Bush Visit to Drug Site

He fell for it. There, on the evening news, President Bush standing before reporters and public in Orange County; behind him to the left a tall pyramid of those bags of white drugs we’ve all become so numb to seeing on television (there seems to be a competition among law enforcement groups on constructing the most impressive stack). Next to him on the right an equally tall pile of bundled U.S. currency.

At a glance the image looks like a large balance scale with the President as its center.

And the message this scene relays to too many viewers, especially those most impressionable: Drugs equal money.

I’m sure neither the President nor his PR adviser intended that it come across this way. They take the news media approach of using U.S. dollars as a measure for quantities of confiscated illegal drugs (as was the currency displayed).

Rarely, if ever, is a news story written where a “street value” figure is not attached to a quantity of drugs seized in a drug bust, often in headlines or evening news teasers. The wise reporter appreciates the sensational value of that figure; the naive believes it to be quantitative.

But using a “dollar-value” figure in discussing illegal drugs is much too subjective. To me and, I hope, to a majority of citizens, the value, dollar or otherwise, of one ounce or one ton of marijuana, crack, coke, heroine is zero. We wouldn’t buy it, sell it, trade it, or touch it. If we saw it on the street, we would pass right by, as many people do in their cities and neighborhoods every day.

It is an unfortunate choice to continually use the illegal drug retailer’s price as a figure for measuring illegal drug amounts. It would be more accurate to continue to recount measures of weight or volume, whether it be stone, pound, or kilogram; even cubic feet will do for comparison. You could even use a misery factor, such as: “enough to kill 100 athletes, or cause 1,000 people to become hopelessly addicted.”

Unless you want to send the message that drugs equal money (or gold, or Ferraris), and ultimately that drugs and money are exchangeable, if not interchangeable, refrain from the visual and mental images of association that have become commonplace in news reporting and law enforcement publicity. The “street value” method is a dangerously wrong approach.

JAMES REILLY

Long Beach