Hard Drugs, Hard Choices

Fred Friendly and the Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society once again take to the roundtable to hash out the issues on another hot topic. The first episode of Hard Drugs, Hard Choices, "Teaching, Testing, and Treatment," begins simply enough with moderator Charles J. Ogletree Jr. querying Dan Rather about his response to a hypothetical situation in which his son is suspected of using drugs in the house. But from the seed of this initial line of enquiry come a whole host of fruitful and thorny speculations. Would a parent call the police? Should employers be allowed to test employees? Do solutions lie more in the direction of penalties or rehabilitation? The distinguished panel, which include a number of key government and media people (William F. Buckley, CIA Director William Webster, FBI Director William Sessions, former Secretary of HEW Joseph A. Califano, Jr., and ACLU General Counsel Nadine Strossen, among others), probe, argue, and try to resolve these legal and moral dilemmas. In the other episode we watched, "Vigilantism and Legalization," the stakes are raised further with discussion about legalization (backed by Buckley and Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke) and the role of vigilantes in cases where law enforcement has proved ineffective (with spokesman Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, on hand). Intelligent discourse is a rarity on television. In these days of 10 second sound bites, and dozens of images compressed into half a minute, a "talking heads" show which holds our abbreviated attention spans has to be very good indeed. Hard Drugs, Hard Choices is very good, and the series is highly recommended. The other two episodes are "Law, Order, and the Community," and "The Crisis Beyond Our Borders." (Available from: Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society, Graduate School of Journalism, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 248, New York, NY 10115.)