ABSTRACT
The “War on Drugs” discourse resulted in the placement of a new group on the social landscape: the crack addict. According to Hurwitz and Peffl ey (1997: 395): “Recent studies of the ‘War on Drugs’ of the 1980s provide an excellent example of how zealous anti-crime policies and sympathetic media coverage can conspire to create violent images of a black underclass.” Illicit drug use is a phenomenon that cuts across racial and socioeconomic categories (see 2005 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, U. S. Health and Human Services; National Institute on Drug Abuse 2007). However, this is not always the story that is offered to the public. As argued by Reinarman and Levine “the period from 1986 to 1992 was in many ways the most intense drug scare of the twentieth century” (1997a: 1). The intensifi - cation of this drug scare was due, in part, to the emergence of the maternal drug user and the drug of choice-crack cocaine. The media, according to the U. S. Sentencing Commission’s Special Report to Congress, “played a large role in creating the national sense of urgency surrounding drugs, generally, and crack cocaine specifi cally” (1995: 28). The use of crack cocaine “attracted the attention of politicians and the media,” this was the case, as asserted by Reinarman and Levine, “because of its downward mobility to and increased visibility in ghettos and barrios. The new users were a different social class, race and status” (1997b: 19). Consequently, the War on Drugs was defi ned as a war on the “crack” house in the “ghetto” and “inner-city” neighborhoods (see Wacquant 2000, 2001).
