Liberals’ ideology, on the other hand, is informed by a model of the family--the “nurturant parent,” but: “...liberals are less aware of the implicit view of morality and the family that organizes their political beliefs. This lack of conscious awareness of their own political worldview has been devastating to the liberal cause” (Lakoff 1996:31).

By failing to frame their policies in ways that resonate with deep-seated Americans values and myths, liberals have ceded valuable political ground to their opponents who have honed their understanding of how to communicate with the American psyche to an impressive degree. In the depiction of the nuclear, male-headed family we also find a central feature of the more conservative strains of Christianity which depicts the ultimate metaphor--God the Father. The central figure of conservative Christian fundamentalism is the Strict Father God--the Yahweh of the Old Testament and his Son, Christ the King who will preside on Judgement Day to send the righteous to heaven and sinners to hell--not the nurturant Jesus of Nazareth who admonished those without sin “to cast the first stone” or encouraged sinners to “go and sin no more.” These conceptions of judgement, punishment, and reward are central to conservative ideology and act as important pillars of the get-tough movement in corrections and the political right’s enthusiastic endorsement of the drug war mobilization.

Indeed, in political terms a new religious cleavage has appeared in America based on the orthodoxy of religious belief. Today differences between doctrinal conservatives and doctrinal liberals within various religious affiliations have come to rival the traditional divides that used to occur between affiliations, that is between Catholics and Protestants or Jews and Christians (Layman 1997). The traditional divide on left and right orientations towards political issues that used to be informed by class considerations appears to be breaking down and replaced with divides between traditional religious versus liberal religious/secular orientations on moral issues. These emerging divisions affect American attitudes on a range concerns--matters including welfare, affirmative action, crime and illicit drug use--which have been successfully removed from their former class frames and recast and reinterpreted to prime the moral judgements and considerations of key target audiences which include the so-called “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s.

Religion, family, ideology and race, these are the themes that underpin America’s drug war. Rather than a narrow concern about the relative effects of illicit drugs on individuals and society, its message, through the larger conflicts, myths and metaphors within American society that constellate around these themes, speaks to and legitimizes a particular conceptualization of the role and responsibility of government in providing for the disadvantaged and marginalized segments of society.

THE MOUSE AND THE ELEPHANT

In considering national metaphors, one of Canada’s most enduring is probably Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s infamous depiction of our relation with the United States as one of a mouse in bed with an elephant—“no matter how friendly or even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt” (Trudeau 1972:176).

Far from a twitch, the war on drugs has been vast, well-publicized and well-financed seizure. So it would be odd indeed if Canadians were left unaffected by its pervasive presence on page, screen and airwave. Sharing so many news and entertainment sources with Americans, from CNN to Law and Order and its endless offspring, Canadians have been exposed to the same media’s agenda-setting effects--not so much telling us what to think but what to think about (McCombs 1993). Canadians have responded by thinking about drugs, by reviewing Canadian drug policy, re-introducing legislation, debating their evils and merits. The question is why have we not simply followed America’s lead into the trenches of the drug war.