Reporting the Drug Problem

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

"Reporters," former Senator Eugene McCarthy once remarked, "are like blackbirds on a telephone wire. One flies off, they all fly off. One flies back, they all fly back." That view of journalism, however unfair, is widely held even among journalists. It has become commonplace self-criticism that news organizations tend to converge on a social trend, stir up alarm, then lose interest in unison and move on to some other concern. Last week a debate heated up about whether the media have collectively hyped the nation's drug problem, especially the threat posed by crack, a potent form of cocaine. At the forefront was an unlikely critic of media warnings about illegal narcotics: the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Crack has dominated media attention during the recent surge in drug coverage. A CBS report televised in early September, 48 Hours on Crack Street, drew the highest viewership of any network documentary in six years. NBC has aired more than 400 reports on drug abuse since the beginning of March; ABC two weeks ago highlighted drugs on all its news programs. Cocaine and crack have been front-page news in dailies ranging from city tabloids to the Wall Street Journal, which last week reported abuse was "rife" in rural Oklahoma. Crack has repeatedly reached Page One of the New York Times and Washington Post, and the drug crisis rated two cover stories within three months at Newsweek. The magazine's editor in chief, Richard Smith, wrote in the June 16 issue: "An epidemic is abroad in America, as pervasive and dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times." TIME has given cover attention to drug use in the workplace and the antidrug crusade led by President and Mrs. Reagan. But the DEA, after a city-by-city survey of crack's availability, asserted in a report that the result of media attention "has been a distortion of the public perception of the extent of crack use."

The DEA said the drug "generally is not available" in some major cities, * including Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, and is not widely available in many other metropolitan areas. In addition, contrary to some news reports, the DEA found little evidence that crack use had spread from inner cities to many suburbs. The study concluded, "Crack presently appears to be a secondary rather than primary problem in most areas." Ironically, the DEA report received little coverage: it did not make the CBS or the ABC network newscasts that night, was passed up by the New York Times and ran on page 18 in the Washington Post the next day.

While the DEA was focusing on crack, some news organizations were questioning whether the entire drug-abuse story has been receiving too much attention. The New Republic ran a cover story billed "Confessions of a Drug- Hype Junkie," written by Adam Paul Weisman, a researcher at U.S. News & World Report who worked on that magazine's July 28 cover story about drug abuse. Weisman charged other publications with "blatant sensationalism" for having ignored statistics indicating there is no boom in drug experimentation among high school students; the number who sampled cocaine, he noted, has been oscillating between 16% and 17% since 1981.

Weisman disputed a widespread media contention that there are 5 million "regular" U.S. coke users. The figure, he said, is the maximum estimate by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of those who have used cocaine within the previous month, among them many who take the drug only occasionally or are trying it for the first, and perhaps last, time. Said Weisman: "The figures for alcohol abuse dwarf those of all illicit drugs." Taking a swipe at his own employer, he added, "Nor are drugs, as U.S. News & World Report puts it, 'the nation's No. 1 menace.' Not while we still have poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, malnutrition, murder, and the Soviet Union."

An even more vehement attack comes from ABC Nightline Correspondent and Syndicated Columnist Jeff Greenfield. "What we have done by the sheer quantity of stories is to imply that a very serious problem has become the most pressing domestic crisis," says Greenfield. "We have helped create an atmosphere in which hysterical legislation is more likely to pass." Hodding Carter, host of PBS's Capitol Journal, agrees. "What the media have done is to throw the blood into the water and then look back and say, 'My, my, the sharks are feeding on this blood in Congress,' " said Carter on the MacNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour last week.

Despite the backlash, many editors and law-enforcement officials regard the stories as long overdue. Says Chicago Tribune Editor James Squires: "Washington discovered the problem when Len Bias, a University of Maryland basketball star, died of an overdose. The rest of the country has been concerned for a long time." New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal asserts, "This is not a press-created problem, nor a crisis made by politicians. Drugs are here." Los Angeles County District Attorney Ira Reiner argues, "The problem seems overreported only because it was massively underreported before."

Few critics of how the press has covered drug abuse would deny it is a significant problem. The debate is about matters of proportion and the proprieties of extensive, simultaneous media attention to an issue. Some journalists believe they are just responding to public concern. Says NBC Anchorman Tom Brokaw: "The drug story reached critical mass. It kept building up and up in almost volcanic fashion. My own guess is that the population of users is much larger than the DEA is led to believe." Yet the debate caused some news executives to ponder whether they were having unintended impact. Acknowledged ABC News Senior Vice President Richard Wald: "Has the press hyped the drug story? Piece by piece, no. But the cumulative fact of everybody paying attention to the same story at the same time certainly has a heightening effect."

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York, with other bureaus