ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1986, American politicians and news media began an extraordinary antidrug frenzy that ran until about 1992. During this period, newspapers, magazines, and network television regularly carried lurid stories about a new "epidemic" or "plague" of drug use, especially of crack cocaine. Politicians from both parties made increasingly strident calls for a "War on Drugs". Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) collects data on a whole series of drugs—from amphetamine to aspirin—that might be present in emergencies or fatalities. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) surveys of drug use produce the data that are the statistical basis of all estimates of the prevalence of cocaine use. The war on drugs and the crack scare explicitly rejected public health approaches to drug problems that conflicted with their ideology During the post-Watergate rebuilding of the Republican Party, far right-wing political organizations and fundamentalist Christian groups set out to impose what they called "traditional family values" on public policy.
