Baldridge, Jordan Edward Turner. Just say no, or else: celebrities as cultural advocates in the war on drugs. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-qg8z-4m55
DescriptionDuring the 1980s, Ronald and Nancy Reagan served as dual figureheads in the United States’ War on Drugs. While the policies and impacts of that campaign have been documented extensively by scholars, this project addresses the cultural side of the anti-drug movement which was crucial for gaining consent for the drug war’s broader policy goals. During both terms of the Reagan administration, celebrities, athletes, and entertainment industry executives were responsible for producing hundreds of public service announcements, rallies, and other media campaigns, some of which were created directly in collaboration with government officials and some of which were created independently. All of those public service announcements and media campaigns served as key sites wherein the state defined the stakes of the drug crisis and sold the public on its vision for the broader anti-drug effort. The messages put forth by athletes and entertainers through their own platforms or in collaboration with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign directly reflected the Reagan administration’s political and cultural perspectives and helped reify the moral panic that underpinned those perspectives. Celebrity-backed campaigns especially reinforced the ideas that the drug war was to be fought voluntarily by individuals and non-governmental organizations, and that drug abuse could be made culturally unacceptable and thus prevented by framing drug users as irresponsible members of society. The cultural side of the anti-drug movement reflected the deeply racialized dimensions of the broader War on Drugs – especially after the ascent of the crack cocaine epidemic – where the political and media framing of crack as a “Black drug” prompted the creation of anti-drug messaging that featured Black celebrities and that was targeted at young Black Americans.