When Crack Was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

A powerful, devastating, and compelling narrative of the history of the crack epidemic and four individuals whose lives were impacted, upended, and ultimately engulfed by it, Donovan X. Ramsey provides an astute and lucid analysis of an era that is greatly misunderstood by most lay people — and even by most of those that lived through it. Ramsey does his research here, telling the story of the “war on drugs” from the Nixon era through Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, but the most interesting and thought-provoking parts of the book are the stories he tells of those four separate individuals who all lived in and around the horrors of crack, how it influenced them in various ways, and if they were ultimately overcome by it or were able to overcome the substantial obstacles in front of them. The story of the crack era has been told before but I’m not sure if it’s been told exactly like this, and any reader can get attached to the main characters, almost rooting for them to succeed as if this were a work of fiction, and not real-life Americans who saw and experienced horrors that you only read about online or see on the nightly news. But there is a great deal of history to digest here as well, and the politicians of the day certainly did their part to dig in their heels and ensure that the impoverished, forgotten, and largely left-behind Black and Latino populations of the inner cities would bear the brunt of the drug wars, and this legacy of callousness and ineptitude lives on in 2024. As Ramsey writes in the last sentence of his book: “If we fail to do this, to reckon with this history, we are doomed to repeat it.” Clear words from a wonderful and impassioned writer.

• “crack baby” had entered the lexicon alongside “crackhead”
• this was based on a study on just 23 women, that infants exposed to cocaine had significant depression, etc.
• research in 2015, no significant differences in the development between children exposed to cocaine in utero and those who were not
• crackhead, crack baby, superpredator: these terms came to dominate the American imagination in the 80s and 90s
• myth of the crack baby was widely accepted as gospel, along with other myths of the era
• “transgenerational trauma”, trauma that is transferred between generations
• “postmemory”, relationship that the generation after has to the personal, collective, cultural trauma of those who came before
• Kerner Commission, riots of 1967 resulted from Black frustration with the lack of economic opportunity and access to the mainstream of American life
• shift in Black consciousness at the end of the 60s
• Nixon’s fierce conservatism steeped in politics of white resentment
• slowly, an anti protest, anti Black approach to policy took shape in the Nixon White House, with Agnew as its public face
• silent majority, law and order
• Souther Strategy
• drugs as a target
• Ehrlichman, getting the public to associate the hippies with weed and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both, could disrupt both of those communities
• they knew they were lying about the drugs, which he said
• Nixon argues a connection between drugs and crime
• full fledged war on drugs
• DEA
• urban renewal, “Negro removal”
• government would spend millions of dollars to acquire ghetto properties, demolish them, and replace them with new highways and housing projects
• Black middle class joined with whites in their flight to the suburbs
• from this emerged a Black America with two faces: a community either flourishing or languishing, depending on where the observer was standing
• even as the Black middle class was expanding, deindustrialization and an economic recession were doing away with meaningful opportunities for work
• Black people worked together to achieve unprecedented success in local politics
• lack of opportunity that existed for Black youths at the time in the late 70s
• media was failing to deal with the real story of drugs in America: freebase, the drug spreading out of after hours clubs and into the streets
• failed to recognize that the nation was in the earliest stages of a drug epidemic
• indigenous people of the Andes who took note of coca and began cultivating it thousands of years ago
• chewed coca leaves to increase their energy and endurance
• medicinal and religious purposes
• in 1860, German chemist Niemann succeeded in isolating the chemical compound, an alkaloid he named “cocaine”, from “coca”, what the Incas called the plant in their language, and the Latin suffix “-ine”, which means “made from”
• popular throughout Europe and the U.S. in no time
• administered in powdered form by doctors and an anesthetic, Freud was a vocal proponent
• also used recreationally
• often mixed into sodas and cocktails at bars
• association with American underclass, Blacks, that first turned Americans against cocaine
• much of the scientific community in the early 1900s were convinced that cocaine triggered something in Black men that made them rape white women
• Harrison Narcotics Tax, 1914, first ever federal drug law
• proved effective at stemming the consumption of cocaine in the US
• puritanical about drug use in whites
• in the 70s, continued to believe that Black drug fiend but came to accept “experimentation” in whites, cocaine was normalized
• incredibly lucrative
• with a leaf to powder understanding of the cocaine business and some money to invest, Escobar created his own cartel
• transformed it into a professional business
• prices fell, as supply outpaced demand
• whites fled to the suburbs, deindustrialization, recession
• powder cocaine mixed with chemicals to produce a smokeable therefore more potent form of the drug
• “freebase”, cocaine alkaloid was “freed” from its powder base
• difficult to do, and dangerous
• smokeable cocaine could be made with common baking soda instead of volatile chemicals
• freebase was identical to the powder form which it was derived on a molecular level
• substance’s high and its low cost made it popular, especially in poor communities
• members of gangs associated with South Central high schools came together to form the Crips
• according to legend, the name was a reference to the walking sticks members used to style themselves
• handful of other gangs from nearby Compton combined to combat the Crips
• called themselves Bloods, as in “blood brothers”
• “Freeway” Rick Ross, popularized by helping make cocaine, freebase in particular, ubiquitous in L.A.
• Ross used his unique connections to both Nicaraguan traffickers and LA’s street gangs to create a drug enterprise that made cocaine cheap, widely available, and easy to consume
• freebase crept into communities through after hours clubs in LA, NYC, Miami
• crack, safer and easier to produce, quickly eliminated the market for other forms of freebase
• crack houses fostered unseen levels of violence and disorder
• high quality, low cost
• Bloods and Crips major distributors on the West Coast, cocaine trade grew East in part to Jamaican gangs known on the street as “posses”
• Black and Latino youth in particular, drug trade and the rise of freebase was an unprecedented economic opportunity
• Freebase’s powerful but short high drove addiction
• “ready rock”, crack
• Reagan, instead of going after international cartels, wanted to go after users
• as former entertainers, the Reagans recognized the tremendous potential of weaponizing TV and other media in the war on drugs
• 1984, Comprehensive Crime Control Act — reinstated federal death penalty, abolished federal parole, increased penalties for weed
• Nancy, “Just Say No”, 1984
• Len Bias, autopsy concluded that he had consumed the freebase form of the drug
• conclusion flew in the face of statements from friends who were there
• his death galvanized the nation
• smoking crack and mixing it and heroin into speedballs, one part heroin and one part crack mixed with water and acid — lemon juice or vinegar, usually — and cooked on a spoon, melted into a smooth, injectable liquid
• combination of a stimulant in cocaine and a depressant in heroin
• crack to perk up and heroin to mellow
• Schmoke, first elected Black mayor of Baltimore
• spoke about drug decriminalization
• eliminate all criminal penalties for week possession, methadone treatment programs, public health professionals to administer heroin and cocaine to addicts, supervised maintenance or treatment programs
• regulated based upon their potential for harm
• criminalization of narcotics, cocaine, and weed has not solved the problem of their use
• “broken windows” theory, held that any visible disorder in a neighborhood, symbolized by actual broken windows, contributed to the perception that a neighborhood was open for crime
• Kelling, Wilson, hypothesized that minor offenses like vandalism, jay walking, public intoxication, could bring down rates of other crimes, like murder
• Reagan promised a drug free America, proposed a 3B commitment to the effort, including treatment
• Anti Drug Abuse Act, 1986
• law enforcement, drug treatment, education programs, mandatory minimum sentences
• seismic shift in drug policy
• treated crack users and dealers as a different class of criminals, swell America’s jails and prisons
• administration without adult supervision
• cocaine was it its most accessible
• Black communities were overpoliced and overincarcerated but still underprotected
• Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1988, life without parole for offenders with two or more prior convictions
• denied a number of federal benefits to individuals convicted of drug crimes
• Office of National Drug Control Policy, “drug czar”
• Reagan succeeded wildly in drug politics
• war on dealers and users alike
• extra price was paid by Americans living in neighborhoods hit hard by the crack epidemic, mostly Black and Latino communities
• Drug Crime Emergency Assistance Program failed to make a dent in DC’s violent drug trade
• violent crime still increasing at high rates in the late 80s and early 90s
• arrests and incarcerations would prove futile as long as the drug trade provided economic opportunity and as long as treatment needs went unmet
• women users, Black women in particular, fell to the absolute lowest rung on the nation’s social ladders
• crack became almost synonymous with prostitution, sex trade more desperate
• women who smoked crack, especially if they traded sex for crack, lived with the constant fear of being attacked or killed
• smoking crack to relieve depression or PTSD and feelings of worthlessness, being traumatized in efforts to obtain crack, and smoking more crack to relieve the new trauma
• Republicans and Dems migrated back to crime and drugs every election season
• Republicans were unwilling to admit that the course they had taken was wrong
• Bush upped the ante on enforcement and incarceration
• Dems were resolved to never again appear weak on the issue
• leading the effort was Biden, reportedly coined the term “drug czar”
• Dems figured if they couldn’t beat the Republicans, they would join them
• prioritization of candidates who reflected those they lost in the 60s — white men from the south, heartland, blue collar northeast
• Clinton emerged
• because crime victims were disproportionately Black, Clinton was able to pass off proposals that would hurt the more as ones intended to help
• white facing solutions to Black facing problems
• “Sister Souljah” moment, a term later applied to any public repudiation of a controversial person, group, or idea associated with one’s politics
• Clinton on the offensive when it came to crime
• 1994 Crime Act authorized 8B over six years to support the hiring of one hundred thousand new police officers across the country
• new prisons and boot camps
• Baltimore, crime decreased where methadone was readily available
• HIV/AIDS, needle exchange program had tremendous potential to reduce the rate of transmission in the city
• overall, the Clinton budget proposal increased the funding of anti drug enforcement efforts to 4X what they had been under Reagan
• HIV/AIDS, how much money could be saved by reducing rates of infection
• evidence that the government officials were well aware of the large quantities of cocaine coming into the US
• providing overt and covert aid to anticommunist movements within their borders
• Reagan Doctrine, meant actively interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations
• it was imperialism through manipulation instead of conquest
• Iran-Contra, shifted attention from Reagan’s war on drugs at its height
• whispers of Contra involvement in the trafficking of cocaine into the U.S.
• federal government’s intent to fund the Contras with drug money
• 1985–1989, some of the most treacherous years in the war on drugs
• Reagan admin turned a blind eye to foreign actors bringing drugs into the country
• admin actively sought to fund its covert operations with the proceeds
• Mercury News published in 1996. claims that culminated in an argument that the CIA backed Blandon had supplied Ross with enough cocaine to kick off the crack epidemic
• fund the Contras and covert operations in Nicaragua
• federal law enforcement agencies, including the CIA, knew that Contra members were involved with the Columbian cartels and trafficking large shipments of cocaine to the US
• also knew that a number of major US drug rings controlled by Nicaraguan agents were helping to fund the Contras
• media campaign against the story effectively ended Webb’s career as a journalist
• first ever acknowledgement by federal law enforcement that it knowingly allowed drug trafficking into the US while simultaneously waging a war on drugs — all met with a yawn
• smoking gun has yet to emerge, epidemic was the consequence of the anti Blackness that permeated and continues to permeate every facet of American society and public policy
• drug trend ended as most trends do, because a new generation of young people simply refused to pick it up
• around 1989, plateaued, started to decline soon
• improved economy
• significance of hip hop in this shift
• anti crack theme that emerged in the late 80s and continued on through the end of the epidemic
• New Jack City, Boyz in the Hood
• anti violence, anti drug messages at their core
• Dre — alternative to hard drugs, homage to weed
• Chronic: term for high grade weed
• residents of he communities hardest hit by the crack epidemic played some part in its decline
• neighborhood patrols, watch groups
• real community is what sustained Black America
• Americans failed to realize crack was on the decline
• mass incarceration, anti crack fervor created a general tough on crime climate that led to more arrests, more convictions, longer sentences
• result was a boom in the US prison population
• just as crack was exploding, federal government eased its oversight of the gun industry, manufacturers kicked up production of cheap firearms, Saturday Night Specials
• crack epidemic inflicted harms that cannot be measured — attitudes, stereotypes, preconceived notions, perception of Black people as sick and in need of a firm hand
• media’s cocaine narrative
• “trickle down paradigm” — cocaine as a glamour drug
• “siege paradigm” crack epidemic as a crisis originating in the inner city
• “post crisis phase”, returned to public health solutions but maintained its focus on the inner city
• insidious bias in news coverage
• misconduct rose alongside the zero tolerance policies of O’Malley in Baltimore, massive increase in the quantity of arrests, corresponding decline in quality
• Baltimore’s Black residents were disproportionately the targets of this kind of policing
• long term cocaine use can lead to cognitive impairment, including memory loss
• resilience: mental process by which people accept loss, manage emotion, maintain confidence, and problem solve in the face of adversity
• built on a foundation of caring and supportive relationships within and outside of families
• Black identity — a shield, membership in a club
• drugs like cocaine are not more powerful than the human spirit
• in many ways, Black America is stronger post crack than it was before
• Obama, Fair Sentencing Act, Clemency Initiative
• drawdown on the war on drugs, phase out use of private prisons
• aggressive in confronting racism in policing
• Trump began reversing Obama’s reforms, but bipartisan Fair Step Act made the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, eased mandatory minimum sentences, lowering “three strikes” a bit, funding for vocational and rehabilitative programs within prisons