Cracktoberfest Part One: Constructing the Crack "Epidemic"

Robert and Prop sit down to talk about an epidemic that wasn't.

A five part series

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Oh, prop Sophie. Ye, Hey, what's the word, homie? You
know I'm a big fall guy. I love pumpkin spice.
I love walking through falling leaves. You know, the colors
start to change. What do you say this fall? We
all get together as buddies and we spend like seven

(00:24):
or eight hours talking about the crack epidemic, the c
I A Iran contra, the Gary Webb story that broke
it all that then had him hounded into self destruction
by the CIA and the New York Times. What do
we just did that for the first entire week of October?
Wouldn't that be a hoot? I feel like I feel
like this would be a good time because it kind
of matches all the stuff that kind of happens when

(00:47):
we sit around the table anyway, talk about crack. What
should we what should we call? What should we call this? Well,
you know, the Germans have a holiday during this period
in time, and I feel like if it's German, were
allowed to co opt it, So why don't we call
it cractober Fest. Listen, I'm waiting. You know what I'm

(01:07):
saying October crack October because october Fest to me is
it's a little too late a hose it for my Yes,
yes there will there will be no leader housing, but
there will be whatever CIA agents where. Honestly, probably like
Patagonia vs. Khaki Slacks. Yeah, yeah, hell of a lot

(01:29):
of those. Um Well, this is serving as a general
introduction to the series. Prop you have done a blistering
two parter on the Iran Contra scandal. I am covering
the crack epidemic and the CIA and all sorts of
good stuff and um but I think people are gonna
be happy. I think you're all gonna have a good
eight ish hours learning about everything there is to know

(01:50):
about how the CIA actually because like that's like the
thing everybody like says, joking, like jokingly says, like the
CIA brought crack to the inner cities. Like there's an
actual story there, and it's actually kind of worse than
than than just like the quick summaries people give. It's
worse than the street lower. It really is what you

(02:11):
get into it. And I've really felt like, you know,
we're always looking for ways to collapse, you know what
I'm saying. There's obviously there's a lot of mutual friendship,
symbiotic nous between our two uh podcast, but it was like,
so there's that we share a Sophie. Uh, but I

(02:31):
feel like finding that perfect then diagram that perfect you
know meme of the two guys holding hands. What movie
is that' from Rambo? Right, Commando? What movie is that from?
That's from Predator? Actually it's from Predator. I knew it
was one of him, but Arnold is from Commando, so

(02:52):
it's understanding. Okay, so it's from Predator. Yeah, when they
that perfect like where both our stories meet and it
couldn't have met better than the crack epidemics he was
having right now and how we even got there perfect
perfect storm and uh so this so so so this
is episode one of five because we're gonna be doing

(03:14):
Cracktoberfest all week and you can listen to all five
episodes either and they're available in the Hood, Politics, Speed,
in the Behind the Bastards. We listened to them wherever
you get your podcast. So I officially, uh apologize to
all the other podcasts you listen to. You can go
ahead and uh go to those fees now and tell

(03:35):
them you can subscribe them. Just burn them off of
your phone. In fact, throw that old phone away. Get
a new phone, keep it pure, just yeah, exactly, all right,
all right, here's what's mandatory, my minimums. I'm Robert Evans,

(04:07):
host of Behind the Bastards per Wow. Wow, that was powerful, powerful, prop.
So man, how are you doing? How are you doing? Buddy?
Hey homie? You know what I'm saying. Trickling down quick
and ther Reaganomics over here. You feel me? Beautiful now,
prop this is our special week. We had it. We

(04:30):
we did this introduction, the last one. I'm not sure
which of these episodes will introduce it on, but you
and I are tackling the crack epidemic, the c I
A Iran contra, all of which are individual stories that
are fucking wild, and all of which also kind of
deserved to be told together because they they're interwoven. Just
a bowl of gumbo of bastards man, Yeah, which I

(04:51):
feel like it's like the perfect, uh perfect analogy, because
everything in gumbo is great by itself. Yeah, then when
you get together, it's still amazing. Yeah, that's what I think.
When I think about the crack epidemic, I think, wow,
that was great by itself. It's perfectly fine by itself
without anything else around it. Yes, a plus um proper, Yeah,

(05:17):
how do you? How do you? How do you feel
about crack? Man? That doesn't seem like the right way
to start this. Um let's let's yeah, it's what crack.
It's so interesting how it went from like, uh, there
was a time where it was like hip hop was.

(05:39):
I feel like it's one of the proof proof of
concept that if hit hip hop is given the right information,
it does the right thing, Because it was it was
the butt of a joke to be like you do crack,
don't do crack. Crack it's what you know? Uh, and
then the self destruction and we're all in the same
game was about like, you know, you should do crack,

(06:00):
you know, And then all so there was a moment
where crack was terrible in in our in our culture,
or the butt of every joke. And then the crack
sellers became all the rappers, and then it was just
it became the coolest thing to sell crack, right, And
it was like, yeah, but I'm a crack dealer, Like
oh wait, so it's cool again. Yeah, but you supposed

(06:24):
to do crack, You're supposed to sell it. Yeah. I
think maybe a place I might want to start here is.
Do you recall the first time you learned Like, is
that about like crack? The first time you remember the
first time, Yeah, you're you had to talk about it
with anyone. I do remember the time. I do remember
all the after school specials. I remember all of the

(06:46):
like you know, sort of the Dare program, all this
stuff around crack. But I think really it was whether
it was the movie Knew Jack Swing. I mean I
Knew Jack Swing, New Jack City, uh um, but really
it was like being in Los Angeles and like what

(07:06):
is wrong with that guy? Like and just like seeing
what a crackhead was and being like, yo, this is different,
you know what I'm saying. So I mean as young
as young of a child as I was, like a
very young child during this time, like really really like baby,
but just being like this is this is different? You know?

(07:29):
Uh So I think my and then just somebody explaining
all that's crack you you know, you smoke it like
this or you shoot it up. You know what I'm saying.
It's just people figuring out like what that was. I
remember my first syringe. You're stepping over my first syringe,
which isn't crack per se, but like a crack pipe,
and just knowing what all that stuff was was like, Yo,

(07:49):
this is bad a matter of fact, now that i'm talking,
I know there's a lot, but now that I'm talking,
my neighbor, dang, I haven't thought about this. And so
we grew up, you know, in the part of town
I was in my my neighbor you know. Um, like
I said, I grew up in total neighborhood. So like

(08:10):
my neighbor, they were you know, in the life hardcore
or whatever, but they were just they were just some
of the most loving like people whatever. Right, So anyway,
they moved right and when they moved, um, for whatever reason,
the next family that came in, I remember didn't turn
the electricity on and like they never turned on any

(08:34):
of the like utilities, and I just remember being like, oh,
that's weird. And then the two little boys who were
a little bit younger than me used to always come over,
like right at dinner time, like you know what I'm saying,
and just all the like, they always smelled a little
bit like they weren't clean or whatever, and my parents
would like my parents knew was going on. I don't
know what's going on, but my parents knew was going on.
They would let him in. They'd be like dang, okay,

(08:55):
they feed them no more, you know. And then once
they put it all together, it and then you know
again people all hours at a night going in and
out the house. And then finally I realized I lived
next door to a crack house. It it was like
it was this slow roll of like wait, what, like

(09:16):
why do you why do they why do they have
so many candles? It's like, oh, it's kind of camping.
They cook with candles, you know, and just and then
just realized power, yeah, like no, it's crack. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, And obviously for me, it was a much
more distant thing, right, it was a thing that like
number one, crack was before anything else for me, like

(09:37):
a euphemism, yeah, for like something is addictive or also
someone is silly, like you're cracked out, Yeah exactly. And
it was the adults talked about crack like it was
a plague, like it was a disease that it hits
certain areas, and the kids talked about crack like it
was a euphemism. Right, it was like yeah, just kind
of an explanative term that you could throw in. Oh yeah, yeah, like, yeah,

(10:01):
you're smoking crack, bro. We're gonna talk today about the
crack epidemic and how it happened and what happened as
a result of it. All cocaine type drugs, all cocaine
derived drugs, which include crack, good old fashioned blow, also
tinctures of cocaine, which is how people used to take
it back in the past, come from the leaves of
the cocould tree um and the co could tree grows

(10:23):
mostly in Columbia, Bolivia, and Peru on their own. Naturally,
the leaves can be chewed generally with something like potash
for a mild to moderate stimulating effect, with a little
bit of euphoria thrown in for good measure. I've gotten
to chew coca leaves in a couple of occasions and
it's very nice. It's a really pleasant and it's also
pretty hard to have be a problematic drug. You you

(10:44):
should think about coca the way we think about pot
or the way we think about like opium poppies, right
um opium poppies on their own. Some people do have
problems with that is a more serious drug, but it's
nothing compared to what happens when you start making heroin
or morphaga marijuana as it grows naturally almost impossible to
hurt yourself with. Then now people start making it into

(11:07):
shatter and stuff and they're blowing up trailer parks and
burning their brains out and ship right. Um, you know,
that's kind of the way to think about the way.
And this is the way in which indigenous people used
coca one of them for probably thousands of years. Right um.
I know what we have evidence of coca used going
back and as as long pretty much as long as
there have been people in the area. It's it's it's

(11:29):
it's got to be the most like naive thing to
think that like, you know, these just plants that just
grew outside, that somebody didn't chew it and go oh
you know, and and and that that was just a
normal part of life. And maybe the rolls of shamons

(11:50):
and profits and they've probably been chewing wild plants forever. Yeah.
It's the same thing with you know, the coffee which
which comes from Ethiopia. The Romo people were kind of
the first people using the coffee plant. A big part
of what a major way it was used is for
like hunters, right to keep you going during the hunt.
That's probably a big part of how coca leaf was
used early on. It's like, right, we're out in the

(12:12):
we're out in the woods or the jungle or whatever
for a couple of weeks. You know, this should will
will keep us moving. Um. And also this is interesting.
Most people don't know this coca leaf is an oral anesthetic.
It numbs your mouth, so we One of the things
that's always been kind of interesting is that in a
lot of kind of Latin American areas you have early
history of pretty advanced dental work being done in some areas,

(12:33):
and maybe that had an impact on it, the fact
that they had access to a really effective oral an aesthetic. Yeah,
it's it's actually a really it's a fucking amazing plant. Obviously. Yeah,
it gets a bad fucking wrap. Well, novacane from the
coca leaf. That's where it comes from. Yeah, novacane and cocaine.

(12:53):
But he didn't get the song reference. It's okay, okay,
I didn't get the song reference. But I'm glad that
you brought up no vocane because we get novocane from
the coca leaf. See. Um, Yeah, it's just it's a
baffling lye useful plant. Um, and it's the root of
novocane and light a cane and crack cocaine. Um, they
all come from the same thing, right, Um, what kind

(13:16):
of Yeah, well it all sorts of canes. Yeah. Um.
Europeans really figured out what was up with coca in
eighteen fifty five. They'd noticed people in the areas they
were colonizing using it for a while. Um, But it
wasn't until eighteen fifty five that pure cocaine was extracted
from the leaps for the first time. Again, you've got

(13:37):
this bafflingly useful plant that's doing great stuff, and then
some white people come in and are like, you know
what we could do make a drug that makes people
insufferable at parties out of this let's we're gonna ruin
a lot of rabes. Like, yeah, now you already you
nailed the joke already. There's a way that's exactly a Yeah,

(13:58):
if you're going to snore a drug in a party, kids,
kinta means a lot better anyway. Uh So, obviously, the
fact that they're not co signed officially, Yeah, legally, no
one is co signing there. So this is a huge
moment in medical science. Obviously, like I joked about them
ruining it, but actually a lot of really cool number
one cocaine. There are some were some early medical uses

(14:20):
for it. We get anesthetics like novacaine and lightacne. This
is a big deal, and we don't talk again, this
is something that people don't think about, but it was
not We're we're we're at about like a hundred and
fifty years or so of effective anesthetics being widespread available, right,
that is not a thing in surgery prior to this.
If you don't live in a place where there's a
good natural oral anesthetic, um and there's a couple of cocaine,

(14:43):
coca is not the only one. Also, um cava, which
Hawaiian people I believe have been using, Polynesian people using
for a long time, works really well for that purpose.
But if you don't live somewhere with that plant and
you need a tooth taken out, you're probably downing half
a handle a liquor and then someone's ripping a bone
out your skull, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, then
you're then you're looking like a medieval movie, really real gnarly. Yeah.

(15:06):
I was listening to a h I think what was that, uh,
what kind of pot was that radio lapped the science
one from w might see what anyway, they were talking
about like figuring out molecules for new medicines and stuff. Right,
so if you figure this thing out, um, you know,

(15:26):
you're also looking at like side effects, so like the
difference between like a poison, like a narcotic or a medicine,
you know what I'm saying, or poison. And one of
the researchers from China was like, well, they're just molecules,
like you know, and that that bifurcation, the difference between
like a good molecule and a bad molecule is like
it's a very new and sort of Western way to

(15:49):
look at this. It's like they all have strengths and weaknesses,
you know what I'm saying, and ways to abuse and
not abuse, you know. So even the way the way
that you're talking about, you know, the coca leaf is like, yeah,
I'm pretty sure somebody you know, in the ancient past
like chew that thing. And then his buddy was like, hey, bro,

(16:09):
you gotta chill man, you know what I'm saying, and uh,
you know, and it was like, yeah, man, that was
too far. You know what I'm saying, like there has
to have been because again, I feel like the point
you're making at this stage in the story is you
can't stress enough. It's just a plant. It's just a plant.
And and at some point some people figure out how

(16:30):
to like supercharge it, right, And so at the same
time as you get these early anesthetics, you start getting
pure cocaine, right, usually sold as a tincture. So you
just get a fucking dropper of cocaine water sheeese right,
you can know you can shoot that stuff up. A
lot of people injected it. I believe Sherlock Holmes injected cocaine.

(16:51):
I think with heroin. Um, this is what guys like
Freud are doing. Right. Most of them are not doing lines,
you know, um they are. They are taking it as
a pure like distilled tincture. You can pick this ship
up at the at the drug store. Um. Now, this
causes problems because cocaine is incredibly addictive, um, and also
not great for your body, especially if you're taking it

(17:14):
a lot of it every single day because the doctor
told you it's good for you. That actually hurts you
a lot. Right, You can choo coca leafs all day long,
and it's you're probably not well, not all day long.
When you can choot coca leaves on a regular basis
and you're not dealing with too huge of a problem.
You're doing cocaine every day. People are gonna notice because
it's going to destroy you. Yeah, I think they're government.

(17:35):
You're just gonna be like, hey man, you know, I
mean just doing Yeah, you're gonna get really into White
Snake and yeah, then your heart's going to explode. Hey, bro,
so make an album. Hey man, we should make album.
You want to make an album of night Let's cut
we we we gotta bring back fucking prog rock. Man,
that's what I want to fucking hear right? Yeah? Um
so Europeans eighteen fifty five we get cocaine. Nineteen fourteen

(17:58):
is when the US government decides, right, that's enough, that's
enough cocaine being available. We gotta we gotta, we gotta
lock this one up. So we get the Harrison act
Um and and that makes it that's that restricts the
sale of cocaine, right, It makes it a lot harder
to get. People aren't buying it over the counter anymore.
And then in nineteen twenty two, another law gets passed,

(18:18):
which is one of the very first anti drug laws
in the United States that effectively stops legal US extraction
of cocaine. But of course the drug in various forms
continued to flow into the United States from Latin America
up through its land and sea borders. In the nineteen seventies,
cocaine caught on big time as a drug for the
rich and the upwardly mobile party set sometime in the

(18:41):
late seventies, and obviously there's a lot of history in
other countries, especially in Europe outside of the US. I'm
focusing on the US here. Sometime in the late nineteen
seventies are very early nineteen eighties. We don't exactly know
when this happens because it's happening illegally, right, and there's
no If we had the internet, then you would have
a fucking Reddit post the day people figured out how
to make fun and crest. But we don't know exactly

(19:01):
when it happened. But sometime between the very end of
the nineteen seventies and the start of the nineteen eighties,
some drug chemists figure out that you can take powdered
cocaine and you can dissolve it in water and then
mix in baking powder and cook it down into rock
like chunks. Now, this is easy to smoke, which makes
it convenient. Right, it's easier to take, but it's also

(19:24):
much purer than powder cocaine, right, which is often filler
or more. Crack is around pure and it's significantly cheaper
because of the way you're manufacturing the per exactly, the
per dose cost is a lot less than it is
with cocaine. So from kind of similar amounts of raw product,
more people can get high, more often for less money.

(19:46):
So here's where I fill in pop culture for you.
Uh So, the the legend is that it was a
dude in Oakland that figured it out. Oh yeah, that's
that's the legend. Don't know that, but that's that's the legend. Right.
And once uh you know, once it hit Callie with

(20:06):
through like freeway Rick and and just some it starts
to hit and it starts it's hits hard and ruins
the crips and bloods. But that's but we'll get to that. Um.
But I think what you're talking about, as far as
how to make crack all of half of the slang
that gets appropriated from hip hop into the Zeigeister comes

(20:28):
out of black culture. Is actually it's crack slang. So
like cooking in the kitchen, you know, chef, you know
a chef spin, look at the flick of the wrist.
All of that is about spinning. Crack over, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah, it's all crack slang. You know.
A huge piece of internet slang right now that Garrison

(20:49):
and I say, probably more than is good for our
health is based right, it's crack. The term it's it
comes from free base right, like the origin and briefly
the right wing tried to take it in what I
mean like ideologically pure, and now it's just a general
term for cool, yes, and will be being the bad, yeah,
it will be being the base God like all these things,

(21:10):
Like I think it's gonna happen as this is going,
like I'm gonna keep pointing out rap lyrics to you
to be or just slang and being like that's about crack. Yeah,
it is great. And I really love that you point
this out because from a from a from a cultural standpoint,
crack is like on the level of the Simpsons in
terms of how it's influenced the way people talk, yes,

(21:33):
we're rappers. Where people called it rappers athletes, they call
themselves chefs because they're cooking in the kitchen, which is
where you make crack, right, right. So I want to
quote from the New York Times here to kind of
go over the economics of this new drug as it
starts to hit the market. Quote, the ten dollar sale
price made crack accessible to poor people who could never

(21:55):
have come up with two hundred or more that affluent
users paid for a gram of powder. Crack produced an
intense but fleeting high that pushed many users to buy
again and again until they ran out of money. And
that is one of the things about crack is that
like it hits harder and faster as generally the case
when you free base something than railing it or insufflating,
to use the scientist insufflation as the scientific term for

(22:16):
snorting something um like. So, for example, if you're taking
like a powdered hallucino generous psychedelic like a two C
or something um, if you eat it in a pill, right,
which is the way most people take that sort of drug,
it could take an hour for you to come up.
If you snort it, it comes up much faster and
then insuff like if you're actually free basing something. And

(22:36):
I don't think you can free base most of those drugs,
although I don't know that anyone's tried, but free basing
hits you faster, like for example, d m T, which
is the drug you know that all of the tech
gurus talk about the way in which they tend to
take it in like the ceremonies that they're kind of
co opting from indigenous Latin Americans as ayahuasca. You're drinking
it as a t it takes a while to come up,
you vomit a lot. But you can also basically you

(22:59):
can basically free base d MT if you just take
the straight crystals out and you turn it into a
crystal and you smoke it in a crack pipe and
it hits right the funk away, but it's much shorter, right. Yeah,
most of my most of the people that I do
know that either got hooked and got off that you
could communicate with, you know what I'm saying, who figured
out a way fought their way through to get off
the stuff. That's what they say. They are like, there's honestly,

(23:24):
there is nothing like that hit it is so fast
and so intense, and that's why you get hooked immediately
and you'll give up everything for it. Because he's like
they like the Homies would explain to me. It's like,
I'm glad, I'm off it now, but I'm telling you
that high, that first high. You know what I'm saying.
It's like you never really reached that other high, that

(23:45):
high again, but that first high. They're like, you're there's
there are no words for it. That's why it's so
I mean you Also, I do want to focus on
the economics here because another thing is that not only
is the high so intense, but you achieve a it's achievable.
So you're looking at if you've got if you're someone
who uses cocaine, and you're looking at, well, it's gonna

(24:06):
a night of coke is going to be two hundred bucks, right,
We're probably not going to do that. Some people do
get that addicted, but for most people it's like, okay,
so I will occasionally buy two hundred bucks in cocaine
for a night to party cracks tin bucks a hit, Yeah,
I was gonna gets cheaper that, And that's how it is.
That's how cheap it is at the start, it gets
a hell of a lot cheaper. So that's something you're
having a bad day, ship's rough, you're feeling bad, you know,

(24:29):
any time for pocket dollars you can fucking call again, right, yeah,
any Obviously this becomes a problem. Um. So obviously this
of course leads to overdoses. Another problem is that it
is actually kind of hard, unless you're being really ridiculous
with cocaine, to overdose just by snorting it. With actual

(24:52):
like quality cocaine, it's harder to do that than it
is smoking free base, because you can burn a shipload
of crack really fast, right, and it's difficult for you
to tell what you're getting, and the cooking like, you know,
the strength can vary and stuff, So people start accidentally
consuming a lot more of the drug than they've been
used to. Obviously. The other issue is that smoking freebase

(25:13):
is so much harsher on the body than just inhaling powder.
You know, it's not good for you obviously to sport cocaine,
and there's issues like deviated septum and stuff that health
issues you get from that, But you're not ruining your
lungs when you're smoking. When you're when you're inhaling cocaine, right,
it's not good for you, but you're not destroying your
lungs in addition to fucking with your heart. Crack is

(25:35):
it's it's it's all the worst parts of cigarettes and
all of the worst parts of cocaine super charge. It
ages you. Yeah, they're yeah like that that used to
be like for for me, one of the biggest like
deterrence one. N it wasn't none of him commercials, It

(25:55):
wasn't a song. It was the site. Uh, someone you
went to cool with that now looks like your grandparents
and it and it was just and the fact that
like and just that nothing else mattered, Like how are
you You're just sitting like if you ever hopefully Robert,

(26:18):
you've never walked into a crack house. Now. I don't
know if that's true, but hopefully maybe it's some maybe
somewhere in Prague knowing your ass. But like, uh, out here,
like the site, it's it is probably the most heartbreaking
site you can imagine because you're just like, I know these,

(26:42):
I know y'all, like you, how did you become this? Yeah?
So I think the point that we built to here
is that crack is indeed a hell of address. Yes,
And obviously people get better very quickly get better at
making and I think you know, there's no proving where
it came from. Oakland is a pretty good guess in

(27:03):
terms of the first people to figure that the ship
out that that that that makes would make total sense
to me. Obviously, the Bay areas where innovation comes in,
right resistance, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, um. But you know
who else is constantly innovating? The sponsors of this podcast, well, yes,
pharmaceutical companies A K. John Dealers, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(27:27):
and in a much Also, the thing I don't want
to be doing here is like demonizing and we'll talk
more about this, is demonizing crack because it is addictive.
It is a drug that has serious physical consequences. Yeah,
there's nothing about crack cocaine that is worse than painkillers,
than like than the ox is. Right, there's no a Yeah,

(27:49):
and when we get to any sentences, there's a big difference. Yes,
we can talk about why that's so problematic. Yeah, we'll
be talking about that now. But first here's the crack
of products for you. Ah, we're back. So there's a

(28:11):
lot of misinformation in moral panic, and it is tough
to kind of seriously talk about how fucking gnarly crack
is for a lot of people, um and also not
go to the moral panic shift that you get about it,
which is which is what we're about to talk about now.
Um So, I want to talk before we start talking
about the crack epidemic and the moral panic it causes.

(28:32):
I want to talk about the struggles that Black American
families were going through as the nineteen seventies gave away
to the swing in eighties. So from the post World
War One era to the nineteen sixties, Black Americans migrated
from rural parts of the United States to cities across
the United States and unprecedented numbers. This is probably the
most significant demographic shift that has ever occurred in the

(28:55):
history of the United States. A huge fucking thing that happens.
It's the Great Migration, and my family is one of them.
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, and yeah. Um So, because there's
all sorts of bullshit restrictions on where and which are,
many of which are legally enforced, but a lot of
which were just sort of like guys will show up
outside of your house and funk with you and your
family if you do this on where you can live

(29:16):
as a black person in this period, a lot of
the people who are doing this great migration are forced
into crowded neighborhoods with underfunded serve obviously prop like elephant
of the room, you know, all this, Like I'm not
explaining let's see right right, this is a thing to
go over because it's Yeah, it's history that for certain
I didn't encounter in school and in anything more than

(29:37):
the Vegas terms. Yeah, I don't want to feel like
I'm not explaining your do you know? Do you know
that this happened to you? Yes? I do know. Yeah, Like,
are again to add some color to this, like you'll
probably get to this also too. But like my family,
you know, my father's side, how we got to California
was was through Texas, and that was and and traditionally

(29:59):
betwe in Texas and Oklahoma. Most families from there probably
got there, uh because of the chance to become a cowboy,
you know, where you could work for yourself, and that
was you know, almost all of food on your neck.
Yea of American cowboys were actually free slaves, you know.

(30:20):
And then and then from there we all went to
Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego because of these these
housing projects, like the Watts Towers that that these housing
vouchers that brought specifically Jason Petty's family to California, you
know what I'm saying. Yeah, And that's like that's what

(30:44):
happens to most too, to a huge chunk of people,
and they get forced into these neighborhoods like Watts, right,
and and there's other neighborhoods and their parts of the unit.
Because this is this is happening a lot in southern California.
This is also happening just to Shipload and the play
SIT's primarily happening to is like the Eastern seas and
chunks of the chunks of the urban Midwest, right, Great

(31:06):
Lakes regions, stuff, Minneapolis. You know, this is when all
of this is happening. And across the board, these black
families are being forced into not just these crowded neighborhoods
with underfunded services, but low paid, insecure industrial jobs. Often
they're being brought in to deal with because unionized white
workers are too expensive rights, so they're being brought in

(31:27):
as as strike breakers and stuff. And this is and
then as soon as that happens, right, you have so
you have that being done by these capitalists, and then
we get nafta. Right, so suddenly what jobs they had
start to fall out from under right, um as manufacturing
and ship moves across the border. Um. It's also worth
noting that a ton of these of the particularly the
black men working these industrial jobs, are doing so in

(31:50):
dangerous like being exposed like deadly chemicals, like in horrific
ways that would have been that were illegal, but it happened,
you know. Um. So while all this is going on,
white families are considering their you know, flight to suburban
areas and at an that takes off to um and
you know, these suburban houses that cost about as much

(32:12):
as three good lunches due today, they start moving into
an accumulating wealth. They go up hundreds of thousands of
dollars in value by the time the owners reach retirement age. Now,
when the civil rights movement wins its major victories, obviously
a lot had gotten better for black families. But this
has what one journal of social welfare paper paper i
read called a quote perverse, unintended impact on the inner city.

(32:34):
And I want to quote from that. Now, successful African
Americans move their families to newly integrated communities, leaving an
even higher concentration of poverty and the predominantly African American
inner city. Based on an extensive literature review, Small and
Newman two thousand one identified the increasing concentration of poverty
during the nineteen seventies and into the nineteen eighties, particularly

(32:54):
among African Americans, as primarily the result of three phenomena
black middle class flight, continued residential discrimination, especially against less
wealthy African Americans, and the departure of low skilled jobs
from the Northeast and Midwest cities. And again, one of
the reasons why this is so devastating is when the
black families that make money leave these inner city neighborhoods

(33:16):
because of the way the tax system is set up
in the United States, all of the income they had
that was going to schools in the inner cities leaves, right.
It's a big part of it. So the nineteen seventies
are a challenging decade for many people in the United States. Um,
the economic stagna and this is across the board, right,
this is why Jimmy Carter loses reelection. The economy ships,

(33:37):
the fucking bed, there's gas lines, everything's fucked up. But obviously,
where everyone is suffering, nobody suffers worse than Black people
in the inner cities, that is the most hard the
hardest hit region of the country. As a more globalized
economy ships factory jobs off to foreign countries, advancing technology
meant that what good working class jobs remained required computer

(33:58):
literacy and other training that folks you'd grown up in
economically disadvantaged schools didn't have access to write. Um. Everything
just builds upon itself, So poverty and long term unemployment
are associated with a variety of other negative things overcrowded housing, PTSD,
team pregnancy, school dropout, violence, crime, and drug and alcohol abuse.
As poverty worsens in the inner cities, all these things

(34:20):
grow more common for black families. For a variety of reasons,
Black kids since emancipation have been more likely than white
kids to grow up in a one parent household. The
rate of two parent households was stable among black families
from emancipation up to the sixties. It was around seventy right,
so about seventy Black kids grow up in two parent households.
For white kids it's ninety percent, so it's lower for

(34:43):
black families in up to the nineteen sixties, but still
the vast majority of kids, right are growing up in
two parent households. Once you hit the seventies, that or
the sixth of the late sixties, really that number starts
to drop like a fucking stone. By the mid nineteen hundreds,
only a third of Black Aerican children lived in two
parent households. Yeah like that that. I was unaware of

(35:05):
how fucking sharp that drop it. But there's a there's,
there's there's depending on how hotep you are, there's a
lot of answers to that, right, But I do think
that this this moment is so it's so pivotal and
so underreported um in the sense that it's like so

(35:26):
much of our culture now is came out of this moment.
So this is this inner city as you're talking about,
especially along the Eastern seaboard. This is the Bronx, the movie,
the movie Warriors, Right, it's this, It's this moment. It's
this overcrowding, underfunding, this city that you know, being a

(35:46):
city of rubble, and that there was you know, broken
down buildings everywhere. Because if you're a slum lord, it's
cheaper to just destroy the building and get the insurance
then try to you know, fix it or or or
you know, be a responsible landlord. Just burn it down
and just let the rubble happen. UH A big power

(36:07):
outage in in UH in New York, which is what
which actually happened, which is what the movie Warriors takes
place in. But it's ultimately it is this moment that
d J cool herk from from from Jamaica moves over,
you know what I'm saying, and plugs his turntable into
a power line and does the first park jam, which

(36:29):
creates hip hop. You know what I'm saying. It was
out of this time. This is what creates all this
ship yo saying. It was this moment, and it was,
but it's important to understand. It's like, oh yeah, it
was cool. They were throwing parties in the park. Well
they were living in rubble. Y understand I'm saying, because
we were forced to with with no music programs in

(36:51):
our schools. You know, I'm saying nothing, There was nothing
provided that there's no as you talk about the rubble,
it's not you. And I want to really hit on
this because this ties directly back into crack. It's not
just you know, shady landlords. It's not just that things
are underfunded. It's that we talk about this center Robert
Moses episodes, Black neighborhoods are bulldozed in a bunch literally

(37:14):
bulldozed in a bunch of countries, sometimes with like the
military essentially helping to do it in order to make
way for ship like overpass um that effectively than walls
those areas off from the rest of the cities. And
what's important here, why I'm going over this, is that
this is a thirty ish year you know, obviously it
goes back further than that. But this specific process um,

(37:35):
all of these things, these these massive drops and wealth, um,
this this collapse of of you know, the rate of
two parent households in the black community, all of these
things are the result of thirty forty year long trends
right where things happen very steadily over that period. They
hit their height right as crack becomes a thing. And
so all of them get blamed on crack, right because

(37:58):
it's easy to say that, well is community. All these
black people got hooked on crack, and that's why everything
fell apart. Ship was falling apart due to specific policy
decisions for decades, and it hit its height during the crack,
and that that's critical to know, otherwise you're gonna wind
up blaming crack for everything. It's not to blame for everything, yes, um,

(38:19):
it's it just is not. Um. Obviously, it sure doesn't help,
you know, like it does not reversity of these trends.
But that that's like if it's like somebody has a
heart attack while they're like during a fucking run, and
then you hit him in the head when they finish it,
and it's like, well, you know they were having problems

(38:42):
before you hit him on the head. Yes, exactly. I
don't know. That's a bad way to that's a stupid
way to describe, but I don't know. Again somewhere, so yeah,
during we're gonna be talking about crack today, obviously, and
it plays a role in this. But again, this is
this is going on for a long time. And I
want to quote again from that paper I read from earlier.
So policy may have inadvertently contributed to the decline in marriage.

(39:03):
During the nineteen sixties, many states denied a f DC
payments aid to families with dependent children. The single mothers
suspected of living with a man. These types of eligibility
requirements were struck down by the Supreme Court in nineteen
sixty eight. However, even under the revised welfare policy, poor
couples had an incentive to cohabit instead of mary in
order to maintain welfare eligibility. And there's this is one

(39:24):
of the thing because one of the things that Crack
gets blamed for is the destruction of the of the
black family, all of these black men who abandoned their families. Right,
this is the this is the right wing lion on
what happens. And no, in the nineteen sixties, twenty years
before we've got Crack on the street. US states are
denying aid to families to single mothers who are suspected

(39:44):
of living with a man. And what usually happens before
marriage is you cohabitate, right, Um, so suddenly you're penalized
for that if you're not already married. See that's what
by like, depending on how hots up you are, because
that's in a lot of like the black like a
lot of the black act of his circles is like
that was a process of demasculating and devaluing the black

(40:07):
man even further by being like, uh, well, if y'all
need help, you can't handle daddy in the house, you
know what I'm saying. So it's like, well, dang. And
then what they talked about among our community is like
what it might have done to our psyche. Not I
don't think this is very fair, but their argument is
what has done in our psyche to look at our
women and be like, you chose to check over me,

(40:30):
you know what I'm saying. And I think that's a
that's a very that's a very man no sphere way
to look at it. But that being said, the idea
that like it do kind of feel like the government
pitted us against each other Joe saying, I mean, and
that that move right there, A strong case can be

(40:50):
made it does a lot more damage than crass. Right. Yes,
there's a really good documentary if people want to know
more about this and like the kind of the human
side of this, called the Pruitt I Go myth prove it.
I Go was a government housing development in St. Louis
Um during this kind of period of time, I think
fifties sixties, and that documentary does a good job of
explaining how the way in which benefits were handled, um

(41:11):
led to the dissolution of a lot of families, and
like kind of incentivized that. It's a very dark story,
but that documentary I found, I felt did a really
good job of it. Um So, obviously, the cause of
all of these problems is complicated and goes on for
a while. But where the credit comes, as far as
the media is concerned and as far as US politicians

(41:32):
are concerned, all of this is the fault of crack cocaine,
which starts to enter US inner city communities in nineteen
eighty one, primarily in southern California, although where it would
take off the most and do the most damage is
the huge dense cities of the Northeast, places like fucking Baltimore. Right.
Um So, crack is immediately big business. A lot of

(41:52):
it gets sold to people who live who live in
this communities, but and this is often ignored, much, if
not most, of the money comes from people who lived
elsewhere outside of the inner city, often in more affluent areas,
who would drive into inner city communities to buy crack.
And what this actually is means there's a graph going
around Twitter right now that shows where money moves within

(42:17):
kind of a graph of an urban area, and it
all comes from the inner city out to the suburbs, right,
because where are the people who live who own the
buildings that poor people in the inner city live out
in the fucking suburbs, right. So one of the things
that crack represents is money coming from affluent suburbs and
entering the inner city. Right. Nothing else is doing There's

(42:40):
no way, like really not other meaningful ways money is
coming from outside into the inner city. So that's part
of why this is a big deal. We've talked about
how negative the impact is on people, but one of
the things this means is that there's fucking money coming now. Um.
So of course the fortunes to be made meant that
a lot of money was on the table for people
who were willing to be more violent than other people

(43:02):
who wanted that money. So you do get a lot
of as there always is when cash is on the
table in those quantities, murders over matters of profit and
to keep their operations safe from the police. Um. There
are of course significant social costs due to the use
of the drugs. There's people who neglect their kids and
mistreat their partners and spend money that are needed for
other things. But narcotics um and the static statistics on

(43:23):
this are pretty bleak, and I don't want to stray
away from those either, So I'm gonna quote from an
analysis in Chicago Booth University. Quote the rise and crack
use from nineteen eighty four and nineteen eighty nine is
associated with a doubling of the number of murdered black
males aged fourteen to seventeen, a thirty percent to increase
for those aged eighteen to twenty four, and a ten

(43:43):
percent increase for those twenty five and over. Thus, crack
accounts for much of the observed variation in homicide rates
over this time period. In addition, the proportion of black
children in foster care more than doubled, Fetal death rates
and weapons arrests of racks of blacks rose by more
than and black babies low birth weights increased by five percent. Now,
this is really bad. But what what's happening in the

(44:06):
media as this massive murder search happens is crack is
being associated as a drug that makes people murder, right,
the drug that makes people lose their mind. That is
not what It's not it's it's the money. Yes, it's
normal economics. That happens everywhere else. It's really like what
you're explaining, I think again, it's like if you just

(44:30):
under just an understanding of economics in general, Like what
we're doing is this is an influx of venture capital.
You know why, Like what fund did. It's like you're
gonna go to the bank and let them white boys
tell you know. You know what I'm saying, You're gonna
keep you have to keep, you know, dressing up and
kind of shucking and jiving for these people to come
invest in your things. Or it's like you go get

(44:50):
it out the mud, you go get it, go get
it on your own corner. You invest in your own
So the thought was like, I mean, I mean, it's
literally there. It's the narrative of every jay Z album, right,
is like I invested in myself. How I did it
is I sold crack, got out the game and invested
in us. You know what I'm saying, it's it's it's
nipsey hustle. It's like, so like you said, like you

(45:12):
can have this media narrative of like, you know, all
this is terrible. You did it on the backs of
each other, which might be true, you know what I'm saying.
But that being said, it's like, where else is there
any other influx of capital that like that is self
generated and that I don't owe. And it's like where
I mean where you where you think where you think

(45:33):
we got that from? We got it from the mafia,
Like you you learn from the mafia. That's what they did,
Joe said. So it's like, oh, well, that's okay, that's
how you get it that way. You don't ask nobody else.
You keep it in the family, you know what I mean.
And it's it's, uh, this is I mean again, the
point that we're making here is that crack there are
specific things and and as we'll talk about like babies

(45:55):
with low birth wings that's a that's a part of that.
There are specific problems that are just due to the
inherent like characteristics of crack. But the massive increase in
murders and the proportion of kids who go into foster
care and large part because they've lost parents. Um, that
is do the thing that has entered the community that
has caused that violence is fucking cash, right, That's what

(46:18):
when we're the Crack epidemic is a fucking yeah, cash epidemic.
It's a gold rush, right, yeah, exactly. Um, so this
is all sucked up, but obviously one of probably even debatably,
the thing that winds up being most toxic from all
of this is the moral panic that follows article. And

(46:40):
this is where the moral panic over crack starts. There
is a nineteen article in the New England Journal of
Medicine which goes viral among the media of the time,
which is just starting to kind of transition into the
twenty four hour news cycles that we've got now right,
we're in the early stages of that with TV media.
The author of this article is a guy named Dr
Ira chasten Off, and he claimed, based on a couple

(47:01):
of cases, that children of mothers who used crack were smaller, sicker,
and less social than other infants. Now, to his credit,
chat Off is like, hey, we only have a few
people in the study. This is very small, It is imperfect.
This is I'm doing this because I think there might
be a problem in this small batch study means that
we should do a larger study to determine if there

(47:22):
is a serious population wide problem, right, which is how
you do science. I don't think he's doing anything wrong here.
But the problem and this is again and early we
start seeing this stuff. We we we've all lived through
this ship the last couple of years. Right with these
you get these little studies about oh iver, mecton or whatever.
There's this and then suddenly that gets blown up to
a bunch of guys people taking fucking fish medicine or whatever,

(47:43):
and there's people dying and stuff. Um, this is one
of the first times that happens because nobody listens to
chast and Off being like, so, this is a really
tiny study and we need to do more research before
we draw any conclusions. They lose their fucking babies. And
by the the people losing their minds are the goddamn
the mainstream media, the legacy media, and I'm gonna quote

(48:06):
from the fucking New York Times here. As a medical writer,
Harriet Washington wrote of this period in her book Medical Apartheid.
Dr Chasnov's provisional research was swallowed whole, then regurgitated in
a racialized form by newspaper, magazine and even medical accounts.
Americans were told on the nightly news that crack exposure
in the womb destroyed the unique brain functions that distinguished

(48:26):
human beings from animals, an observation that no one had
connected to the chemically identical powdered form of the drug
that affluent whites were shoveling up their noses. The legal
scholar Dorothy Roberts argues in her Reproductive history, Killing the
Black Body, that by for focusing on maternal use of
a drug associated with black people, the press promoted the
notion that the monstrous crack smoking mother was typical of

(48:49):
black women. Yeah, and uh, this is where the real
herding starts. This is what actually, this is crack, gnarly drug.
Lot of people get hurt because chemically what crack does.
The money that comes in brings a lot of murder
with it. The thing that's most devastating is right here.
It comes as a result of this fucking moral path.

(49:10):
The crack ain't the bastard of the story. No, No,
it's curious. Um, yeah, it's it's adjacent to the bastard.
And you know what's adjacent to behind the bastards? Politics,
the wildhood politics deeply intertwined, especially this week, but also
the products and services that support this podcast. So check

(49:32):
this out and purchase things we have returned crack giveaway,
all right, little Dave's pill reference. Yeah, yeah, of course,
of course. Um so um. I want to continue that

(49:56):
quote from the New York Times about kind of how
how this all works. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts argues in
her history Killing the Black Body that all this focus
on the specific danger to black babies helped push a
notion of the monstrous crack smoking weather in the media.
Washington Post columnists Charles Croudhammer, famous for having never once
been right, wrote a popular column in which he alleged

(50:17):
that black women were spawning a bio underclass of impaired
children whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth. Crowdhammer wrote,
the dead babies maybe the lucky ones. Oh my god. Yeah,
this guy still gets paid to right. Shit. Fucking Charles
Crowdhammer again never been right in his entire life? Is it?

(50:39):
Let me stupid? Um? Yeah? I I just again when
you are when you write the words bio underclass, Yeah,
come off, you should wonder Am I doing a phrenology?
Have I just have I just started? Have I reinvented
race science as a moral panic? Yeah? Baby, doesn't? Am

(51:00):
I doing the thing that men in wigs did a
hundred years ago, like, Um, yes you are Charles Crowd,
yes man, so yeah, um I yeah. Anyway, Um, all
this concern over unborn babies and crack fed nicely into
the Christian extremist movement that had gotten Reagan elected again.

(51:21):
We've talked about this in our episodes on Focus on
the Family, on Philish Slaflely. Um, this all feeds into
each other. Right, this is all happening at the same time.
You've got the religious right is a thing and they
have just now because they started out. The religious right
gets initially involved because they're angry that schools have been integrated.
Right that Bob Jones University has been forced to take
in black people because it gets federal funding. Um, you

(51:43):
can't segregate your schools. But that's not popular. So they
turned to abortion as like the real thing to hit. Um.
And right as they're really getting the anti abortion movement
churning up, there's all this concern overr unborn babies and crack,
which which really jels great. Um, And I'm gonna quote
from the Times again here. News organizations embraced far fetched

(52:05):
ideas like the one advanced by doctors who believed they
could discern babies who had been exposed in the womb
by the tone of their cries. In nineteen ninety, Time
magazine argued that the case for limiting the rights of
women and elevating the rights of fetuses was gaining strength
based on the fact that maternity wards around the country
were ringing quote with the high pitched cat cries of
crack babies who may face lifelong handicaps as a result

(52:27):
of their mother's drug use. Man, there's so much sinister,
Like I'm mourn like the amount of this we internalized
and kind of like weaponized against each other, and just
hearing it now so many years later, it was like
you motherfucker, you know what I'm saying, And and the

(52:51):
reality of like, yeah, dog, like yo, this you shouldn't
be doing crag. Why are you pregnant? Fam you know
what I'm saying, and like and and just but just
all of that sort of together, it's just it makes
it even more sinister to be like, you know, we
even actually, like even among our own community, peddled somebody,

(53:11):
you know what I'm saying, and that that that kind
of hurts also, you know, yeah, yeah, um and this, so, so,
this and and this New York Times article I'm quoting
from is a modern one where they are kind of
taking themselves in the past to task for what they did.
And the New York Times is a huge It's dope.

(53:33):
It's also like, this isn't the only time that happens
in New York Times. It seems like you guys, actually
often because of these fucking opinion columnist assholes that you
bring on start arguing for like terrible ship that has
nightmarished consequences on the world, and then twenty years later
the good journals will be like, oh, turns out we
had a huge fault, like like we we were largely responsible,

(53:55):
but this nightmare. The Times amplifies what gets called the
damn generation theory. Their editorial page argues in nine nine
that it's going to cost more than seven million dollars
to prepare twenty thousand children in the state of Florida
for school because of like how damaged they were from cracked.
There's zero evidence of this. That's just a lie. That's

(54:16):
just fucking nonsense. The former executive editor of The New
York Times, a guy named Abe Rosenthal, writes a column
titled The Poisoned Babies, where he asks authorities to suspend
parental rights for women who are addicted to crack. Um, now,
there's evidence as to what happens when you do that,
and it causes women who are addicted to crack and

(54:37):
pregnant not to seek medical treatment that allows them to
provide adequate care for their babies, which is what does
the harm more than the crack. It is not look
controversial ground here. Obviously, not good to smoke crack while
you are pregnant, not good to drink while you're pregnant.
There's a number of things you ought not do while
you're pregnant. Also, human beings for thousands of years and

(55:01):
many cultures drank alcohol regularly with babies, and and and
those babies came out and we're fine and learned things right.
Um not, it's not good. There are health consequences associated
to smoking crack in the womb. The d data suggests
the real harm comes from driving these women away from
treatment and adequate medical care, which is what causes problems

(55:22):
for the baby more than anything. Yeah, yeah again, I
mean not good to smoke crack with the baby. Worst
to do what we did. I mean, it's the same,
like it's such a just a like a parallel for
even immigration issues. Like if I know, you know what
I'm saying that you know of a very minor, completely

(55:46):
treatable thing is if I would just go to the clinic,
you know, go to the the county, you know, a hospital,
it'll be fine. But if there are ice agents at there,
I'm not gonna go, you know I'm saying. And even
when even when the even during the whole like sort
of crackdown you know under President Trump about federal you know,

(56:10):
that mandatory reporting to like immigration from the police, why
the police was like, I'm not doing that, and they're like,
and it's not like I'm patting the police on the back,
but I'm just just being logical here. And they were
being logical. They're like, well, then no one's gonna report
anything because why would I do. So then it's like, well, no,
I'm not gonna tell I'm not gonna report nothing because

(56:31):
if I do, you might deport me or think I
should be deported, you know what I'm saying. So it's
like that that that uh policy exacerbates the problem. Is
what I'm saying, is like and in and in so
many other areas of culture, it's the same thing. It's like,
I'm not gonna shoot, I'm not gonna do that. I'm
not telling y'all nothing, because if you do, that's gonna happen,

(56:53):
and that and then that avoidance exacerbates the problem. I
said that, right, But yeah, yeah, and that's that's where
the issue comes from. It. In nineteen nine, the New
York Times is coverage peaked in a front page story
that warned of an onslaught that fall of the quote
first big wave of children exposed to crack in the womb.
The journalist who wrote that article now acknowledges it as

(57:16):
both alarmist and unsubstantiated, which is again nice. But one
of the things this does is that police, uh, police
unions and whatnot and political figures start flipping out about
crack babies like they're like like it's like it's an
alien life form coming to the planet Earth to do
us harm, and we have to ready our fucking guns
to fight the invaders. Right. That is how they talk

(57:38):
about this, And as the paper of record, it was
the Times job to lead credence to these claims, so
that police and political figures can how including Joseph Biden,
by the way, can howl about super predators and justify
harsh new mandatory minimum sentences to stop the raging danger
of drug crime. As the panic reached its peak, Congress

(57:58):
passed a bill that included the hundred to one rule.
This made it mandatory to assign a ten year sentence
to anyone caught with fifty grams of crack, which is
about as much crack in terms of weight as you
would get in a fun sized bag of chips. For comparison,
someone caught with cocaine would need a full suitcase worth
of high grade cocaine to qualify for the same penalty.

(58:21):
So this is what quote unquote destroyed a generation to
the extent that that actually happened. This is what does
it And I'm going to read a quote from an
AP right up here. An Associated Press review of federal
and state incarceration data shows that between nineteen seventy five
and two thousand nineteen, the US prison population jumped from

(58:41):
two hundred forty five nine to one point four three
million Americans. Among them, about one in five people were
incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.
The racial disparities reveal the war is uneven toll. Following
the passage of stiffer penalties for crack, cocaine, and other drugs,
the black and car sor ration rate in America exploded
from about six hundred per one hundred thousand people in

(59:04):
nineteen seventy to eighteen hundred and eight thousand and two
thousand to eight hundred and eight thousand, sorry the eighteen
hundred and eight and two thousand. In the same time span,
the rate for the Latino population grew from two hundred
and eight per hundred thousand people to six hundred and fifteen. Well,
the white incarceration rate grew from one hundred and three
people per hundred thousand to two hundred and forty two.

(59:26):
So yeah, you're looking at number one, the rate at
the start of this of this process, the rate of
incarceration for blacks in America is six times what it
is for Americans, and then it triples. Yeah, it's so yeah,
I think, like for the listeners sake, like let's let

(59:48):
me go back to the hundred to one ratio in
in that Like, so, what we're saying is one ounce
of crack gets the same amount of jail time as
a hundred pounds of cocaine. Like, so one ounce of
crack same amount of jail time as a hundred So

(01:00:12):
if you ask, so, if you so, just, I mean,
come on, guys, put your thinking caps on. You've got
a one ounce of crack versus a hundred ounces, Okay,
which one of y'all you think is gonna distribute the stuff?
Who you thinks the sales person? Do you know what
I'm saying versus just the user? Like I you're telling
me we get the same jail time? Do you know

(01:00:35):
much money you have to have to have a hundred
ounces of cocaine? Like yeah, So just like like hear
how sinister and purposeful? This is like we're not making
this ship up like this is it. It's not a conspiracy.
These are laws. Part of the reason why because this

(01:00:57):
is one of the things that's happening here is we've
talked about in our Bill Cooper episodes, is that a
lot of the black community and this some of this
happens through hip hop, is embracing a set of conspiracy theories.
And we'll talk about that more. But part of why
they're doing it, because we talk there's some stuff in there.
There's some especially the Bill Cooper stuff that gets adopted
by hip hop that's not at all accurate. But part

(01:01:18):
of why people would believe in conspiracies is that you
could not seek to damage a community more than they
then happens here, right, Like this, it's surgically targeted to
hurt black communities, Black inner city communities. Like it's like
it's like somebody dropped a bomb. Yeah. And when these
laws are yeah, and you're saying, like, am I taking crazy?

(01:01:41):
Feels I feel like we're being targeted, Like no, you're not.
You're just not listen, you're five five, You just you
don't have any fathers in your home, you know what?
You just you're just like no. I feel like, well, no,
you guys are just violent. Look, I mean, this is
what's happening. You guys die more than us, isn't. You're
in a jail more like yeah, but I'm trying to
tell you family, like it just don't feel to say.
And it's like it's like, well, there's got to be

(01:02:02):
something going on here. Yeah. And it's worth noting too
that this surge and arrests that we've just talked about,
there is no increase in addiction treatment resources and these
communities that follows the surgeon arrests. Zero I found an
article in the Chicago Booth Review that analyzed a recent
study measuring the impact of crack cocaine by University of

(01:02:23):
Chicago professor Stephen Levitt and a bunch of other smart
college guys and attempted to determine what actual harms could
be laid at the feet of crack as opposed to
things like the legal climate around it. They concluded, quote,
the destructive effects of crack cocaine were because of the
prohibition itself rather than the usage. If crack were legal,
the authors argue, there would not have been as much violence.

(01:02:43):
Levitt himself added, all the evidence suggests that the violence
is closely tied to the fact that the suppliers of
crack the gangs were killing each other because they could
make huge profits. Suppliers were competing. It seems that the
consumption effects of crack weren't that bad in comparison to
the one and therefore, while the effective crack is not negligible,
it is not as large as some of the doomsayers

(01:03:05):
of claim damn it is not. The problem was not crack.
If people if if all drugs had been legal, right,
if we've never had a prohibition culture. In a nineteen
eighty one an entrepreneur, some Mark Zuckerberg type right in
Oakland had been like, I've invent to crack and you
know has his Apple type announcement for crack cocaine. There's
some lives that will be negatively effective, right, some some

(01:03:25):
families will be harmed it. It's not good. Crack is
Again I'm not a prohibitionist, but it's a gnarly drug.
It's not good for you to do. But what you
wouldn't have is any of this ship. You would have
some specific people that have problems with it, and some
like specific areas probably where it's more common than others,
and there would be some gnarly ship as a result
of that, But you don't have neighborhoods destroy I was

(01:03:47):
gonna say that again. The laura around here is that
like crack, there's there's there's the cribs before crack, and
there's the crib after, you know, and the pre Like
we talked about this in the in the when we
first met in the Black Panther episode of Yeah, it's

(01:04:09):
like they're just the children. PRIs for the children of
the of the panthers, you know what I'm saying, and
knuckling up, you know, fist fights, rolf rolf housing protecting
their turf. It crack has brought the guns. Yeah and
uh and yeah. So like you saying that like is
a yeah, it's a big that that's that's so important

(01:04:31):
to to understand that nuance and it's I have to
I want to emphasize here like we had in this
might be a good way to explain it. A bunch
of because of the mix of this suddenly, this social
justice movement inspired by the murder of George Floyd is
is everywhere as huge. There's protests. There's also a lot

(01:04:52):
of need as a result of the pandemic as a
result of issues relating from the protests, and you get
a bunch of different community organization in a bunch of
different states raising huge amounts of money through crowdfunding, right,
and there's a shiploaded drama that comes from that and
a drop we're talking drama because a hundred grand came
in suddenly, and so people who have never seen that
much money in their lives had a plan for it. Originally,

(01:05:13):
and then ship gets gnarly between people, because that's what
happens when you introduce a bunch of money suddenly, right
with crack, you're talking about suddenly groups like the Crips
and the Bloods, who were very different organizations prior to
crack looking at million dollars that you can put down
in a few yes, right, like you can make that
money fucking quimmediately. Yeah, of course, of course people get murdered, right, Um, Like, yeah,

(01:05:40):
it's it's there's no other way for that to have gone. Now,
what's most interesting about the crack epidemic to me is
what stopped it. After nine the link between crack and
adverse social outcomes for Black Americans disappears statistically. The only
exception is the homicide rate for black men aged eighteen
to twenty four, which remains is elevated because now a

(01:06:02):
bunch of different groups, the Crypts and the Bloods and
other groups like that, have gotten used to selling drugs
for money and making that a very gnarly business, right,
and so yeah, people keep murdering each other. Um, But
the other stuff we've talked about, including like infant birth
weight and stuff that goes away crack use in terms
of overall quantity remained stable, so the number of people

(01:06:24):
the amount of crack consumed does not decline after but
the negative effects due to it on a societal basis
among the black community stop. And what's interesting is that
because this is because the there's no expansion in the
number of people smoking crack, what researchers find is that
people who had been smoking crack don't stop right, they

(01:06:45):
continue to smoke um, but new users stop doing the drug.
So the people who are already addicted stay addicted because
it is crack cocaine and it's very addicted addictive. But
after new people don't really start in insignificant population amounts.
New people are not coming into the ranks of people
using this drug. The reason that the overall amount consumed

(01:07:08):
remains stable is that there's a breakthrough in crack manufacturing,
which makes the price plummet, so users are able to
afford more, and thus the total amount consumed is stable,
but the amount of new people who are doing crack
stops expanding. Levitt points out that the expansion of crack
in the black community is halted not due to arrests
or to fearmongering, but from social learning, Yes, what happens

(01:07:30):
is the first generation of people who got addicted. It's bad.
It's really bad for them. And yeah they're younger siblings,
their cousins, their kids see this and are like, wow,
it seems like I shouldn't do crack. I am because
that's what I was explaining before. I am the product
of that where I was like, oh, yeah, I don't

(01:07:50):
know if we should do that. And like I said,
like hip hop got together and was like what songs
like self destruction and like making sure we made using
hip hop. We I wasn't. I was five years old,
but hip hop made using crack not cool in a
lot of ways, you know what I mean. And that's yeah, um,

(01:08:14):
that's that's what happens, right, And so you get you know,
the suddenly the you know, the crack baby panic goes
away because it was never really real. Um, and because
the age of crack users goes steadily up. Right, the
same amount of people are smoking, but they're they're not
having kids anymore because they're older. As profitability drops on
a per head basis, violent crime around crack fell as well.

(01:08:37):
It simply was not worth killing for the dollar amount
of crack that people were likely to have on them, Right,
the same amount is worth ten dollars instead of two
and fifty dollars. Well, maybe it's not worth throwing down here,
you know. Um. And so in spite of everything the
government had actually done, the problem got better in part
because crack got cheaper and more available. Right. That is

(01:08:58):
for the people who are like, if all of this
stuff did and legal from the start, we wouldn't have
had a problem. That's strong evidence, right then, like crack
gets cheaper and the crack epidemic gets less bad. That's
not the only thing. Again, a lot of this, as
you said, is cultural. It's it's the it's the community
taking agency. It's people talking to each other, it's people
making wise decisions in their own self interest, and it's

(01:09:18):
people trying to talk to their fellows to get them
to stay away from this stuff that's pretty bad for you. Um.
And it's one of those things. Everything gets better in
spite of the government, which if Ronald Reagan was a
guy who actually meant anything that he said, right, Because
he's the guy who's like, I'm the scariest words in
the English language, or I'm from the government, and I'm
there to help. If you're actually believe in anything as

(01:09:39):
a conservative, this is a perfect example of things. Right. Oh,
the government just made this worse. Yeah, exactly, Like here's
your proof. Yeah. Actually, the free and the free market
did kind of solve this one credit where it's dude,
this is a um. So. The crack epidemic is well
past sight by, but it remained a common subject in

(01:10:03):
the news and part of the repeated attempts by guys
like Joseph Robinett Biden to expand the prison industrial complex.
Black inner city communities were well in recovery by this point,
but cracked was a fat crack. Sorry, was a fact
of life now, as were the tens of thousands of
young black men serving decades of time for possession. And
it was into this climate in the August of nineteen

(01:10:24):
ninety six that A and again ninety is right. When
the crack Evanica is cooling off, things are starting to
get better. The black community is starting to breathe a
little bit right. Um August of nineteen ninety six, a
young journalist named Gary Webb publishes a massive three part
investigation under the title Dark Alliance, The story behind the

(01:10:44):
crack explosion. Now his employer is the San Jose Mercury,
which is a scrappy new upstart paper. They had only
a fraction of the budget of the l A Times,
which is like the fucking New York Times for southern California. Right,
it's a big It is a national level outlet, even
though it's called the l A Times. Um. But obviously
you know, they've got only a little bit of the
l A Times this budget, and they've got none of

(01:11:06):
the cache. But what they do have is a working
understanding of this thing that's probably going to be a
big deal in the future called the Internet. Right, San
Jose Mercury figures out that the Internet is where journalism
can go viral, and there maybe you could argue the
very first outlet whoever figures this out in a meaningful way,
Matt Drudge, is kind of right around the same time
and gets a lot of this. He's a piece of ship,

(01:11:27):
but he has kind of along those lines. Um. But
the San Jose Mercury publishes this whole investigation Dark Alliance
simultaneously online and in print, which is again kind of
the first time this has been done for a big investigation.
This right, up from the Columbia Journalism Reviews, Peter Cornblue
summarizes what happens. The long three part series covered the

(01:11:49):
lives and connections of three career criminals. Freeway Ricky Ross
perhaps l A is most renowned crack dealer in the
nineteen eighties, Oscar Danilo Blanden rays a right wing Nicaraguan
X pay treat described by one US Assistant district attorney
as the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States.
And Juan Norvin Norvin in some documents Menenzez Cantarero, a

(01:12:10):
friend of the fallen dictator Anastasia Samosa, who allegedly brought
Blandon into the drug business to support the contrast and
supplied him for an uncertain amount of time with significant
quantities of cocaine. The first installment of the series, headlined
Crack Plagues Roots are in Nicaraguan War, opened with two
dramatic statements and this is quoting from the original article.

(01:12:30):
Now for the better part of a decade of San
Francisco Bay Area drug ring so sold tons of cocaine
to the crips and blood street gangs of Los Angeles
and funneled millions and drug profits to a Latin American
guerilla army run by the Central Intelligence Agency. The second paragraph,
which captured even more public attention, read, this drug network
opened the first pipeline between Columbia's cocaine cartels and the

(01:12:52):
black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as
the crack capital of the world. There it is so.
If you have ever heard, either in a conversation or
most recently in a prominent TV show The Boys, the
claim that the CIA introduced crack to the inner cities,
this is the origin point. This is one percent where

(01:13:16):
that comes from. You made it. It all comes out
of this article, right, because this article is the first
time that you have someone saying in a very condensed,
clear form, the CIA brought crack to the inner city
by in order to fund the contrast. Right, that is
that is the way this is. Now, that's actually not
what the article says, because the CIA is not bringing
crack anywhere. What the CIA is doing is allowing Nicaragua

(01:13:38):
drug dealers to bring cocaine into the United States so
that they can sell it to fund to right wing
paramilitary in Nicaragua. That cocaine is then being turned into crack,
because that's happening at the same time. Um. But yeah,
the claims Web made in his article are a bit
different from the version of the story that spreads kind
of viral. What he provides as evidence to support the
assertion that quote a cocaine for weapons trade supported US

(01:14:01):
policy and undermined Black America. Now, while the article did
not show, the articles did not show any direct stated
intention of the CIA to spark a crack epidemic, it
did lay out how the agency supported cocaine smugglers in
order to fund the contrast, We're gonna talk that in
a minute. But the third article doesn't touch on the
CIA at all. It covers what we've just talked about
in terms of sentencing discrepancies between black and white people

(01:14:23):
for cocaine trafficking and how that harms the community. Webb
pointed out that Ross, who was black, received a life
sentence without parole. Blandon, a Nicaraguan man, had smuggled cocaine,
and whereas Ross had sold crack, and Blandon serves just
two years and then gets a bunch of money from
the FEDS to be an informant. Um. So the primary gotcha.

(01:14:44):
The story had was that it connected the two right
wing dealer not Nicaraguan's, to the f d in freedom
fighters and showed that they somewhat inexplicably had escaped a
prosecution for a weird number of crimes. And this is
the point at which I think we're gonna have to
bring things to a close for the day, because we've
got we'll be talking about in part two, Nicaragua, the contras,

(01:15:06):
all of this, how the actual crack and coke, well,
the cocaine tread because again, this is if you want
to it's one of those things where, like the the
inaccurate version of the story is the CIA brought crack
to the inner cities. The act perfectly accurate version is
the CIA allowed uh cocaine to be trafficked in mass
into southern California, which was then turned into crack and
that's what caused the crack epidemic. And then the other

(01:15:29):
accurate for all and then the stuff we talked about
in my episodes. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things
where if you don't understand it, you might just say
the CIA smuggled crack into the inner city. If you
really understand it, the summary is still the CIA brought
crack in the inter city. It's just a little more
detailed that. Yeah, there's a few more steps in between,
but the CIA did this. Yeah, yeah, the CIA is

(01:15:52):
a bit well. But also, I mean, and here's the thing.
One of the things that I do think is frustrating,
because we're gonna we're about to talk in part two
all about the CIA and some other groups, is yeah,
the CIA has got a lot of blame for this.
But um, where I'm standing not more than the New
York Times, Right, That's that's where I'm fucking standing here
and not and not more than Congress when the people

(01:16:13):
passing these laws. Right, Um, that's where I'm fucking standing. Um,
it's what it looks like to make oh, y'all multiple bastards. Man. Yeah,
well I don't love it, but you know what I mean,
that's the crack epidemic. In brief, Um, prop you've got
anything to plug here, maybe hood politics, the show that
we're doing, yeah, this on partnership with this way, Yeah,

(01:16:36):
this is this is definitely like a you know, a
little a newbie thing where we're doing like, you know,
a collaboration on this where uh, this story takes place
in the context of the stories that we're talking about
on the