the role of presidential rhetoric in the creation of a moral panic: reagan, bush, and the war on drugs

Between the hammer and the anvil? The anti-money laundering-complex and its interactions with the compliance industry

“…Banks can decide for themselves which structure suits their institution best. This results in different choices by financial institutions: most of them (73%) opted for a centralised approach 9 to compliance, which means that there is a central compliance department (in the head office, often in Brussels), combined with a national compliance policy (69%). This policy regarding compliance implementation varies: sometimes a degree of regional discretion is permitted, and in other cases, there is a compliance policy, specified for each business unit in the institution.…”

“…In order to understand these diverging interests, we need to go back to the US in the 1980s, the period of 'Reaganomics': a deregulation of the economy and a tough-oncrime-policy [9]. In this period, the concerns over the profitability of crime and more specifically, drug crime, rose.…”

“…Large sums of money were said to be in control of criminal elements, the underground economy was expanding widely [17], and policy makers concluded that traditional methods were no longer effective in fighting these forms of crime [22]. Hawdon states that this period can be characterized by a moral panic regarding the 'war on drugs' [9]in fact the same rhetoric that was used by Nixon, when he used the war on drugs as a key issue in his election campaign in 1968 [7].…”

How an Elite-Engineered Moral Panic Led to the U.S. War on Iraq

“…Also, researchers have applied the general moral panic concept to a wide range of social problems including but not limited to youth gangs (McCorkle and Miethe 1998), school violence (Burns and Crawford 1999), child abuse (Best 1994), Satanism (Victor 1994), wilding (Welch et al 2002), flag burning (Welch 2000), the U.S. war on drugs (Reinarman and Levine 1989;Hawdon 2001), illegal immigration (Welch 2004), and even terror (Rothe and Muzzatti 2004).…”

Social construction of drug policies and target populations: U.S. Policy and media discourse

“…Hartman and Golub (1999) examined the narrative and volume of stories about crack cocaine in the media from 1985-1995 and found that it was disproportionally represented as an "urban" problem. Hawdon (2001) empirically explored the role of presidential rhetoric concerning drugs during the administrations of Reagan and Bush and found that different types of statements by the presidents directly affected the rise or decline in moral panic. His conclusions support the constructionist view of the drug epidemic and the types of policies that result from particular definitions.…”