Introduction

These recent headlines were easily selected from a panoply of similar frightening stories about phencyclidine, America's newest important drug of abuse. PCP, 1-( I-phencyclohexyl) piperidine, was first synthesized in 1958 (Domino 1964). It was widely tested in humans between 1959 and 1962 because it suppressed perception of painful (and other) stimuli and made possible surgery in patients who were not suppressed to the point of full stupor, as is usually required in surgery. Its clinical use was curtailed because patients often emerged from surgery or other treatments with excitation, fearful delusions or complete psychosis (Luby et al. 1959). The drug's originators, Parke-Davis, ceased clinical testing in 1962 but for years the drug was available to veterinarians who used it to anesthetize large animals, particularly primates. It was sold to this market as Sernylan. PCP emerged as a street drug in San Francisco in 1967 (Meyers, Rose & Smith 1967-1968). After that first use, it surfaced periodically; it was often deceptively sold as THC, the active ingredient of cannabis products. In the last years of the 1970s, however, its use became very widespread in America and to many it became our most important drug problem (Luisada 1978).

Our purpose here is not to describe the pharmacology or patterns of use of PCP but to describe how America learned about the drug and how it earned its status as the "devil drug." Early medical journal reports concerned with street use and abuse of PCP used the customary medical-scientific-journalistic style, a nonemotive style. By the mid-1970s, however, a few reports published for medical readers began to cite a number of horror stories. In 1976 an article appeared in Emergency Medicine entitled "High on PCP" (Unsigned 1976). This presentation featured an interview with R. Stanley Burns who with other workers had published the first extensive clinical article on PCP in Western Medicine the preceding year (Bums et al. 1975). The 1975 article did not detail stories of crimes, rapes and murders, but the Emergency Medicine article did present a number of PCP horror tales told by Burns. While discussing a group of chronic users he referred to patients who died.

... all three died because of behavioral toxicity. Two drowned in swimming pools while under the influence and the other burned to death in a fire.

Burns also referred to several homicides and suicides resultant from the use of the drug. The emergence of this style of material in the medical literature regarding drug abuse was not without precedent, but this was the first signal of a now predominant theme regarding PCP that emerged in newspapers, magazines and TV shows. We decided to survey popular media sources of PCP stories to identify both this pattern of emergence and the predominant themes presented to the larger public.

We surveyed published newspaper reports for the period of 1957-1979. We then expanded the survey to popular periodicals, television news and dramatic shows and finally included popular music.

Newspapers

The most extensive survey was carried out on newspaper articles. The "underground press" would have constituted an interesting source but existing indexes are far from comprehensive and we reluctantly confined this search to the established press. Indexes are maintained by a number of major newspapers and we searched the following ones:

We found one extremely valuable source, Newsbank. This microfiche collection catalogs articles from more thin 230 major and minor national newspapers. A search of the "health" category revealed valuable indexing of drug and drug-addiction articles.

We obtained two large clipping files from Dr. Richard E. Gamy of Tulane University and from "The Bridge," a drug-information service of the Town of North Hempstead, Manhasset, New York. The New York office of the Associated Press (AP) supplied us photocopies of their wire stories on PCP. Each new article was obtained and analyzed. We recorded the city of origin (national wire service or local) and the thematic treatment.

Most of the cited indexes were first organized in 1972 except the New York Times Index (1851) and Newsbank (1970). Therefore most pre-1970 data come from the New York Times. The geographic distribution of the major indexes is uneven and our data focus prominently on large cities. The study does not encompass every PCP article printed but any errors from omission am probably negligible.

Popular Periodicals

Indexing services were also important in locating articles published by magazines. Some sources used were:

The Magazine Index provided the most comprehensive compilation of popular journals and supplied most of our citations. It indexes on microfilm approximately 370 periodicals.

Television News and Entertainment

Comprehensive indexing tools for this important area of American media do not exist. We obtained some information from:

The Vanderbilt service catalogs evening network news broadcasts. The Televison Information Office (TIO), whose files were incomplete, retains some information on network television shows. Most other sources were, like TIO, parochial, incomplete or both. We probably located more television shows that focused on PCP from friends who paid attention to the TV listings in newspapers than from any other source.

Results

We read 323 newspaper articles that focused on PCP between 1958 and 1979.(1) Twenty-seven states plus the District of Columbia were represented by newspaper articles. Table I indicates the total number of articles found in the established press for the period 1958-1979. An obvious explosion of coverage occurred in 1978 and the subsequent reporting has begun to diminish. Most notable was the fact that the presentation and representation of horror stories became a most important theme. These narrative accounts dealt with acts of violence by users on others or themselves. often such stories wee shocking and even repugnant and loathsome. We were able to identify 59 different stories involving violent or shocking themes during this time. One narrative horror tale occurred in 25 percent of all newspaper articles and some articles recounted as many as 15. Even when the new report did not utilize a narrative horror tale, the articles often focused on violence secondary to the drug. Table II presents the dates and locations of horror tales and Table III identifies those stories recounted five or more times.

The most repeated tale was that of self-removal of eyes which was cited 17 times during a three-year period. Different versions gave specific origins and identification. The victim was said to be a Baltimore college student (Brown 1978), the son of a Massachusetts Congressman (Chargot 1978). a man in a midwestern city (Oswald 1978) or a man from San Jose (Green 1978).

Magazines

We located 23 magazine articles in the 1977-1979 period: seven in 1977, 13 in 1978 and three in 1979. Table IV lists these sources. Horror stories appeared in 10 of these 23. The "gouged eye" theme was again most popular and appeared in seven stories. Two new versions appeared: Sepia (Gay 1978) stated that the incident occurred in 1971 when a young woman, following arrest for assault, gouged out her eyes in jail; and New Times (Koper 1978) identified a young man by name who, following arrest for indecent exposure, gouged out his eyes in jail.

Television

Table V lists television news programs that featured PCP stories. Most listed were national news programs such as Today, Tomorrow, and 60 Minutes, or network national evening shows. We were able to find, because of our location, a number of local NYC features as well. In most instances we were able to view these presentations. There were certainly many other local telecasts about PCP throughout the nation. Those shows we saw frequently told horror stories and, in fact, focused on them as part of the dramatic setting and urgency that accompanies TV news. Nine horror stories were presented by Walter Cronkite on The CBS Evening News in 1978.

The 60 Minutes show of October 23, 1977 devoted one-third of its time to PCP. It featured reputed live filming of a drug seller's arrest in San Jose, California. Mike Wallace interviewed two men accused of murder who were supposedly under the influence of PCP at the time of their crimes. Wallace also interviewed R. Stanley Burns and his associate Steven Lerner. Both men were co-authors of the Western Medicine article in 1975 and they, with associate Ronald Linder, had formed a private corporation to carry out training, educational and treatment services related to PCP. Lerner told two of the horror stories we have mentioned, perhaps promoting their retelling. The gouged eye story was told by a Hayward. California, drug worker. The show featured a lengthy interview with Barry Braeske, a young man who had murdered his mother, father and grandfather while under the influence of PCP. This horror story, made more compelling by Braeske's quiet recitation, was retold nine times in our newspaper survey. As Table V indicates, Lerner made frequent appearances on national television where he essentially always illustrated the PCP story by the telling of violent tales. He even achieved an unusual notoriety for a scientist by being featured in People magazine in September, 1978 wherein more horror stories were featured.

TV Dramatic Presentations

By early 1979 PCP had become a thematic concern in fictionalized television drama (see Table VI). Sometimes it was central to the theme, at other times, peripheral. The compelling effects of the drug and its ability to induce mindless violence and self-destructive acts were widely exploited in most. The Man Undercover show opened with a young man taking two to three hits of a joint of "angel dust" and becoming psychotic and raging.(2) The Wack Attack, a made-for-television movie, featured a preposterous scene inside a "PCP treatment ward" where a group of young people enact a gathering of chronic psychotics a' la Snakepit. The White Shadow episode featured two reifications of horror stories. In one a young woman tried to fly off the roof of her high school and in another a young man removed (most of) his clothing and ran about overwhelming and evading his pursuers. The Quincy show focused on the strength and invincibility of the user. Two popular horror stories were dramatized. an oncoming dope-crazed fiend required multiple police bullets to halt his advance; and handcuffs and leg restraints were broken by users crazed and fortified by the drug. A special case of "documentary entertainment" was provided by the David Begelman documentary Angel Death narrated by Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. This documentary was not fictionalized but was a telling of the PCP story. Many of the horror stories were retold and some footage purported to show a naked young man under the influence of "dust" whose superhuman strength made him difficult to subdue. We were also shown the actual handcuffs that an enraged person had broken while under PCP's influence.

Miscellaneous Media

Three not easily categorized 1979 items were found. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded a short television public service announcement in which Robert Blake, very much in his role as Baretta, warns people away from angel dust ("It's a rattlesnake and it'll kill you"). Also during 1979 some New York City radio stations played another public service announcement by musician Gil Scott-Heron warning about the "dangerous powder." Scott-Heron's song "Angel Dust" was played behind the spot. The recording achieved, on its own, fairly wide play and was listed on the Billboard Soul Charts as a hit record.(3) Scott-Heron was also an in-studio commentator following the first New York City showing of Begelman's documentary in October of 1979.

Discussion

The abuse of phencyclidine emerged as a national problem in the 1970s. The volume of newsprint devoted was large and the story has moved steadily through all forms of media. In this video age the attention paid by television news and drama has been important and probably validated for many people the importance of the drug and its story. The style of presentation in all media has encompassed a dramatization of the dangers of the drug by focusing on individual, supposedly true, stories of violent even loathsome behavior carried out by individuals intoxicated by the drug. It is erroneous to think of this approach as unprecedented.

In 1908 the New York Times printed an article that described "Jew peddlers" selling cocaine to drug-crazed Southern Negroes (Stickgold 1977). Another New York Times account in 1914 attributed to the "drug-crazed [cocaine] fiend" : superhuman strength, cunning, sexual rapaciousness and a temporary immunity to shock so as to withstand .32 caliber bullets. The murders of 17 Southern Whites were blamed on Negro cocaine-sniffing parties (Williams 1914). Musto believes that White fears of released Black aggression secondary to cocaine use strongly contributed to state and national anti-cocaine legislation (Musto 197 3).

Anti-marijuana slogans and posters signaled the governmental campaign against marijuana prior to the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. One famous poster portraying a marijuana cigarette read:

Beware! Young and Old-People in All Walks of Life. This may be handed you by the friendly stranger. It contains the killer drug marijuana - a powerful narcotic in which lurks murder! Insanity! Death! - Fort 1978

Federal agents kept an up-to-date gore file listing accounts of vicious crimes committed by users of marijuana. The most famous case described Victor Licata, 21, who with his axe killed his father, mother, sister and two brothers while they slept. Another tale described a user who smashed a man's face and head to a pulp. Not satisfied with the murder, he then extracted the tongue and the eyes from the victim (Sloman 1979).

The PCP story of the 1970s was probably matched in volume by the media attention to LSD in the 1960s. Multiple stories of murders committed by LSD influenced people were reported. Few of these cases were ever documented by the measurement of LSD in the bloodstream of the killer, although this finding would scarcely prove that LSD caused the killing.

LSD often was stated to have caused individuals to remove their eyes. Grinspoon and Bakalar (1979) in fact tried to document the self-enucleation stories and found only three cases about which any information existed. All three events involved hospitalized individuals who may have used LSD previously, but at the time of the incident there was no evidence that they were intoxicated. All three were ruminating on sexual guilt and two cited the Biblical edict "if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out."

Siegel (1980) sites the following:

A powerful vineyard worker fought wildly against an imaginary tiger, smashing chairs against the wall. A normally quiet garage worker thought he was a circus performer and walked along the cable of a suspension bridge.... A man yelled, "Look at me! I'm an airplane and I can fly!" and jumped from a window to the ground below and then ran 50 meters on two broken legs while unaware of any pain... The attacks were fluctuating while the intoxicated broke out of their bonds and restraints, attacking firemen and police who were forced to use manual restraint by gangs of men in order to control those with "superhuman strength." At least two people ripped out of their strait jackets with bare hands.

These familiar episodes grew out of ergotism, the consumption of fungus-contaminated rye in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, in 1951.

Every new drug experience in America is handled in a stereotyped fashion by the media. Emphasis is placed on individual tales of dangerous, criminal or self-destructive behavior by the drug-crazed. The myth is newly erected and slightly embellished with each new drug, and the stories come to resemble the myths, ballads and folk-tales previously generated and transformed by oral transmission. Indeed, the best model seems to be the Frankenstein monster who advances impervious to pain, bullets and this time to fire, in order to murder, dismember or bugger men, women, children and the household pets. The myths are compelling because they touch an emotional core that has meaning in the individual and in the culture, and they exploit our fascination with horror. The user commits wanton rape and murder, the murders often encompass fratricide, matricide or infanticide. The monster must die bizarrely: drowning in inches of water, attempting to fly from a building or trying to halt a speeding two-ton vehicle with its bare hands or body. If it lives it should commit the most sexually meaningful self-mutilations - removal of the eyes or castration. These tales are the archetypal expressions of human inner terrors and exist in the preserved ballad and epic tales of most languages. Jung would have loved to analyze the "facts" about PCP presented by American media.

Are some of these stories true? Probably so; myth feeds on fact nearly as well as it feeds on fancy. But if they were not true we would make them up - as we have in the past. The multiple sources of the gouged-eyes does not mean that the event did not happen, merely that it is so meaningful that facts cannot constrain it. The story moves from anecdote to apocrypha.

Charles Innes, a Baltimore student, did blind himself in jail in 1971 and his story served as a model for some retellings of this legend (Smith 1980; Green 1971). A 1977 AP wire story quoted Dr. Regine Aronow:

She said a Baltimore college student who took in overdose [of PCP] tore his eyes out of their sockets (Carter 1977).

The photocopy of the AP story we obtained has the following notation above the text.

Editor: Material in the 10th graf [sic] may be objectionable to some readers.

The warning about the gouged-eye tale might also have predicted that the retelling would be extremely popular.

Charles Innes had dropped out of college by 1971 but he did live in Baltimore and was the son of a Massachusetts state legislator. He swallowed a film canister of drug during a police raid on his home. Some of the material removed by gastric suction was analyzed chemically as LSD. No tests for PCP were carried out because the drug had attained little publicity in the East in 1971. Four days after the ingestion Innes was incarcerated after a nude appearance in public and blinded himself while in jail; he did not remove his eyes from their sockets. He denied that the drug was PCP and claimed that it was PCPA (parachlorphenylalanine). This agent, which increases copulatory behavior in rats and is unrelated to PCP, was claimed to be available on the street in the late 1960s and early 1970s but there is no proof that it was ever available. As late as 1978, during his interview for Koper's article in New Times, Innes apparently denied that PCP caused his behavior and indeed the case was initially listed in the LSD horror tales. Green, the journalist who described the events in 1971, was correct in listing PCP as a potential cause. He had learned that the drug at times caused severe disruption of behavior and that it was sometimes misrepresented as other street drugs. Despite this careful speculation by Green, there is no proof that Innes ever ingested PCP. Seven years after the fact, the case was exhumed, polished and transformed into part of the horrific PCP mythology.

We found one other important example of mythic transformation. During the 60 Minutes portrayal of PCP, Mike Wallace interviewed Barry Braeske who confessed on national television that he had murdered his mother, father and grandfather. Wallace then interviewed Steven Lerner who stated that Braeske had been using PCP (it had been found in his urine) and that he had been under its influence when these crimes were committed. The Braeske story was then repeated multiple times in newspaper stories essentially as Wallace and Lerner (and the 60 Minutes editors) told it. In reality, there was much more to the story. Far from an unpremeditated act, Braeske planned the murders with an accomplice who assisted in the killings. The motive was to collect Braeske's inheritance. The two killers then ransacked the house to create the appearance of a burglary, removed some items from the house and hid these "stolen" goods with the rifle used for the murders. They then went to the movies to establish an alibi and returned to the house. Braeske phoned the police stating that he had just come home and "discovered" the bodies (People vs. Braeske 1979). I do not wish to imply that Braeske could not have been influenced by the PCP. However, the testimony of the behavior above may have influenced the jury to discount Lerner's expert testimony at the trial and convict Braeske of the murder.(4) The portrayal on 60 Minutes was deceptive because of exclusion of this material, but it is doubtful that the deception occurred because Wallace or Lerner wished to lie. They wished to participate in the telling of a myth too meaningful to be altered by a few inconvenient facts.

Martin Phillips, the producer of the PCP segment for 60 Minutes, states that he knew of these characteristics of Braeske's crime. He denied that the withholding of them was in any way deceptive. Phillips believes that "everyone" associated with the case knew that Braeske committed the crime because of PCP. Not only Lerner and the defense attorney but the prosecution and even the jury believed that Braeske was under the drug's influence. Because of this unanimity of opinion that he perceived, Phillips did not feel that leaving out the associated facts we've cited was deceptive.(5)

This event signals another difficulty in television portrayals of fact. Television, like any visual medium, best makes any statement by focusing on the particular rather than explaining the general. One picture is indeed better thin a thousand words and infinitely more deceptive. The visual artist attempts in this focus on the particular or individual instance to illuminate an issue on which the historian or social scientist may expend many thousands of words. Additionally, of course, the display of the individual provokes in us an identification with the character that exceeds anything presentable by the writer constrained by fact. The young woman falling off the building in The White Shadow and the young musician killed in The Wack Attack are immediately more recallable than documented facts about PCP, just as Garbo's Camille is more recallable than documented facts about tuberculosis. The danger is that putative documentary fact as presented by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes may be reshaped to accomplish "artistic goals" while we believe that the material is straight truth from something akin to the International Journal of the Addictions.

There are two other points to be made about the terrifying presentation we have described. Even those caught up in drug lies may justify their behavior by claiming that if the tale scared one individual away from using the drug then the distortion of fact was entirely justified. A scientist active in the black community of Los Angeles told me that The Wack Attack, which is so distorted and laughable that it will become the Reefer Madness of the "angel dust" generation, scared some users away from the drug. The oft-stated problem is that scare factors do not seem to work. One motivation for the street-drug user is the thrill of danger, and scare stories may actually offer a challenge to some (Franklin 1978; Unsigned 1978). The scare approach works on those who have some prior agreement with the message; in others resistance to the message develops. Potential users know that there are people who have used the drug without these disastrous events and resist the message. The story is discounted and the source discredited. Furthermore, there are data that strongly emotional presentations regarding pain and disfigurement provoke tension in the recipient sufficient to generate psychological resistance to the communication's messages (Janis & Terwilliger 1962).

The horror tale has another apparent utility. Young quotes Dr. Gerald DeAngelis:

[There are] irresponsible people in my profession who want publicity to attract dollars to their programs .... Spoonfeeding sensational stories to the media to keep themselves in grant money .... If I go to you with a list of 80 kids that killed their mothers because of PCP and tell you all I need is money to solve the problem, my chances of getting it are good .... (Young 1978).

DeAngelis' words are nearly a horror story, and they may apply to some situations. Someone has to perceive a problem to get money to solve the problem. Since its inception, the problem of drug abuse has been exploited and sensationalized for some of the reasons we have stated in this article and for some pecuniary goals.

Although we have not focused on the reality of danger with PCP (and we believe the reality of danger has little to do with media handling) some comments on that danger are appropriate in this conclusion. We believe that PCP is probably the most dangerous drug, other than alcohol, that has been widely utilized by the recreational drug culture. Our criticism of media exaggeration and exploitation does not alter that assignment. However, there is reason to believe that morbidity secondary to the drug has been overestimated and is declining. Those who worked in hospital emergency rooms in the late sixties will recall that numerous young people were seen with "bad trips" secondary to LSD. Such a clinical event is now rare because, in part, the culture has learned to use the drug and has learned to anticipate its effects and to deal with them. There is evidence that a similar pattern is now operating in the PCP culture. During late 1978 and early 1979 the Harlem Hospital Emergency room saw approximately 60 cases per month of apparent PCP intoxication. The late 1979 admission rate is closer to 10 cases per month (Sixsmith 1979). Additionally, the publicity of the problem may well have led to overdiagnosis. The psychosis that may occur with PCP is distinguished only with difficulty from nondrug psychosis. Few clinical centers confirmed a clinical diagnosis of PCP with detection of the drug in bodily fluids.

Finally, as in other "drug epidemics," professionals in the drug field decide that the entire population of drug users resembles those whose self-selection brings them to where we work. For instance Wesson (1979) has described his experience in a private psychiatric hospital where his PCP patients have been chiefly auto workers whose insurance enables them to be treated at his hospital. Many workers, according to him, came to the attention of supervisors because of erratic work performance or accidents. They often had used the drug for periods of time without trouble and described friends and fellow employees who had not had particular difficulty. There may well be many such "functional" users who have never presented to emergency departments or murdered their mothers. This again does not mean to imply that such users are safe from long-term hazard with use of the drug.

The media presentation of PCP has been conditioned by mythic perceptions of the drug users and should have been predictable in light of previous drug-abuse stories. Malcolm Muggeridge once described journalists feverishly looking at previous newsclips to give them perspective on a story, comparing the recycling journalist to the parched desert traveler consuming his own urine (Muggeridge 1979). The particular character of the randomly violent PCP user has also attracted much attention in television drama. In fact, PCP is the ideal American television dramatic drug because it fits so many violent stereotypes. PCP may be the drug that the American media hoped LSD would be.