[This book "offers a fresh history of the epidemic that gripped
minority communities, inflamed media coverage and led to draconian
drug laws."]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY CRACK BECAME THE 1980S ‘SUPERDRUG’  
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Jonathan Green
July 11, 2023
The New York Times Book Review
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_ This book "offers a fresh history of the epidemic that gripped
minority communities, inflamed media coverage and led to draconian
drug laws." _

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_When Crack Was King
A People's History of a Misunderstood Era_
Donovan X. Ramsey
One World
ISBN 9780525511809

Crack erupted across America’s marginalized urban neighborhoods in
the 1980s like a biblical plague torn from the pages of Revelation.
The drug offered an inexpensive, nirvana-like high, leaving users
clamoring for ever larger doses in a hopeless yet insatiable quest to
sustain the same levels of bliss. It was the perfect “superdrug,”
and Black communities, redlined in concrete city blocks, were
neglected as their wealthier white neighbors escaped crack’s worst
embrace. Those left behind absorbed the brunt of an apocalyptic
epidemic that redrew a generation with ruthless precision across
racial and economic fault lines.

Donovan X. Ramsey came of age in a crack-era neighborhood in Columbus,
Ohio, where it was better not to ask questions. “It was like growing
up in a steel town where nobody talked about steel,” he writes in
“When Crack Was King,” his panoramic social history of the rise
and fall of the epidemic. His book offers a needed corrective to the
period’s biased media coverage and tropes — “crackhead,”
“crack baby,” “superpredator” — the impetus behind some of
the country’s most draconian drug legislation.

Ramsey, a freelance journalist, draws the epidemic’s contours,
tracing its roots to the hard-fought advances of the civil rights era
and the rise of a nascent Black middle class in the 1960s and early
’70s, developments that triggered a backlash in the form of
President Richard Nixon’s ill-fated war on drugs. In a diary entry
from 1969, Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote that Nixon
“emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is
really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this
while not appearing to.”

Nixon achieved this goal, Ramsey argues, by switching from a focus on
organized crime and wholesale importers of narcotics to one on the
users themselves, criminalizing already marginalized Black and brown
communities. As president, Ronald Reagan amplified the strategy.
Spurred by the moral panic surrounding the 1986 death from cocaine of
the basketball star Len Bias, Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug
Abuse Act, passed the same year.

Notoriously, the act mandated a five-year minimum prison sentence for
the possession of five grams of crack, while the equivalent sentence
for possessing powder cocaine required 500 grams, thus enshrining into
federal law the disparity between “Negro Cocaine Fiends” (the
title of a 1902 article in the weekly Medical News), and Hollywood
hipsters caught taking a “bump” at parties. The legislation
swelled America’s prisons with its poorest citizens.

In Ramsey’s chronicle, the politics of Capitol Hill are braided
together with the politics of the street as he recounts the stories of
four survivors of the crack epidemic over a span of almost 60 years.
One, Lennie Woodley, was sexually abused from the age of 7 by an uncle
in South Central Los Angeles, an area decimated by factory closures,
leaving “gangbangers, hustlers and pimps” to fill the vacuum. When
Lennie was 15, a man picked her up at a bus stop in Culver City, took
her to a hotel and, after having sex with her, gave her $86.
Afterward, crying in shame and despair, she was offered a line of
cocaine by another man as a salve. He turned out to be a pimp. Lennie
was hooked — on the money and, soon enough, crack too.

 
Years later, Lennie was combing the carpet looking for tiny fragments
of crack to smoke when her 2-year-old son, a pacifier in his mouth,
dropped to his hands and knees to aid her efforts, plucking up lint
and offering it to her hopefully. She realized she had to stop and
entered rehab, only to relapse.

From the outset, cocaine democratized the drug game. It broke the
Italian mafia’s monopoly on street narcotics, principally heroin, as
Colombian cartels flooded major American cities with cocaine for as
little as a tenth the cost per gram. For underprivileged Black and
Latino youths, becoming a crack dealer was an opportunity to escape
the generational cycle of poverty. The drug, Ramsey writes, promised
to be “their Gold Rush, their Homestead Act, their Prohibition.”
One of his subjects, Elgin Swift, dealt crack on the side in Yonkers
to make money for bus fare, food and other essentials in a
neighborhood where everyone, including Elgin’s father, seemed to be
either using crack or selling it.

 

Eventually, however, the economic emancipation achieved by “getting
money” became a curse. Families were ruptured by the twin evils of
addiction and incarceration. Corner crews fought deadly gun battles
over access to lucrative customer bases in public-housing tower
blocks, pitting neighbor against neighbor and leaving residents
prisoners in their own homes, trapped in fiefs controlled by drug
gangs.

Shawn McCray, a basketball prodigy from the Hayes Homes in Newark, was
caught with crack and narrowly escaped prison when a judge showed him
mercy. He went on to graduate from Caldwell College with a degree in
sociology. He vowed to go straight and took on a 9-to-5 job, only to
succumb to the gravitational tug of the streets to hustle with the Zoo
Crew, one of Newark’s biggest drug-trafficking rings
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in the early 1990s. (McCray eventually gave up dealing and went on to
coach boys’ basketball at his former high school.)

Ramsey aims to give the story of the crack epidemic a human face while
telling it from start to finish, a herculean task. By and large he
succeeds. With a focus on deliverance for his characters as they get
sober or stop dealing drugs, he leaves less explored the homicide
epidemic that crack ignited — the violence that was an inevitable
part of business for operations like the Zoo Crew. Still, he includes
an account of Kurt Schmoke, once a zealous Baltimore prosecutor who
sought the death penalty for a crack dealer guilty of gunning down a
Black detective. Schmoke went on to become Baltimore’s mayor, and,
in an impressive volte-face, resolved to try to halt the suffering
brought on by crack by decriminalizing users. His biggest successes
came in 1994, when he inaugurated a needle-exchange program and a
drug-treatment court intended to help addicts avoid jail.

Yet it was not politicians but, rather, people in crack-riddled
communities who finally brought an end to the epidemic. By the
mid-1990s a new generation had come of age, determined to reject the
drug’s grip on minority neighborhoods. Marijuana, accompanied by the
bass lines of Dr. Dre’s triple-platinum 1992 album “The
Chronic,” supplanted crack. This younger generation heeded the
cautionary tale of the 1991 movie “New Jack City” and the street
justice meted out to its murderous protagonist, the Harlem crack
kingpin Nino Brown_._ The movie’s antidrug message was in stark
contrast to the glamorization of the heroin-trafficking mafia dons in
“The Godfather” — yet more evidence of the disparity with which
America defines its anti-establishment idols.

_Jonathan Green is the author, most recently, of “Sex Money Murder:
A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal.” He is working on a book
about a group of politically radicalized Christians who formed a
deadly armed militia._

* Crack
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* Cocaine
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* The War on Drugs
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* 1980s
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* Ronald Reagan
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* Richard Nixon
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