When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

by Donovan X. Ramsey

Crack babies were, the stories went, infants born afflicted due to their exposure to cocaine in the womb. They were the “tiniest victims” of the crack epidemic—deformed, intellectually disabled, and expected to overwhelm taxpayer-funded public services. Exactly how many crack babies were born was, it seems, secondary to the horror and resentment they could evoke.

When she finally concluded her research in 2015, the results were astounding: there were no significant differences in the development between children exposed to cocaine in utero and those who were

MANY ARE ADAMANT THAT the crack epidemic was orchestrated by the U.S. government to disrupt communities of color, poor Black communities in particular. It’s not a far-fetched theory, given this nation’s penchant for terrorizing its Black citizens and the countless points at which the rising epidemic was noted by officials but ignored.

That’s the story of the crack epidemic told through happenstance. Existing along the same timeline is evidence that government officials were well aware of the large quantities of cocaine coming into the United States. In fact, it appears that they facilitated it.

I’VE BEEN ALL OVER the country and have interviewed hundreds of people whose lives were touched by crack, but never have I met a “crackhead.” I met people—dealers who thought they’d have just one hit, party girls who stayed at the party a little too long, men and women who simply started experimenting with drugs in the wrong decade. Their stories were buried by that word.

It’s time we begin the difficult work of excavating the real stories of the individuals, families, and communities who were swept up in the crack epidemic. A part of that work is putting ideas like “crackhead,” “crack baby,” and “superpredator” to rest. They were always constructs, after all, distortions of flesh-and-blood people. It wasn’t those people—our people, us—who should have been the objects of our fears but the forces that created them.

Tensions mounted, and I was once again transported back in time as city officials debated whether to arrest the boys or put them in jobs programs, or maybe even issue citations to their parents. I couldn’t help but worry about what was around the corner in a moment when Black death and suffering were more visible than ever, when calls to end police brutality still went unanswered, when nearly twenty-nine thousand Black Americans were dead from COVID and almost one-third of Black Americans knew someone who’d died from the illness, when mass evictions were threatening to further destabilize Black communities, when architects and advocates of mass incarceration had been elected president of the United States, when the response to Black boys hustling on corners (water this time) was still the police.

All it would take was the right substance—novel, cheap, and abundant—for us to be right back where we were a few decades ago, I thought. I hoped for everyone’s sake that it didn’t come along.