Thesis and Literature Summary In our contemporary society, the media constantly bombards us with horror stories about drugs like crack-cocaine. From them, and probably from no other source, we learn that crack is immediately addictive in every case, we learn that it causes corruption, crazed violence, and almost always leads to death. The government tells us that we are busy fighting a war on drugs and so it gives us various iconic models to despise and detest : we learn to stereotype inner-city minorities as being of drug-infested wastelands and we learn to "witchhunt" drug users within our own communities under the belief that they represent moral sin and pure evil. I believe that these titles and ideals are preposterous and based entirely upon unnecessary and even detrimental ideals promoted by the government to achieve purposes other than those they claim. In Craig Renarman's and Harry Levine's article entitled "The Crack Attack : Politics and Media in America's Latest Drug Scare," the authors attempts to expose and to deal with some of the societal problems that have related from the over-exaggeration of crack-cocaine as an "epidemic problem" in our country. Without detracting attention away from the serious health risks for those few individuals who do use the drug, Renarman and Levine demonstrate how minimally detrimental the current "epidemic" actually is. Early in the article, the authors summarize crack-cocaine's evolutionary history in the U.S. They specifically discuss how the crack-related deaths of two star-athletes fist called wide-spread attention to the problem during the mid-1980's. Since then, the government has reportedly used crack-cocaine as a political scapegoat for many of the nation's larger inner-city problems. Thefts, violence, and even socioeconomic depression have been blamed on crack and according to what Reinarman and Levine imply-- this has been done wrongly so. They assert that the ...
