Politics of Drugs in the U.S.

A notable feature of American politics in the second half of the 1980s was the "war on drugs." The intensity of political and media "drug war" rhetoric and attention seemed to increase sharply through the second half of the 1980s, culminating with the highprofile appointment of William J. Bennett, an articulate and ideological national figure, as "drug czar" by President Bush. Yet  even before the eruption of a "real" war in the Persian Gulf  the rhetorical tempo of the drug war seems to have tapered off sharply since its high point in the fall of 1989.

Two further impressionistic assertions may be made regarding the (hypothesized) rise and fall of the drug war, assertions which  if correct  illuminate the politics of the drug war, and indeed the American political process itself. The first of these is that the rise of the drug war was closely tied to the electoral cycle. This writer vividly recalls a drumfire of drugwar rhetoric during the 1986 election campaign, followed by a sharp reduction of media interest in the topic after the election. The drug war also seemed to escalate, rhetorically at least, during the 1988 election campaign, faded somewhat, then was revived as a "permanent campaign" issue by the Bush Administration. Memory does not serve to indicate whether the drug issue showed a similar cycle in 1982 or 1984; certainly drugs did not seem a major issue in 1990.

. . .
ral test subjects to compare their estimates of passage length).2 It is important, in content analysis, to make sure that the hypothesis proposed is the same as that actually tested. We may therefore propose two related hypotheses, to be tested by content analysis for this study: 1. Through the decade of the 1980s, the amount of space devoted to illegal drugs in the three major newsmagazines, and the number of citations in the Readers' Guide, was significantly higher during election seasons than in the political offyears. 2. In 198990, the proportion of space devoted to legalization within drugissue coverage in the three news magazines reached a relative maximum shortly before the total level of drug coverage showed a significant decline. These two hypotheses, if proven, do not in themselves either prove or disprove broader speculation about the politics of the drug war, but, if confirmed, they would indicate (1) that drugwar coverage in the mass media followed a political rhythm, and (2) that (for whatever reason) drugwar coverage became less attractive once legalization became an issue. ________ 2Klaus Krippendorf, Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology (B
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Approximate Word count = 2143
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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