STUDY: TV PRESENTING REALISTIC VISION OF DRUG USE

Unlike TV shows in the past that presented fanciful images of drug users and sellers, “America’s most popular primetime shows reflect growing skepticism about the effectiveness of the 40-year-old War on Drugs,” according to a study released on Thursday by he Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. A news release summarized the findings: “In TV storylines about the War on Drugs, drug users are not arrested and drug suspects are often portrayed as morally ambiguous or even heroic. In these TV shows, 65% of drug suspects are white, accurately reflecting that the vast majority of drug users (and likely offenders) in the U.S. are white. Despite the predominance of African-Americans and other minorities in U.S. prisons for drug violations, most drug manufacturers and dealers in the series studied were white. Prescription drug abuse and methamphetamines were depicted three times more often than recreational marijuana.”