The Fading Lessons of the Crack Epidemic
With Donovan X. Ramsey
As the U.S. enters a “fourth wave” of the opioid crisis, I spoke with journalist and author Donovan X. Ramsey about the crack epidemic. In his book, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era, and in conversation, Donovan details how the epidemic began, why government policies were ineffective, and how lessons from the crack era are fading from memory today.
Donovan’s reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, WSJ Magazine, Ebony, and Essence, among other outlets. He has been a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, NewsOne, and theGrio. Donovan also served as an editor at The Marshall Project and Complex.
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also watch the interview on YouTube as well as listen to the audio, which includes a discussion of the start of the war on crime, popular conceptions of cocaine until the 1980s, the unsubstantiated basis of the myth of the “crack baby,” the rise of mass incarceration, and more:
Ben: Donovan, thank you so much for being here.
DXR: Thank you for having me.
Ben: Today, I’d like to build a better understanding of the rise and fall of the crack epidemic.
To begin, how did broader societal dynamics contribute to the start of the epidemic?
DXR: Heading into the 1980s, major cities across the country were suffering. For decades, white flight had drained urban centers of tax money, and deindustrialization led to diminishing high-paying jobs for skilled workers.
Then, under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. entered a period of major disinvestment. There was an extreme conservative shift towards free markets and private industry, which led to less investment from the federal government into cities, and to cities suffering even more.
So for poor people — often people of color — there were fewer and fewer opportunities for advancement. There was also increasing disaffection. The kind of despair that we talk about today in the Rust Belt or coal country — well, it permeated communities of color in cities in the ‘80s, which set the stage for the spread of something like crack.
Ben: An interesting parallel. To be clear, what exactly is crack?
DXR: Crack is a smokable drug derived from powder cocaine. The first name for it was “freebase,” which derives from the chemical process by which crack is made: you separate or “free” the base of cocaine from its other elements.
When researching my book, I kept hearing a story about a pimp in L.A. who taught people how to make freebase. When I pulled the thread of that story, it brought me to a head shop in the Berkeley area (a place where people sell drug paraphernalia like bongs, papers, etc.).
Ben: To be fair, I’m pretty sure if you pulled any thread in the Bay Area, it would eventually lead you to a head shop.
DXR: Ha, I think you're right.
In this instance, the head shop was also an independent publisher of books about drugs, and they published a book called The Pleasures of Cocaine, which included a recipe for freebase cocaine. The book spread around the bay, and through his connections, the pimp in L.A. got ahold of it, too.
From there, the substance took off like a rocket, spreading across the country.
Ben: You write that “for Black and Latino youth in particular, the drug trade and the rise of freebase was an unprecedented economic opportunity. It was as though they’d struck gold in land thought to be barren.”
You also follow the lives of four different people caught up in the epidemic. Lennie’s story demonstrates how Black women in particular suffered. Can you talk about her a little bit?
DXR: Lennie is a woman, now in recovery, who was addicted to crack for decades in South Central L.A. Growing up, she experienced a lot of trauma, and as crack became easily accessible, it was the only thing that Lennie found comfort in.
She explained to me how, being a woman, being a Black woman, and being an addict made her basically a non-person in society during the ‘80s. People only spoke to her at a distance — literally out of arm's reach.
It was like that for a lot of people. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, I had a neighbor named Michelle, whom I never met. My mom and our neighbors would complain about her — she played Patti LaBelle really loud, late into the night, on a loop. When I was five years old, my wise older sister told me she was a “crackhead.” I was gobsmacked because on Sundays I would see Michelle’s mom and daughter visit her. I just couldn’t believe that a “crackhead” could have a mom and a daughter.
As I grew up and learned more, I was struck by how vilified crack addicts were. I really wanted to understand who they were underneath all of the names and myths that were hurled onto them.
Ben: Speaking of names and myths, a major focus of your book is how poorly the media covered the epidemic. Can you explain more through the lens of The Washington Post’s publication of “Jimmy’s World” in 1980?
DXR: Absolutely.
Published in September 1980, “Jimmy’s World” was an article written by a Black woman named Janet Cook. She told the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy, who was the product of an incestuous relationship, living in a heroin shooting gallery in D.C. The story ran on the front page of the Post and was a huge sensation. For her writing, Janet Cook became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer in a journalism category.
To this day, she’s also the only person to ever give a Pulitzer back. It turns out the story was entirely made up. Editors at the Post were a little too willing to have the wool pulled over their eyes, as was the rest of the country.
To me, the story signifies just how bad the reporting on drugs would be throughout the crack era. The media kept getting it wrong; kept decentering the voices of people who were impacted by crack and instead highlighting so-called “experts” and politicians who were disconnected from what was happening on the ground.
In turn, myths about crack proliferated, like the idea that smoking crack is immediately deadly, or that crack is different from cocaine when, chemically, they’re the same thing. As the media and our elected officials spread terms like “crackhead” and “crack baby,” people caught up in the epidemic became more and more dehumanized and less and less understood.
Ben: One of the other maddening parts of this history, too, is that the government just kept re-upping the war on drugs (pun mildly intended) — even though it didn’t work.
DXR: Yes. Instead of treating addiction like a public health issue, the government continued to treat it as a criminal one. The Reagan administration and later the Clinton administration put billions of dollars into policing and building police departments into the paramilitary machines that they are today. The increased militarization of the war on drugs did little to actually assist communities racked by crack and led to more people in prison than ever before.
One of the other characters I follow in the book, named Kurt Schmoke, suggested an alternative path. In 1987, Kurt became the first Black mayor of Baltimore, which was having a hard time with both heroin and crack. Kurt, a very brainy guy, suggested decriminalizing drugs as a way of eliminating the drug economy. Relying on hospitals like Johns Hopkins, he also suggested finding new ways to treat addicts as people who were sick.
Yet when he went public with his ideas at a congressional hearing, he was basically laughed out of the room. He won reelection as mayor of Baltimore for a few additional terms, but the hearing really hung over the rest of his tenure as a politician. His ideas are more accepted today.
Ben: How did the epidemic end? And who was more responsible, Nancy Reagan or Dr. Dre?
DXR: It was not Nancy Reagan. The “Just Say No” campaign that she spearheaded had little effect.
To your point about Dr. Dre, gangster rap was consistently anti-crack. Fascinatingly, beginning in 1992, we saw a steep drop in cocaine-related arrests and cocaine overdoses, which coincided with a takeoff in marijuana use among young people. Also in 1992, Dr. Dre dropped his celebrated album, The Chronic, which advocates for smoking “chronic,” aka marijuana.
Ben: Spiritually, I could’ve told you about the influence that Dr. Dre had on even me as a kid, but I had no idea about his influence on a wider societal level.
DXR: Ha! It’s not to say the epidemic ended because of Dre. Rather, it ended because of young people.
The crack epidemic was a trend, and just like any other trend, it had to be taken up by subsequent cohorts. Beginning in the early ‘90s, young people of color looked at the devastation in their communities, and collectively, culturally, they stopped using crack. The epidemic took off around 1983, reached its peak in 1990, and ended abruptly in the mid-90s because there were few new crack users.
Young Black and Latino people still don’t use hard drugs like cocaine or opioids at the same rate as their white counterparts. Many scientists and researchers believe there is a protective buffer from the crack epidemic that has kept those young people from reengaging with harder substances.
I will say that that buffer effect is going away, and sadly, we’re starting to see Black and Latino men now lead overdose deaths related to fentanyl. Enough time has passed that people are starting to forget some of the devastation of the crack epidemic, which is one of the reasons that I wrote the book.
Ben: What a great book it is. Donovan, thanks for sharing the lessons you learned and speaking with me today.
DXR: Thank you so much for having me, Ben.