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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

“News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized Black women ‘addicts’ by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.”

Crackhead, crack baby, superpredator: these terms came to dominate the American imagination in the 1980s and 1990s. And because so much news coverage of the crack epidemic, and the debate around it, was racialized, these characters came to personify the nation’s urban centers and, ultimately, Black America. Crack cast a shadow over the entire community—especially its young people.

The myth of the crack baby was widely accepted as gospel, it seems, because it mapped so well onto existing ideas of Black biological inferiority and cultural pathology, and it stoked anxieties regarding violent crime and the cost of America’s social safety net.

the crack baby, America was delivered a perfect symbol for its animosity toward Black America—a ticking time bomb of violence and expense created because Black mothers cared too little about themselves and their offspring.

The crack baby myth stuck, along with other myths of the crack era. That they persist and continue to distort the image of Black communities is an insult on top of the actual injury of the epidemic—trauma that has largely gone unacknowledged and ...

the U.S. criminal legal system functions as a means of social control by targeting Black communities through the war on drugs.

Unbridled ambition requires a vehicle. Without one, it can torture those who have it, perverting their judgment until ambition meets opportunity and is finally satisfied.

This period marked the birth of America’s racial double standard on drugs. While previous generations believed that drugs had a special impact on Blacks, they were simultaneously puritanical about drug use in whites. In the 1970s, however, Americans developed two minds regarding drugs. They continued to believe in the Black drug fiend but also came to accept “experimentation” in whites as a hallmark of youth. At the absolute worst, addiction in whites was considered a sickness, a tragedy.

To the one, the biggest kingpins grew up in extreme poverty in some of America’s most devastated communities. Like generations of Americans before them, these young prospectors were willing to take on extreme risks and skirt the law in pursuit of their fortunes. The advent of freebase was their Gold Rush, their Homestead Act, their Prohibition.

What Bennett would have likely learned from the Barry administration was that arrests and incarcerations would prove futile as long as the drug trade provided economic opportunity, and as long as treatment needs went unmet.

In a time when crack still cast a dark shadow over entire communities, people sought to elevate themselves by humiliating and outright abusing crack addicts, women especially.

A psychologist might say these women, including Lennie, were depressed and suffering from PTSD. There weren’t, however, many psychologists around to make those observations, so they were characterized within their communities as moody or crazy. The way they coped, with drugs and alcohol, was dismissed as a habit they could break if they weren’t so irresponsible.

The epidemic gave rise to tough-on-crime politics and politicians who refused time and time again to enact public-health solutions to a public-health crisis. Instead, they accelerated mass incarceration in the United States, creating what legal scholar Michelle Alexander describes in her book The New Jim Crow as “an enormous system of racial and social control.”

Blacks and Latinos were economically isolated in ghettos. Compounding that vulnerability was a profound grief, the result of everything they lost in the sixties and seventies—assassinations of leaders, destruction of their communities from riots, a Civil Rights Movement that cost them so much but ultimately missed the mark of securing opportunity and freedom.

The Reagan Doctrine, as it was called, meant actively interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations. It was imperialism through manipulation instead of conquest. Nicaragua was central to these efforts.

TALK OF SUCCESS AND the American Dream rarely accounts for how focused dreamers must be to climb out of abject poverty to some degree of stability. You can’t slow down, stop, or take detours. It’s a never-ending grind to keep going, to create something from nothing and then maintain it.