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.

The commission released its report seven months later, on February 29, 1968. The 426-page document reasoned that the riots of 1967 resulted from Black frustration with a lack of economic opportunity and access to the mainstream of American life. 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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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 their potential for addiction and their medicinal value.

It was an accomplishment put in stark relief just a week later when four students were killed during similar demonstrations at Kent State. Kurt Schmoke was largely credited for making it all possible.

With hysteria at a fever pitch, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act on December 17, 1914. It was the first-ever federal anti-drug law. It did not prohibit the possession of drugs, however. Rather, the act imposed a special tax on the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products in the United States. The result was that it became more expensive for retailers to keep cocaine-laced products on the shelves, thereby making it harder for consumers to access them.

(Between 1950 and 2010, Baltimore lost approximately one-third of its population and 70 percent of its white residents.)

Schaefer tried to reverse the city’s fortunes by encouraging the development of the downtown and tirelessly promoting the city’s Inner Harbor, in hopes that Baltimore would survive with a shift toward tourism. But tourism dollars never really materialized. The result was three distinct Baltimores, says historian Marc V. Levine: the Renaissance City, represented by downtown and the Inner Harbor; the Suburbs, neighborhoods located outside city limits in Baltimore County; and the Underclass City, comprised of West Baltimore and other neighborhoods like Fairfield, Dundalk, the Monument Street area.

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.”

He outlined three initial steps. The first was to eliminate all criminal penalties for marijuana possession. Step two was to build on existing methadone treatment programs for heroin users by allowing public-health professionals to administer heroin and cocaine to addicts “as part of supervised maintenance or treatment programs.” Finally, Schmoke wanted the government to explore broader decriminalization through a commission that would “study substance abuse, including tobacco and alcohol, and make recommendations on how they should be regulated based upon their potential for harm.”

“Providing legal access to currently illicit substances carries with it the chance—although by no means the certainty—that the number of people using and abusing drugs will increase,” Schmoke conceded. “But addiction, for all of its attendant medical, social, and moral problems, is but one evil associated with drugs. Moreover, the criminalization of narcotics, cocaine, and marijuana has not solved the problem of their use.”

After twelve years of being denied access to the White House, Democrats figured if they couldn’t beat Republicans, they would join them. The party underwent a transformation that included rebranding, realignment on the issues, and the prioritization of candidates who reflected the voters Democrats lost in the 1960s—white men from the South, the heartland, and the blue-collar Northeast. A star emerged from this shift in Democratic politics: Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.

In 1993, Baltimore spent just over $150,000 on drug treatment programs,

Economists Geoffrey Williams and W. Alan Bartley compiled handgun price and production data from the late eighties and early nineties from advertisements in Gun Digest. Comparing that data to crime rates revealed a “supply shock” of low-priced pistols, corresponding to higher levels of gun homicide among young Black men.