I. Thesis and Literature Summary In our contemporary society, the media constantly bombards us with horror stories about drugs such as crack and cocaine. From them, and probably from no other source, we learn that crack cocaine in any case creates an immediate addiction, we learn that it causes corruption, crazy violence and almost always leads to death. The government tells us we are fighting a war on drugs and then offers us various iconic models to despise and loathe: we learn to stereotype inner-city minorities as drug-infested wastelands, and we learn to "witch-hunt" drug users. drugs within our own communities in the belief that they represent moral sin and pure evil. I believe these titles and ideals are absurd and based entirely on unnecessary and even harmful ideals promoted by the government to achieve goals other than those stated. In the article by Craig Renarman and Harry Levine entitled "The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in America's Latest Drug Scare", the authors attempt to expose and address some of the social problems resulting from the over-exaggeration of crack cocaine as an "epidemic problem" in our country. Without diverting attention from the serious health risks of those few individuals who use the drug, Renarman and Levine demonstrate how minimally harmful the current "epidemic" actually is. At the beginning of the article, the authors summarize the evolutionary history of crack cocaine in the United States. They specifically discuss how the crack-related deaths of two famous athletes brought widespread attention to the problem during the mid-1980s. Since then, the government has reportedly used crack cocaine as a political scapegoat for many... half of paper... d substance. In conclusion, we should allow drugs like crack and cocaine to receive due attention as social problems, but let them receive nothing more than that!.V. References D'Angelo, Ed. (1994, September). The moral culture of drug prohibition. Humanist., 54, p. 3.Dorfman, Lori-Wallack, Lawrence. (1993, November). Health of advertising: the case of counter-advertising. Public Health Reports., 108, p. 716.Johnson, Bruce-Golub, Andrew et al. (1995, July). Careers in crack, drug use, drug distribution, and non-drug crime., Crime & Delinquency, 41, p. 275.Perrine, Daniele. (1994, October 15). The view from Platform Zero: how the Netherlands manages its drug problem. America., 171, p. 9.Renarman, Craig & Levine, Harry G. The Crack Attack: Politics and the Media in America's Latest Drug Alert, *From the Montclair State Univ. Library