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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

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.

Contrary to popular opinion and against the advice of many, 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.

By this point, it was clear that King’s dream and the hope it represented were beginning to fade from the American consciousness. In fact, in 1966—just three years after his “I Have a Dream” speech—King himself expressed his disillusionment in an interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace. It was in this interview that he called riots “the language of the unheard.” “And what is it that America has failed to hear?” he added. “It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

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.”

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.

Despite the growing rift between the groups, middle class and poor Black people worked together to achieve unprecedented success in local politics. The energy of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements was still very much alive in Black America. So Blacks, regardless of class status, mobilized in the 1970s and pooled their resources to elect Black mayors for the first time in a number of big cities, especially in cities that had been rocked by riots in the late sixties.

A stimulant, the substance gets into the bloodstream of users and intoxicates them, making them feel confident, energized, and serene. Those qualities, of course, made cocaine the ideal drug for Black youth at a time when we were either celebrating—or fighting to be one of those who were “movin’ on up.”

There was, however, nothing to share, because the story was a complete fabrication, one that was only exposed after “Jimmy’s World” was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing the following year. But while “Jimmy’s World” was fake, it reveals how, at the dawn of the crack epidemic, poor Black communities and drugs existed in a very dark place within the American imagination.

It was during a 1982 visit to Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, California, that the First Lady happened upon a slogan for her campaign. When asked by a girl what to do if she was offered drugs, Mrs. Reagan responded plainly, “Just say no.”

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.

The year 1983 also marked the launch of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in Los Angeles. DARE was the brainchild of Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who also pioneered the concept of special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units within the LAPD, spurring their creation in police departments across the United States. Gates also infamously defended police chokehold maneuvers in 1982, when he argued that a physiological deficiency made them deadly to Blacks. He was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “We may be finding that in some Blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.”

When Schmoke opened his mouth on that April day in 1988, what came out was revolutionary. In his trademark even tone, he criticized U.S. drug policy and proposed that the mayors of America’s big cities and their police chiefs consider decriminalization. “Have we failed to consider the lessons of the Prohibition era?” Schmoke asked the leaders. “Now is the time to fight on the only terms the drug underground empire respects—money. Let’s take the profit out of drug trafficking.”

To his credit, Schmoke refused to back down in the face of criticism. To the contrary, when he was asked months later by Rangel to testify before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, he again presented a case for decriminalization. “We have spent nearly seventy-five years and untold billions of dollars trying to square the circle, and inevitably we have failed,” he said. Instead of a law-enforcement response to drug use, Schmoke proposed “a measured and carefully implemented program of drug decriminalization.”

Merely suggesting there was another way to address the issue of drugs in urban America cost Schmoke much of the credibility and political capital he’d been building since he was fourteen years old. Within less than a year, he’d been transformed in the public imagination from a brilliant young politician with proven leadership on urban crime to a naïve idealist who was in over his head in Baltimore, “a brilliant spokesman for a bad idea,” as New York mayor Ed Koch described him. Indeed, the rebuke was so immediate and intense that Schmoke began jokingly introducing himself when speaking publicly as “the young man people say used to have a political future.”

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 drew criticism no sooner than it was signed. Analysts kicking the tires found it didn’t exactly live up to its promises regarding drug education and treatment, or the president’s vow that the law wasn’t intended to fill prisons and jails with drug users. Just 12 percent of the $1.7 billion provided by the law was allocated to drug education programs. In fact, most of the funds were set aside for criminal justice efforts—$1.1 billion for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and $96.5 million for new federal prisons, for example. Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration was unsure of how to dole out the money. After the bill had been signed, all the pens had been handed out, and the midterms were over, the logistics of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act were left to bean counters in the Office of Management and Budget. “It was an administration without adult supervision,” Deborah Steelman, a former associate director of the OMB, told The New York Times. “Overall, the details were left to implement themselves.”

Ronald Reagan declared his efforts in the war on drugs “an untold American success story.” The use of illegal drugs had, he said, “already gone out of style in the United States.” It was an assessment completely divorced from reality. Most experts agreed, to the contrary, that Reagan’s anti-drug campaigns had failed. “We’re not winning the war on cocaine,” Coast Guard admiral Paul Yost admitted to The Washington Post in February 1988. Indeed, according to the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee report, inventories were high, wholesale prices were the lowest ever recorded, cocaine sold on the street had never been purer, and the substance was readily available throughout all areas of the United States. But while Reagan had failed to create a drug-free America, he’d succeeded wildly in drug politics. He did so by conflating the nation’s legitimate fear of rising crime with its anxieties about increased drug use. The undercurrent to both, of course, seemed to be lingering hostility toward people and communities of color.

They had to navigate both drug-related violence and police harassment. They saw loved ones lose their lives to both addiction and incarceration. All that remained after their communities were ransacked by the epidemic and the war was grief, trauma, and shame.

Beyond Bennett and beyond just D.C., many placed the blame for the crack epidemic and its accompanying violence at the feet of big-city mayors, the majority of whom were Black Democrats.

The police raid and the arrests were meant to break them up, but it only brought the group closer. If anything, the attention from police—throwing Terrance and Shawn’s moms in jail—made them feel persecuted. From then on, it was the Zoo Crew versus the police. And with every overzealous police interaction that followed, the Zoo Crew was further cast as a symbol for Newark’s least and left out. They were at once victims of Newark’s neglect and agents of harm in the city. The police were attempting to disrupt the flow of drugs in the city but abusing people in the process, something they had a history of in Newark.

Women users, Black women in particular, fell to the absolute lowest rung on the nation’s social ladder. As such, their stories and their insights reveal the depth of the crack epidemic—just how bad things got and what damage was done.

And the longer a woman remained in the life, the more likely she was to experience additional trauma. It was a devastating cycle: smoking crack to relieve depression or PTSD and feelings of worthlessness, being retraumatized in efforts to obtain crack, and smoking more crack to relieve the new trauma.

In fact, it was Biden who reportedly coined the term “drug czar,” the shorthand used for the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. As the nineties approached, the parties became locked in a bitter custody battle for the war on drugs marked by one-upmanship.

The 1994 Crime Act also included some particularly callous provisions aimed, it seemed, at cruelty for the sake of tough-on-crime politics. It allowed juveniles as young as thirteen to be tried as adults in federal court for certain violent crimes and crimes involving guns. It also ended college funding for the incarcerated by making them ineligible for Pell grants. The last measure even drew the ire of conservative Washington Post columnist George Will, who called the elimination of Pell grants for prisoners an act of “grandstanding and chest-thumping” by “Sheriff Clinton” and a Congress full of “would-be Wyatt Earps hot to be deputized.”

Truly, what the Mayor’s Working Group on Drug Policy put forward went a long way to reduce the harm associated with addiction. It showed, for example, that crime decreased where methadone was readily available. And that, with between ten thousand and thirteen thousand of Baltimore’s thirty-five thousand intravenous drug users carrying the HIV/AIDS virus, a needle-exchange program had tremendous potential to reduce the rate of transmission in the city. Finally, with 57 percent of drug arrests in 1992 for mere possession, the creation of a drug court could free up resources and allow law enforcement to focus on drug dealers.

That’s the story of the crack epidemic told through happenstance. Existing along the same timeline is evidence that government officials were well aware of the large quantities of cocaine coming into the United States. In fact, it appears that they facilitated it. Such a claim may seem wild on its face, but the evidence is hiding in plain sight—in news reports, government documents, and the firsthand accounts of individuals involved.

It’s worth noting that the period from 1985, when the AP first reported the Contra-cocaine connection, to 1989, when the Kerry Committee report was released, spanned some of the most treacherous years in the war on drugs.

What Webb could say with authority was exactly what the Kerry Committee had: that federal law-enforcement agencies, including the CIA, knew that Contra members were involved with the Colombian cartels and trafficking large shipments of cocaine to the United States. They also knew that a number of major U.S. drug rings controlled by Nicaraguan expats were helping to fund the Contras.

A smoking gun has yet to emerge proving a government conspiracy to poison communities of color using crack. But what the evidence supports is more insidious: the crack epidemic was the consequence of the anti-Blackness that permeated and continues to permeate every facet of American society and public policy. Reagan, the CIA, the cartels, and the Contras had no need to conspire, because the entire machinery of the United States was designed either to our detriment or with no regard for us at all. The crack epidemic was not the product of an anti-Black conspiracy but the product of an anti-Black system.

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.

Other factors seem more salient in the decline of violent crime, including an improved economy. Poor economic conditions were, after all, responsible for the creation of highly competitive, often violent drug markets in urban America. And, in a way that Nancy Reagan never could, it appears the community and culture surrounding the most vulnerable young people demonstrated why they should just say no, rather than merely telling them.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of hip hop in this shift. The culture was blasted by the mainstream for its vulgarity, “gangsta rap” in particular. Just a cursory look at some of the most prominent popular albums and songs reveals, however, an anti-crack theme that emerged in the late eighties and continued on through the end of the epidemic in the mid-nineties. New Jack City, Boyz n the Hood, and Jungle Fever, all released in 1991, depict the horrors of the crack epidemic.

Rap was also deeply engaged with the crack epidemic and the war on drugs. At the time, a common retort from rappers to criticism of their lyrics was that they were merely reflecting the reality of the streets. It was dismissed by some as an excuse, but when it comes to crack, they were telling the truth.

Despite commonly held beliefs in Black complacency with drugs and crime, it’s also clear that residents of the communities hardest hit by the crack epidemic played some part in its decline. In several cities, they formed neighborhood patrols and watch groups with the specific goal of driving out drug dealers and closing down crack houses, taking the dangerous work of securing their neighborhoods into their own hands. They also founded organizations, launching campaigns and initiatives to provide access to substance-abuse programs and job training, to beautify streets, build playgrounds, and mentor children.

Iowa went so far as to adopt the federal government’s one hundred to one (crack to powder cocaine) sentencing disparity.

Beyond the quantifiable damage, the crack epidemic inflicted harms that cannot be measured—the attitudes, stereotypes, and preconceived notions that still linger in the hearts and minds of many Americans. The crack epidemic advanced in the American imagination the perception of Black people as sick and in need of a firm hand. This idea animated crime legislation to devastating effect, and it persists today in U.S. politics and domestic policy.

The ways we talk about the crack epidemic, or don’t in some cases, reveal our deep misunderstanding of it. We don’t discuss the crack epidemic properly because we barely understand what happened.

Schmoke did, however, in his first news conference following O’Malley’s win, question how O’Malley might deliver on his promise of zero-tolerance policing, and on the implications of such a policy. “My concern would be a dramatic increase in cases of police abuse,” Schmoke said. Schmoke’s concern would prove prescient nearly two decades later, after the death of a twenty-five-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray while in police custody led to a week of protest in Baltimore. The U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department in the wake of the protests. Published in August 2016, the DOJ’s report revealed a pattern and practice of abuse wherein officers routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents through unlawful stops and the use of excessive force. Investigators found that misconduct rose alongside the zero-tolerance policies initiated under O’Malley.

Then, as an opioid crisis spread throughout the rest of the country, people looked again to Kurt Schmoke’s time as mayor of Baltimore and the effectiveness of the needle-exchange program he championed, a program that stands as perhaps his most enduring achievement.

THE CRACK EPIDEMIC HAS grown in legend since it tailed off in the mid-nineties, and the further away we get from its height, the more grotesque it has become in the American imagination. That’s partly a product of memory itself, it seems, but also a consequence of which memories of the epidemic have been prioritized, and whose.

Hillary Clinton’s eventual loss to Donald Trump threatened to halt efforts to reform the criminal legal system. Indeed, a major element of Trump’s campaign to “make America great again” was an appeal for law and order right out of Richard Nixon’s playbook.

We know that drug epidemics come and go. Like the flu or the common cold, they infect the body politic when our systems are compromised. We are presented with options when these epidemics occur. We can shore up the weakened systems that allowed the epidemic to take hold. We can rally around vulnerable communities, providing them with resources and support to survive. Or we can turn our backs on those suffering. Worse yet, we can attack them as though they are affliction itself instead of the afflicted.

Throughout the writing process, I had brain fog, insomnia, stomach pains, heart palpitations. On more than one occasion I visited the ER, certain that I was dying. Doctors and nurses would check my vitals; all normal. Then they’d ask me if I had any major stressors or if I’d experienced any recent trauma.

For the misunderstood, the marginalized, and the maligned