Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, conservative politicians and law enforcement personnel in the U.S. and Canada were strongly associated with an issue frame that identified liberal permissiveness and the lack of respect for authority as the main causes of crime--a definition that inevitably gave rise to the solution of greater punishment and control (Beckett 1997). The get-tough frame that emerged in the last two decades has left little doubt that the crime problem is one of individual, not societal, failings, and that the answers lie in strategies that would restore order and discipline to lives in which these virtues were so obviously lacking.

In 1981, before Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs, only 3% of Americans believed cutting the drug supply was the most important thing it could do to reduce crime, while 22% thought reducing unemployment would be more effective. Sixteen years later, a dramatic turnaround in attitude had occurred with respect to what Americans saw as the causes, and by extension, the solutions to illegal drug use. In a 1997 survey that asked respondents to choose from a list of 10 possible reasons why some people might use illicit drugs, only three reasons were seen by a majority of Americans as a major cause of illegal drug use. All of the options selected referred to personal choice--peer pressure, the marketing efforts of drug dealers, and poor parenting. Two thirds identified the disintegration of the family as a major contributor to illicit drug use, and 58% said parents should share all or most of the blame for the increase in teenage drug use that occurred between 1992 and 1995. The majority of Americans did not believe that difficult social conditions contributed to illegal drug use while 72% of respondents saw the lack of treatment programs for people who wanted to stop using drugs as the least important factor contributing to personal drug use. And as late as 1997, the majority (55%) of Americans reported that they were completely unfamiliar with needle exchange programs as an option for injection drug users to decrease their risk of contracting HIV and AIDS (Blendon and Young 1998).

The media frames used to inform Americans about the drug issue shed light on this shift in attitude and information deficit. A study that looked at the frames used to depict the drug issue in the 1980s identified four dominant interpretive packages: (1) get the traffickers, (2) zero tolerance, (3) need more resources, and (4) war fails. Not only were these frames differentially used by various elites to promote their definitions and solutions, each frame received different exposure depending on the propensity of media sources to use one source in preference to another (Beckett 1997). The “get the traffickers” frame which focussed on the need to stop pushers from preying on the young, and the “zero tolerance” frame which focussed on the need to reduce casual drug use, dominated discussion of the drug issue, particularly on television. They were heavily favoured by police and other state sources and, since media outlets relied on state sources to such an overwhelming degree (76% of frames appearing in stories were attributed to state officials), these two law and order frames dominated 77% of all frames presented in stories. The “war fails” frame, which discussed whether harm is increased or decreased by policies that criminalize and punish drug use, was used by state officials in only 4% of the frames they presented and represented only 11% of the total frames presented by all state and non-state sources. It is little wonder then, in such a one-note environment, that Americans have sung the praises of their country’s war on drugs so consistently and in such unison. It was perhaps an indication of American media influences in Canada that between 1984 and 1987, the height of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, Canadian support for decriminalizing marijuana fell from 51% to 39% (Savas 2001).

Exposure is important to winning the “frame game” but it is not enough. Message is also critically important. The findings of cognitive science demonstrate that ideas are not directly transferred from one person to another in discrete word “packages” but, instead, are metaphorically structured. It is through myths and metaphors, parables and symbols that people process information and experience to make sense of the world (Bales 2002). These metaphors provide a correspondence of concepts across conceptual domains allowing forms of reasoning and words from one domain to be used in another (Lakoff 1996). They serve as models of interpretation for events and ideas that, once incorporated, are extremely resistant to change.