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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

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...