Yesterday the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration (SAMHSA) released the
results of the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health
(NSDUH). As I
noted a couple of weeks ago, when SAMHSA gave us a preview of
those data, the number of respondents who reported using heroin in
the previous month fell by 14 percent last year, despite
ever-rising concern about a new “heroin epidemic.” While NSDUH
probably
misses a substantial number of heavy users (exactly how many is
unclear), the trends identified by the survey still should indicate
whether heroin consumption is on the rise or on the wane (as both
government officials and journalists tend to assume). Hence
it is instructive to compare past-month heroin use measured by
NSDUH (in thousands of users) with mentions of a “heroin
epidemic” in the newspaper and wire service articles collected by
Nexis:
On the face of it, there is no obvious relationship between the
level of heroin use and the level of press attention to it. Notice
that the spike in 2006, when the number of past-month users was
higher than it has been in any year since then, seems to have
prompted no journalistic response whatsoever. The more gradual
increase seen after 2009, by comparison, coincided with an initial
drop in “heroin epidemic” mentions, followed by a slight increase.
Then the number of mentions skyrocketed, rising from 82 in 2011 to
273 in 2012 and 633 in 2013. So far this year there have been
nearly 2,300 references to a “heroin epidemic” in these
news sources, reflecting the tremendous attention attracted by the
actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death
on February 2 (which was
caused by “mixed drug intoxication” but generally attributed to
heroin alone). That single incident seems to have generated more
talk of a “heroin epidemic” than everything else that happened in
the previous 12 years. In any case, coverage of the putative
epidemic really took off around the time when heroin use started to
fall.
This disconnect between drug use and public alarm about it is a
pretty familiar phenomenon by now. Ronald Reagan ramped up the war
on drugs at a time when drug use was already declining. His
successor, George H.W. Bush, gave his
“bag of crack” speech years after cocaine consumption peaked
(as measured by NSDUH’s predecessor, the National Household Survey
on Drug Abuse). Just as Hoffman’s death seems to be the single most
important factor driving the recent explosion in press coverage of
heroin, the 1986 death of basketball player Len Bias, at a time
when cocaine use was falling, drove the political panic that gave
us insanely disproportionate
federal crack sentences (even though Bias
snorted cocaine rather than smoking it).
As the sociologist Nicholas Parsons
points out in his recent book
Meth Mania, press panics about speed likewise have been
only tenuously related to the number of people consuming it.
Parsons found that coverage of methamphetamine
in Time and The New York
Times shot up in 1967, driven largely by a single
incident: the rape and murder of Linda Fitzpatrick, the 18-year-old
daughter of a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, couple who dropped
out of an exclusive private school and reportedly got hooked on
Mephedrine. In that respect, Linda Fitzpatrick was the Philip
Seymour Hoffman (or Len Bias) of her day.
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