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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

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.

Interest in the Kerner Report was so high that it was published as a paperback and sold almost one million copies in the first two weeks of its release. But despite having created the commission and given it its mission, President Johnson was deeply unhappy with its work. Johnson, after all, had signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act into law, and the report pointed to the failures of that legislation. Simultaneously, it called out the whole of white America for its complicity in the country’s system of oppression. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the report read. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Martin Luther King, Jr., called the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.”

further injecting the riots and civil rights issues into the national debate. On the Democratic side, the conversation was over how to best advance the Johnson administration’s civil rights work and end the war in Vietnam, which the United States had been lumbering through since 1955. On the Republican side, the conversation focused on how to best deal with the antiwar left and the nation’s Black population.

On Election Day, Wallace carried five Southern states, winning almost 10 million popular votes and 46 electoral votes—the greatest showing of any third-party candidate in American history. Wallace remains the last non-Democratic, non-Republican candidate to win any pledged electoral votes.

Nixon is perhaps best remembered for his corruption and the Watergate scandal, but his brand as a politician was a fierce conservatism steeped in the politics of white resentment. But unlike Wallace, who advertised his white supremacist ideologies, Nixon’s approach was more insidious. The best example is his choice of Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland, to be his running mate in 1968. Agnew owed his national profile to the stir he caused when he publicly dismissed the findings of the Kerner Commission report. “Why don’t impoverished white Americans riot? Could it be that they know they will not meet with sympathy, that collective white lawlessness will not be tolerated?” Agnew asked in a July 1968 speech to the National Governors’ Conference. “It is not the centuries of racism and deprivation that have built to an explosive crescendo but the fact that lawbreaking has become a socially acceptable and occasionally stylish form of dissent.”

Republican strategist Lee Atwater would later summarize the Southern strategy in an interview with Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires,” Atwater said. “So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.”

In a diary entry from 1969, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman paraphrased Nixon’s private thoughts. Referring to the president as “P,” Haldeman wrote, “P emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,” Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

By the end of 1969, five leaders within the Black Panther Party—Spurgeon Winter, Jr., Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, and Bobby Hutton—had been murdered in confrontations with police, rival groups, and other Panthers. Most notably, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered when Chicago Police Department officers raided Hampton’s apartment. Hampton, it would later be revealed, had been marked as a “key militant leader” by the FBI. And on the night of his murder, he’d been sedated by his bodyguard, an FBI informant, who’d slipped a barbiturate into Hampton’s drink at dinner. By 1970, a number of leaders within the Black Panther Party, including Lawrence S. Bell, Bobby Rush, Bobby Seale, George W. Sams, Jr., Geronimo Pratt, Eddie Conway, William Lee Brent, Chip Fitzgerald, Cinque Magee, Albert Nuh Washington, Anthony Bottom, Pete O’Neal, Ed Poindexter, David Rice, Russell Shoatz, the Panther 21, and Angela Davis, were behind bars or facing criminal charges ranging from robbery and inciting a riot to illegal weapons possession, conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act into law that same year. The law was the opening salvo in the modern war on drugs, and it provided the federal government a legal foundation for its fight. The law had a number of important provisions, but the most significant was Title II, the Controlled Substances Act, which established five “schedules” to categorize substances based on ...

But South Central was changing rapidly. Many of the good factory jobs that so many came to Los Angeles for were quietly moving out of the city. People blamed the Watts riots in 1965, but in truth, the trend began much earlier. Between 1963 and 1964, twenty-eight industrial manufacturing firms left South Central and parts of East L.A.—four metal shops, eight furniture factories, one electrical machinery factory, one food processing plant, four textile plants, and two oil refineries. These were jobs that sustained the local Black community. They made the difference between a Black working-class neighborhood and a ghetto. By 1965, South Los Angeles—which was more than 80 percent Black—had unemployment rates double those of greater Los Angeles and the entire state of California. One in ten adults in South L.A. was out of work. In 1970, the year Lennie started kindergarten, a quarter of Black Los Angeles lived below the poverty line. Folks got desperate and from that desperation a new South Central emerged, full of gangbangers, hustlers, and pimps, who moved from the margins of the community to the center.

The families displaced by urban renewal could have moved out to some of the housing projects built before the War—Bradley Court, Stephen Crane Village, the Seth Boyden Homes—had they not been reserved for whites. Instead, they had to wait for the construction of Christopher Columbus Homes, Stella Wright Homes, Scudder Homes, and Hayes Homes. The buildings were larger than the white-only projects, high-rises instead of two-to-four-story complexes. They boasted heat, indoor plumbing, and fire-resistant construction. It didn’t take but a few years, however, for folks to realize they were not much different from the slums they’d replaced—just vertical. Time revealed them to be poorly designed and constructed, more warehouses for poor Blacks than neighborhoods.

“To be Black in the U.S. is no longer to be subordinate—not necessarily,” declared a 1974 Time cover story on the Black middle class. “The national effort to give Blacks a more equitable share of the nation’s goods and benefits has had results—uneven but undeniable.” The article went on to explain what middle-class status meant to Black Americans, how it came with an immense feeling of being “a useful, functioning part of society—not indispensable perhaps, but not easily dispensed with either.” It was a keen insight, because expendable is exactly how the rest of Black America was seen. Starting with the Nixon administration, the federal government adopted a policy of benign neglect regarding issues of race. That left Blacks to navigate post-civil-rights America—all the benefits and backlash—themselves. Efforts to fully integrate the country’s schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces withered on the vine. Poverty became concentrated in predominantly Black communities as the 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.

The percentage of Black people earning at least ten thousand dollars a year more than doubled, from 13 to 30 percent between 1961 and 1971. Along the same timeline, the number of Black people in professional and technical jobs rose 128 percent. The number of Black people in college almost doubled from 370,000 to 727,000 between 1967 and 1971. But even as the Black middle class was expanding, deindustrialization and an economic recession were doing away with meaningful opportunities for work. Ultimately, despite the success of a select few, too many Black people still lived in poverty—nearly a third. After a decade of struggle, riots, and death, those folks had nothing to show for it. The tension between this beleaguered group and their upwardly mobile counterparts was captured in the Time magazine write-up. “Probably the crudest dilemma facing the new middle class is their relationship with Blacks left behind in the ghetto,” the article notes. “It is natural enough for the middle class to pull out of the slums once they can afford to—just as other ethnic groups have done. But by leaving, they abandon those who cannot escape the ghetto to its more rapacious elements, aggravating the spread of crime and decay. Small wonder that middle-class Blacks feel some guilt and ambivalence about fleeing to better neighborhoods.”

Writer Colson Whitehead paints a picture of the song’s popularity in Sag Harbor, his semiautobiographical novel about summering in the Black beach community. “At any given moment, someone was playing ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.’ It was the Black national anthem. The disco version of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ courtesy of Mr. McFadden & Mr. Whitehead. It came out of our cars as we drove to the store for last-minute paper plates and ketchup, issued triumphantly from sand-flecked boom boxes on threadbare beach towels, blared out of backyard patios from ancient amps plugged into bright orange extension cords uncoiled for annual duty.”

A 1902 article titled “Negro Cocaine Fiends” in the medical weekly Medical News claimed that cocaine made Black people stronger, increased our endurance, and made us “impervious to the extremes of heat and cold.” Cocaine began replacing coffee and whiskey anywhere hard labor and grueling conditions existed—on docks and levee construction sites along the Mississippi, in mines in the West, on plantations and railroad construction camps throughout the South. “Use of the drug among negroes is growing to an alarming extent,” The Atlanta Constitution reported in 1901. It was this association with the American underclass, with Blacks, that first turned Americans against cocaine.

Hamilton Wright, a physician and pathologist who served in the State Department as United States Opium Commissioner under President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote in a 1910 report, “It has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country.” In a 1914 congressional hearing on drugs, Christopher Koch, a physician serving on the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania, echoed that judgment. “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain,” Koch testified.

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. Cocaine illustrates this point more than any other drug. While other drugs were targets of government campaigns and bad press throughout the 1960s and 1970s, cocaine was normalized. It was given a pass, the kind bestowed in this society only on something found sufficiently white. “Among hostesses in the smart sets of Los Angeles and New York, a little cocaine, like Dom Perignon and Beluga caviar, is now de rigueur at dinners. Some partygivers pass it around along with the canapés on silver trays,” read a May 1977 story in Newsweek magazine. The same year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse published a report simply titled “Cocaine: 1977.” It detailed the rapid rise of cocaine in the United States during the 1970s and outlined the history of the drug and its pharmacology. “It produces a euphoria, a sense of intense stimulation and of psychic and physical well-being accompanied by reduced fatigue,” the report explained. “It is also ranked high in desirability because of its convenience of...

The 1970s had marked a period of “benign neglect” on behalf of the government, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Nixon advisor, put it. Black Americans found themselves further isolated in ghettos as whites fled to the suburbs in response to integration efforts. Deindustrialization and an economic recession also did away with a number of meaningful opportunities for work, causing the Black unemployment rate to double from 7 percent to 14 percent during the decade. As the 1980s approached, it seemed America was a nation unwilling to make social, political, and economic room for its Black citizens. Their backs were against the wall and their neighborhoods were ready to explode. All it would take was a catalyst, and cocaine seemed tailor-made for the moment. The stimulant was associated with pleasure and escape. It flooded the brain with dopamine, leaving users feeling euphoric. It was the ideal drug for a grief-stricken people.

Freebase was identical to the powder from which it was derived on a molecular level. It was the rapid onset of the substance’s high and its low cost that made it popular, especially in poor communities that did not previously have access to cocaine. News of an easier, cheaper method for consuming the nation’s most in-vogue drug spread rapidly by word of mouth. It started first with a small group of dealers and wealthy individuals and expanded out to their associates, and eventually reached the streets. In L.A., that meant the street gangs.

For his central role in the rise of crack, “Freeway” Rick Ross is often miscredited as its inventor. That dubious distinction probably belongs to the mysterious Bay Area college students and hippies who experimented with cocaine throughout the sixties and seventies. Ross, however, is the man who popularized the substance by helping make cocaine, freebase in particular, ubiquitous in Los Angeles. Where cocaine had been a substance reserved for the elite, Ross used his unique connections to both Nicaraguan traffickers and L.A.’s street gangs to create a drug enterprise that made cocaine cheap, widely available, and easy to consume. With ready rock, Ricky Ross did for cocaine what McDonald’s did for beef.

But freebase isn’t a discreet substance. To make it, one needs equipment and chemicals. Using it also creates a scene—pipes, open flames, smoke. Given its complicated nature, freebase had to eventually move from after-hours clubs to spaces where dealers could cook and sell it and where users could smoke it openly. From after-hours clubs, it moved to “freebase parlors” in the early eighties. These spaces were often the homes of dealers, equipped with everything needed to make freebase—stoves, pots for boiling, scales—and stocked with water, baking soda, and cocaine. Just like at opium dens a century earlier, users paid admission at freebase parlors, around three dollars, and fees to rent pipes and butane torches. This ended in the mid-eighties as many first wave users began to descend into addiction and dealers became less inclined to operate freebase parlors in their own homes. They could be evicted if landlords or neighbors found out what they were doing, and the volatile chemicals that were sometimes used could cause fires. To solve the problem, some dealers moved their operations to properties rented for the sole purpose of selling freebase. But then crack, safer and easier to produce, quickly eliminated the market for other forms of freebase. Users brought crack markets home through deals with dealers where they set up shop in their homes in exchange for crack. These crack houses fostered unseen levels of violence and disorder. There was violence in the drug trade, cas...

Hip hop’s first anti-drug hit was released on Sugar Hill Records in 1983. “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” by emcee Melle Mel, one of Grandmaster Flash’s Furious Five, presented a cautionary tale about the dangers of cocaine, including freebase. “A million magic crystals painted pure and white / A multi-million dollars almost overnight,” Melle Mel rhymes. “Twice as sweet as sugar, twice as bitter as salt / And if you get hooked, baby, it’s nobody else’s fault / so don’t do it!”

In March 1981, spurred by a question from a reporter during a press conference, Reagan articulated the approach he intended to take. He argued that it was “virtually impossible” to block the smuggling of drugs into the United States given our porous borders. “It’s like carrying water in a sieve,” he said. Instead of focusing on the supply side of the drug problem, Reagan said he believed the more effective approach was to focus on demand. In other words, instead of going after international cartels bringing drugs into the United States, he wanted to go after users. By targeting young people specifically with an anti-drug education campaign, Reagan thought it was possible to win the war on drugs. “It’s far more effective if you take the customers away than if you try to take the drugs away from those who want to be customers,” he said.

In prior administrations, White House drug policy had been made by a number of offices handling both enforcement and public-health concerns. Under Reagan, however, all drug policy would be directed by one office, led by a man who believed the federal government could arrest and propagandize its way to a drug-free America. What followed was an all-out offensive the likes of which might have made former president Nixon proud. White House officials were insistent that the anti-drug campaign wasn’t a political issue, but starting in the spring of 1983, a year before the president would be up for reelection, First Lady Nancy Reagan flooded television with anti-drug media appearances. First, she put her experience as a Hollywood actress to use when she guest starred as herself on a March 1983 episode of Diff’rent Strokes that focused on child drug and alcohol abuse. Later that year, Mrs. Reagan sat in as a co-host of Good Morning America, ABC’s two-hour talk show, for an entire program dedicated to the topic. She also acted as narrator for 1983’s “The Chemical People,’’ a two-part special on drug and alcohol abuse shown across three hundred public television stations.

Before long, users were not only smoking crack but mixing it and heroin into speedballs, one part heroin and one part crack mixed with water and an acid—lemon juice or vinegar, usually—then cooked on a spoon until it all melted into a smooth, injectable liquid. A speedball, it was said, gave users a balanced high: a combination of a stimulant in cocaine and a depressant in heroin that offered the thrill of crack without the jitters and nerves that usually accompany the substance.

This new attitude congealed into the “broken windows” theory of policing, which held that any visible disorder in a neighborhood, symbolized by actual broken windows, contributed to the perception that the neighborhood was open for crime. As a result, more crimes were committed—including serious violent offenses. Criminologist George L. Kelling and sociologist James Q. Wilson, who came up with the theory, hypothesized that arrests for minor offenses like vandalism, jaywalking, and public intoxication could bring down rates of other crimes, like murder. In collaboration with mayors and other elected officials, police departments in many cities took up broken windows and other zero-tolerance policies.

on October 27, President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. The sweeping legislation added $1.7 billion in federal funds to the $2.2 billion already spent each year on law enforcement, drug treatment, and education programs. Just as the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 had, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act increased the number of drug offenses with mandatory minimum sentences. It established a mandatory minimum sentence of five years without parole for possession of five grams of crack cocaine—the same minimum sentence mandated for possession of five hundred grams of the exact same drug in powder form.

The one area where the government had made headway was incarceration. Federal prisons with a capacity of 28,000 already held 33,135 prisoners in 1986. By 1987, their population had grown to 48,300. The population of state prisons was 470,659 in 1986. It grew to 533,309 by 1987. That year, the Justice Department estimated that at least half the individuals entering America’s prisons would be drug offenders by the end of the decade. It was the acceleration of a maddening dynamic, one wherein Black communities were overpoliced and overincarcerated but still underprotected.

THE CRACK EPIDEMIC DIDN’T end the way some expected. The drug warriors didn’t gallop in on white horses and ride the bad guys out of town. Nor did federal law enforcement disrupt the flow of illegal substances into the United States, creating the long-promised drug-free America. What happened instead was more subtle: the drug trend ended as most trends do, because a new generation of young people simply refused to pick it up. Rates of crack use in most cities hit their peak around 1989, plateaued, and started to decline soon after. Researchers are reluctant to declare an end to any epidemic. There are, for sure, individuals still using the substance in America today, but they’re a small cohort of mostly veteran users, with fewer and fewer people opting for the drug each year.