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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

The word was popular, I assume, because it belonged to the grown-up world and using it made us feel grown. I suppose we made it a slur because we feared what it represented, a rock bottom to which any of us could sink. That’s what children do when they’re in search of power over things that frighten us. We reduce them to words, bite-size things that can be spat out at a moment’s notice.

I deduced that my community was in the middle of an invisible war. When people disappeared from the neighborhood, I learned, it was because they’d been killed or locked up. Or worse, they were “on that shit,” meaning they’d become addicted to crack and condemned to a life of wandering the streets like the living dead.

Thirty years after Ira Chasnoff published his landmark study on the effects of cocaine use in pregnancy, the crack baby myth finally exploded. Hallam Hurt, a neurologist, then chair of neonatology at Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center, began researching the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on developmental outcomes in 1988. 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 not.

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. Indeed, in the form of 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.

I still can’t hear Patti LaBelle sing without thinking of Michelle. She’d blast LaBelle’s “If Only You Knew” so loud each night that the muffled sound of the singer’s voice would come through my bedroom windows. “ ’Cause you don’t even suspect, could probably care less, about the changes I’ve been going through,” Patti sings with a tear in her voice. “If only you knew.” It’s heartbreaking for reasons I could never explain.

he advocated for drug decriminalization as early as 1988. It was Schmoke’s belief then that Baltimore, a city with a world-renowned medical and public-health resource in Johns Hopkins University, could serve as a model for treating addiction as a public-health issue instead of a criminal one.

“Sometimes, in the toughest of places against the longest of odds, a guy gets a break, makes a vow and keeps it. The vow takes hold and grows stronger, and everyone is better for it,” read a story in The Star-Ledger.

It called out both state and federal governments for failures in housing, education, and social services. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal,” it famously concluded.

There may be no better symbol for America’s relationship to its Black citizens than King, the most widely respected member of the race, sprawled on a motel balcony in a pool of his own blood. He died a senseless and sudden death, one devoid of dignity—a Black death.

Schmoke started to wonder if maybe the way to kill the three-headed monster of crime, addiction, and now AIDS in Baltimore was to take the profit out of distributing drugs at the street level. Just maybe, he thought, the answer wasn’t law enforcement but decriminalization.

There was no Democrat better for the job. Biden, it turns out, had fingerprints on every major piece of crime legislation during the Reagan years. He served as Democratic floor manager for the successful passage of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act.

Not grandpa Joe!!!!

In fact, it was Biden who reportedly coined the term “drug czar,”

Democrats, led by Biden, came back with even bigger numbers. It was a race to the bottom, with very little distinguishing progressives from conservatives besides small differences on guns and the death penalty. And by the late eighties, those two items were just about all that was left to legislate.

Just as the fight over crime in Baltimore was getting underway, The Mercury News published “Dark Alliance,” its three-part series detailing the connections among the CIA, a Bay Area drug ring, and the South Central Los Angeles dealer who helped introduce crack to cities around the country. The investigation caused shock waves in Baltimore’s Black communities, and Schmoke was one of a few mayors who joined calls for a congressional probe into the matter.

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.