The DEA was ordered to manufacture media attention for crack in 1985

Evidence

In October 1985, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) charged Robert Stutman, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York City office, with drawing media attention to the spreading of crack (and the violence from dealers trying to control and stabilize drug markets). Stutman drew so much attention that he handed Reagan’s slumbering War on Drugs an intense high. In 1986, thousands of sensationally racist stories engulfed the airwaves and newsstands describing the “predator” crack dealers who were supplying the “demon drug” to incurably addicted “crackheads” and “crack whores” (who were giving birth to biologically inferior “crack babies” in their scary concrete urban jungles). Not many stories reported on poor White crack sellers and users. In August 1986, Time magazine deemed crack “the issue of the year.” But in reality, crack had become the latest drug addicting Americans to racist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1087

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the government’s deliberate choreographing of a media panic — an official “charge” to draw attention — as the mechanism for racializing a drug. Strong case study for how moral panics are manufactured top-down.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly did the DEA’s internal “charge” document say, and how openly was media-stoking framed as an official mandate?