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.
