is a hallmark of whiteness. “ e unmarked category against which di erence is constructed.” said George Lipsitz, American Studies scholar and professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California. “Whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relation.” With the anti-Black rhetoric pushed forward by former presidents and generals in the War on Drugs, Nixon and Regan cursed the Black community, sentencing them to negative, unnecessary and unwarranted associations via media as well as in the eyes of uninformed people looking at the community through a distance lens.