When Crack Was King Quotes

“What Bennett would have likely learned from the Barry administration was that arrests and incarcerations would prove futile as long as the drug trade provided economic opportunity, and as long as treatment needs went unmet.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“You can never forget where you came from or the things that have shaped you. If you do, then how do you celebrate making it to the other side?”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“A psychologist might say these women, including Lennie, were depressed and suffering from PTSD. There weren’t, however, many psychologists around to make those observations, so they were characterized within their communities as moody or crazy.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Crack made them sick, destroyed their lungs, destroyed their families. It wore them out. It was their poison until they were high. Then it was an antidote for all that ailed them.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“For added effect, the doctor claimed cocaine had the double-whammy effect of making Black people both better marksmen and somehow impervious to gunshots, even when vital organs were hit.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“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.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“We just sent a spaceship up into space today,” said Congressman E. Clay Shaw, Jr., of Florida, “and we can from space…pinpoint where every cocaine leaf is on the face of this earth that is growing out in the sunshine. We can do it.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“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. Webb could have also said with authority that one of the Contra-cocaine connections known to the feds was Danilo Blandón, a trafficker who, it turned out, supplied Ricky Ross, the L.A. dealer who catalyzed the crack epidemic. Those were and are the facts.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“The New York Times editorial board has since officially acknowledged the paper’s role in “slandering the unborn.” It wrote, “News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized Black women ‘addicts’ by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Of course, Hurt and other physicians make it a point to caution against cocaine use during pregnancy. Its effects are similar to those of tobacco. It can raise the blood pressure of expectant mothers to dangerous levels and even cause a pregnant woman’s placenta to tear away from her uterine wall. For those reasons, it’s associated with premature birth.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“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.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“ALL EVENTS ARE THE RESULT of countless others, big and small, coming together at a particular moment. They pile up like logs on a pyre.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“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.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Resilience, psychologists say, is built on a foundation of caring and supportive relationships within and outside of families. “Relationships that create love and trust, provide role models and offer encouragement and reassurance help bolster a person’s resilience,” wrote Harvard psychiatrists J. Heidi Gralinski-Bakker and Stuart T. Hauser in their 2004 paper on resilience in vulnerable populations. If that’s true, then it appears Black identity—a construct assigned to the darker peoples of the world for the purpose of discrimination—has become a shield, membership in a club that offers care and support through the toughest times.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Phase one, the “trickle-down paradigm,” lasted from about January 1981 to November 1985. It approached cocaine as a glamour drug that, through the rise of crack, threatened middle-class Americans. At this phase, the media emphasized the importance of public-health interventions. Between December 1985 and November 1986, coverage shifted to phase two, a “siege paradigm,” which reframed the crack epidemic as a crisis originating in the “inner city.” This phase of coverage racialized the substance and emphasized a law-enforcement response. Finally, after much criticism that the media was hyping the crack epidemic and engaging in harmful stereotyping, coverage shifted to a “post-crisis” phase, which returned to public-health solutions but maintained its focus on the inner city, continuing the racialization. Television”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Perhaps some of the best research into the media’s handling of the crack epidemic was conducted by Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell for their book Cracked Coverage, published in 1994. For the book, Reeves and Campbell studied some 270 network-news packages dealing with cocaine between 1981 and 1988 and, from that coverage, identified three phases of what they call the media’s “cocaine narrative.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Many believe that the law enforcement response is what ended the violence that accompanied the crack era. New research suggests the availability of guns was a more salient variable. 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. It turns out, just as crack was exploding, the federal government eased its oversight of the gun industry, and manufacturers kicked up production of cheap firearms, dubbed “Saturday night specials” by law enforcement due to the rate at which they showed up at weekend crime scenes. According to the analysis by Williams and Bartley, production of these guns peaked in 1993, the same year the murder rate peaked nationally. It was product-liability lawsuits, more funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the Brady Bill that forced a decline in the production of cheap guns, and subsequently in the murder rate.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“More broadly, anti-crack fervor created a general tough-on-crime climate that led to more arrests, more convictions, and longer sentences. The result was a boom in the U.S. prison population. According to the Sentencing Project, there were 40,900 people incarcerated in 1980 for drug offenses. That number swelled to 489,000 by 2013. People of color absorbed much of the explosion in incarceration. In 1980, they comprised more than 40 percent of the state and federal prison population. By 2010, that number had grown to 68 percent—despite people of color accounting for just around 30 percent of the total U.S. population. What did the nation get for the widespread warehousing of citizens?”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“One study of the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s found that grassroots nonprofits focused on combating crime had a significant impact. Using data spanning 264 cities and more than twenty years, sociologist Patrick Sharkey and his team at New York University observed that for every one hundred thousand city residents, the addition of ten organizations led to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“On the other hand, many youths report that it was their direct personal observations of the ravages of crack smoking and heroin injection among their older siblings, parents, and members of the community that led them to avoid crack and heroin use.” 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.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“More than any other individual rapper, Dr. Dre deserves recognition for his role in helping turn the page on the crack epidemic. As a member of N.W.A. and producer for the group, he helped articulate the conditions of life in the ghetto on songs like “Dopeman,” “Fuck tha Police,” and “Gangsta Gangsta.” Then in 1992, three years after leaving N.W.A., Dr. Dre dropped his magnum opus, The Chronic. The album is ranked by many, including Vibe, Spin, and Rolling Stone, as one of the greatest albums of all time.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“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.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“CIA claimed to find no evidence that “any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing” with any of the figures mentioned in “Dark Alliance,” including Ross and Blandón. The report did admit, however, that there were instances where the CIA did not, “in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” But to that it offered the curious caveat that, under an agreement in 1982 between Reagan attorney general William French Smith and the CIA, agents were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving nonemployees, defined as paid and nonpaid “assets.” The CIA’s admissions were major. They implicated the U.S. government in cocaine trafficking during the eighties, and therefore in some of the devastation of the crack epidemic. There was some attention paid to the report, but overall, the revelations came and went.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“CIA claimed to find no evidence that “any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing” with any of the figures mentioned in “Dark Alliance,” including Ross and Blandón. The report did admit, however, that there were instances where the CIA did not, “in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” But to that it offered the curious caveat that, under an agreement in 1982 between Reagan attorney general William French Smith and the CIA, agents were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving nonemployees, defined as paid and nonpaid “assets.” The CIA’s admissions were major.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Despite the many troubling facts exposed by “Dark Alliance,” the media campaign against the story effectively ended Webb’s career as a journalist. He resigned from The Mercury News in November 1997 and never again worked in a newsroom. In the years following, Webb worked as an investigator for the California State Legislature and published the occasional story as a freelancer. He was laid off from his job in 2004 and shortly after was found dead in his home with two gunshot wounds to the head. Coroners ruled Webb’s death a suicide, to the continued disbelief of many.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“To be sure, “Dark Alliance” was far from a perfect piece of journalism. In his eagerness to break the story of the CIA, the Contras, and crack, Webb overstated some key claims. It was not true, for example, that Blandón’s drug ring “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles.” The piece also suggested in several passages that the CIA actively participated in Blandón’s operation. As much as testimony points in that direction, Webb never presented a smoking gun. 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. Webb could have also said with authority that one of the Contra-cocaine connections known to the feds was Danilo Blandón, a trafficker who, it turned out, supplied Ricky Ross, the L.A. dealer who catalyzed the crack epidemic. Those were and are the facts.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“The Mercury News published Webb’s reporting the week of August 18, 1996, in a three-part, twenty-thousand-word series titled “Dark Alliance.” The series made several claims that culminated in an argument that a CIA-backed Blandón had supplied Ross with enough cocaine to kick off the crack epidemic. All of it was done, Webb claimed, to fund the Contras and covert operations in Nicaragua. Despite many of the revelations having already been exposed by the Kerry Committee, the “Dark Alliance” series set off a firestorm. It swept through Black talk-radio programs and attracted thousands of readers to The Mercury News’s website, making it one of the first viral news stories.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“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. That period included two major anti-drug-and-crime bills, in 1986 and 1988. Indeed, at the very moment Ronald Reagan made his special address to warn the nation about crack, the Contras that his administration created were under investigation by the Kerry Committee. Moreover, as he signed legislation in 1986 and 1988 to increase penalties for American drug dealers and users, his administration was turning a blind eye to foreign actors bringing drugs into the country. Worse yet, the administration actively sought to fund its covert operations with the proceeds. —”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Perhaps the closest the Kerry Committee got to proof of the federal government’s intent to fund the Contras with drug money was a statement made by DEA officials before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime in July 1988. According to those officials, Ollie North suggested to the DEA in June 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money acquired in a Medellín Cartel sting be given to the Contras. The suggestion was ultimately rejected by the DEA, but the fact that it was made, and by the Reagan administration’s man in charge of “the Enterprise,” illustrates an eagerness on the part of the administration to fund the Contras using the proceeds of drug trafficking.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“The Kerry Committee report was finally released on April 13, 1989, and its findings were damning. According to the report, the committee found considerable evidence linking individual Contras to drug trafficking. Further, it found that in each case, “one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era