When Crack Was King: The Effects of a Misunderstood Era

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, in the United States, we know how the opioid epidemic and the fentanyl crisis are literally major killers. But perhaps we’ve forgotten one that blighted the 1980s, devastated communities and defined a generation, that was the crack epidemic. Now, decades later, journalist Donovan Ramsey dives into the many misconceptions around it, and he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his new book, “When Crack Was King,” about the scale of the problem and the role race played.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Donovan Ramsey, thanks you so much for joining us. Your book, “When Crack Was King,” takes a deep dive into what was the crack academic back in the ’80s and ’90s. And give us an idea of the sense — a sense of the scale of how significant this was in the United States.

DONOVAN RAMSEY, AUTHOR, “WHEN CRACK WAS KING”: You know, Hari, the crack epidemic really changed the way that our society operated on a number of levels. I think most significantly, it completely altered our criminal justice system. We have things like the 100 to 1 crack disparity, the (INAUDIBLE) disparity between crack and powdered cocaine thanks to that period. Lots of walls around mandatory minimum sentencing came into place around that period. Lots of policing tactics like stop-and-frisk that we know of today as helping to explode our criminal justice system came into form during that period. But it also changed a lot of ideas about addiction, about cities, about marginalized communities.

SREENIVASAN: And this is also a bit personal for you. I mean, you described early in the book growing up in a neighborhood where crack was taking over households or individuals lives. Why did you want to dive into this?

RAMSEY: Yes. You know, I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone that grew up in a major city whose life was not touched by the crack era in some way, and that includes me. You know, I was born to a single mother, I have two sisters in a really impoverished neighborhood that was hard hit by crack. So, my earliest memories are really of the era. And I wrote in the book that it was like living in a coal town where nobody talked about coal, because, you know, my mom shielded me in so many ways from what was happening, you know, as close as down the street. So, as I got older, you know, I have lots of questions about people in our community that disappeared or, you know, events that I just never got an explanation for. So, I wanted to write this book to be able to answer those questions for myself, but also for people who grew up like me.

SREENIVASAN: You found four individuals that you wanted to follow through the book. Tell us a little about the characters and what drew you to them, even though there’s some significant differences between them.

RAMSEY: Yes. I knew that in order to tell this history properly, to really do it justice, that I couldn’t just chronicle cracks rise and fall as some people had tried to in the past, and I needed to also pair that official history with memory, people’s memories of how they experienced it in their stories of how they survived it.
So, I interviewed hundreds of people across 2018, and I travel to the hardest hit cities, and I sat down with a woman named Lennie Woodle from South Central Los Angeles, Kurt Schmoke who is the former mayor of Baltimore, Elgin Swift whose father was an addict in Yonkers, New York and a man named Shawn McCray who was a major drug dealer out of Newark, New Jersey. And together, I hope that their stories give people a sense of how the epidemic played out differently in different cities, but also how people could experience the epidemic differently just based on how they were positioned in society.

SREENIVASAN: And what did you find, I guess, in common with these individuals as you’re writing the story?

RAMSEY: What I found is that they were positioned to be vulnerable to this epidemic. Just by virtue of living in a big city at a time where the industrialization was happening, where crime was rampant, when there was a great need among folks in that community. You know, today we use the term like disaffection to describe people who have fallen victim to the opioid epidemic. Now, what I found is that, you know, big cities in the ’80s and ’90s were no different, that the people that lived there were hopeless and looking for a way to check out, and crack was that way to check out. So, you know, all those folks have been — have that in comment, that they were members of communities that were experiencing that. What they also have in common is that they survived it. And the way that they survived it was, what I will call community care. Not necessarily policy, but small acts that kept people alive. Things like, you know, churches doing programs to help people in their recovery or to buyback weapons, you know, during some of the most deadly years of the crack epidemic. In some cases, organizations like the Nation of Islam busting up crack houses and, you know, kicking drug dealers out of communities, or even something as small as grandparents taking in grandchildren while their children ran the streets. It was these little acts that kept people alive and ultimately, kept those communities going until the storm passed.

SREENIVASAN: One of the other things that I remember a lot was the term crack baby. Where did — as you point out, the crack baby idea, erroneously it is, come to be? Where did all this start and what was the result of this very powerful meme?

RAMSEY: The crack baby myth was maybe one of the most prominent of the crack era, and it was, you know, the idea that infants who were exposed to cocaine in utero, because their mothers were users, would be irredeemably damaged, that they would have cognitive issues that would make them, I think, the language was, the most expensive babies ever born. That the framing was that they would be not only, you know, violent and unpredictable, but that they would be costly. And the origin of that idea was just a small bit of research done by a scientist in Chicago, Ira Chasnoff, just on, you know, a few dozen expected mothers who had used cocaine. And they gave birth to these small babies that had, you know, tremors and that developed slowly, and his conclusion was that — you know, that these babies would have issues. A few years later, he retracted that because he realized that those babies were mostly premature, that the cocaine exposure had caused them to be born premature and that the things he associated with the cocaine exposure were actually related to their being premature. But by then, it was too late, that the news media, politicians had really run with that and it became, you know, another weapon to really use against people who were dealing the drug addiction. And the consequences of it worldwide that I think that there was a cloud that really hung over a generation of young and black Latino people, this idea that you were potentially a crack baby. And what we saw from that was a level of criminalization in our school. And I think that to find out years later after a woman and named Hallam Hurt out of Philadelphia had done research on hundreds of kids that were cocaine exposed and that there was no significant difference, to find out that it was all a myth really opened my eyes to how impactful the misinformation was of the crack era, that it completely shaped my childhood, that it — again, that it shaped my idea of even kids that I grew up with, you know, to think that, oh, this guy next to me is having issues in class, maybe he’s a crack baby, you know that that was not uncommon, you know, to — sort of an uncommon way to think during the crack era, and think that we still have to expose people to the truth of what was happening.

SREENIVASAN: You lay out in the book how a situation thousands of miles away, in Nicaragua, helped create some of the supply glut. You have a kind of geopolitical understanding of this. And you mentioned, you know, because there are sort of some conspiracy theories out there that say, well, the CIA essentially allowed this cocaine to come into the United States. This was part of a plan. I want to quote you, it says, “Reagan, the CIA, the cartels and the contras (ph) 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.” Tell me more about that.

RAMSEY: This would be a much easier book to write, you know, if it was a group of old white dudes in a back room coming up with, you know, poison to kill people in black communities. You know, it’s far more complex than that. I really learned throughout the reporting of this book the extent to which hundreds of years of policy can make people the most vulnerable to really anything. And, you know, I was finishing this book up during COVID, you know, in 2020, and I was seeing, again, how a disaster could hit black and Latino folks first and worst. And that really helped me to understand it better what happened with crack, which is that there were lots of poor policy decisions like, you know, not going after people who were transporting cocaine into the United States or, you know, not having great public health and mental health systems to help people into recovery, that all of these things, all of these policies make it so that, you know, people like me, people in communities that I grew up in are vulnerable to basically anything that happens. And that’s the way that it was with crack, is that, you know, I didn’t find any evidence that the federal government created crack or, you know, that there was intention around cracks spread in the United States. What I found was that it was this perfect storm of factors that came together. And that, folks like Ronald Reagan, folks like Bill Clinton, folks like even Joe Biden, took advantage of that on the political level to create laws that then compacted the harm in some cases. And because they responded to it so poorly, many people believe that the federal government must have done it, you know, intentionally. It seems all too convenient. You know, but it was — you know, that’s the way that hundreds of years of policy can impact a community.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there were efforts to try to decriminalize, including one of the characters in your book, the former mayor of Baltimore. And at the time, he was basically laughed at by members of both parties. Why do you think that is? And I guess how does he perceive the state that we’re in today, where decriminalizing is a much larger conversation compared to what he was trying to advocate for in the midst of this crisis?

RAMSEY: Kurt Schmoke was really ahead of his time, as you mentioned. As early as 1988, this man who was the first elected black mayor of Baltimore, he was in his 30s at the time, he thought that Baltimore could be a model for what he called medicalization, that he looked around his city and he saw institutions like Johns Hopkins, he also saw that Baltimore had an intravenous drug use problem with heroin that was really fueling HIV/AIDS cases in the cities, and he thought that a medical response would actually be more effective than a criminal justice response. And as you mentioned, he was completely laughed out of congressional hearings and the conference of mayors because people thought it was ridiculous idea. I think that Kurt Schmoke has been vindicated. You know, he’s president of a college now, and people are just now coming around to an idea that he had in the ’80s. But I don’t think that they’re coming around to the idea fast enough.

SREENIVASAN: Explain the disparity in sentencing, back when the Anti-Drug Abuse Act came into being, but then, some people also feel like, hey, well, look, President Obama and the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 has cleared it up, kind of where are we now compared to where we were and where we need to be?

RAMSEY: We are still living with the consequences of, you know, a decade or so of poor policy starting, you know, as you mentioned, with laws under Ronald Reagan, really, that were bipartisan now, I should say. That most of the crime and drug legislation at the ’80s and ’90s was a bipartisan effort. You know, I mentioned earlier that 100 to 1 sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine, which we now acknowledge are the same exact substance, under Obama in 2010, that was reduced to 18 to 1, but it still exists, that despite the fact that we know that this was the substance, that it is the same substance, despite all that we know about our mass incarceration system and how many people we warehouse due to drug convictions, there wasn’t enough political will, even in 2010, to eliminate it entirely. I think that there were lots of things that we need to do policy wise to repair the harm of the crack era, and I think that the — that eliminating the disparity in sentencing between crack and powdered cocaine is a great first step. Next first steps would be continuing to fund harm reduction programs that, you know, distribute fentanyl or test strips and, you know, the lifesaving drug, Narcan, that can actually interrupt an overdose, that we owe it to the folks that we served poorly during the crack era to get it right this time, to eliminate, again, this dragnet that I talked about earlier that can only criminalize people who need help. We need to actually beef up a public health response in a way that could both end the opioid epidemic but also prevent future drug epidemics.

SREENIVASAN: You put some of the blame and responsibility at Joe Biden’s feet as well for actions that he took as a senator. Do you think now that he has done enough as president, what more does he need to do?

RAMSEY: I think that Joe Biden is perfectly positioned to repair the harm of the crack era on the policy level. Not only, you know, are his hands on really every major piece of legislation going back as far as Reagan, but, you know, he also has some a son who suffered through drug addiction and also, an addiction to crack, at the time that Joe Biden was advocating for the death penalty for people in possession of crack cocaine. And he’s acknowledged that many of the policies that he advanced were wrong, but again, you know, we still have an 18 to 1 disparity in how we sentence crack and powdered cocaine.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

RAMSEY: That’s something that his Department of Justice could change tomorrow. And that would be a great first step. But really, what I would like to see is more investment in our health care system, to be able to, one, care for people and to do the harm reduction programs that I’m talking about that keep people alive while they are on their way to recovery. But then we also need a health care system that also helps people recover. Right now, we don’t have that.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “When Crack Was King.” Donovan X. Ramsey, thanks so much for joining us.

RAMSEY: Thank you so much for having me, Hari.