How Similar Is the Opioid Epidemic to the Crack Epidemic?

The War on Drugs being waged against opioids is very different than the one that was fought against crack. Learn more about the politics of race and addiction in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi, brain Stuff,
I'm Lauren Vogelbon, and I've got a serious but important
topic for you today. In October of seventeen, President Donald
Trump declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency.
In the White House ceremony, Trump said, nobody has seen
anything like what's going on now, referring to the thousands

(00:24):
of Americans overdosing every year from a class of narcotics
that includes prescription painkillers, heroine, and fentanyl, which is a
synthetic form of heroin. It's a serious problem and a
sentiment echoed by well meaning public figures across the board.
But the thing is, we have seen its like before.
Back in the nine eighties and early nineties, the crack
cocaine epidemic ravaged poor black communities across the country. When

(00:47):
krack arrived in economically depressed urban areas, it proved both
powerfully addicted and potentially lucrative. Violent turf wars erupted as
dealers fought for control of the market, and the group
of addiction caught many people. The guv mints response to
the crack epidemic was to double down on the war
on drugs, first declared by Richard Nixon in nineteen seventy one.

(01:07):
In nineteen six, Congress passed to the infamous one to
one sentencing law, which treated possession of one gram of crack,
not the sale, mind just possession, as the equivalent of
possessing one hundred grams of powder cocaine. This was on
top of a five year mandatory minimum sentence for first
time possession of crack. Since black people accounted for eight

(01:29):
of crack arrests, black communities were the hardest hit by
the criminalization of crack, which sent young black men to
prison at historic rates. The federal prison population swelled between
the years five and two thousand, and two thirds of
those convictions were for drug offenses. Studies have shown that
although Blacks are no more likely than whites to use
illegal drugs, there six to ten times more likely to

(01:51):
be incarcerated for drug offenses. In contrast to the tough
on crime response to the crack epidemic, which took its
toll primarily on poor black unities, the government responds to
the opioid crisis, in which more than pent of overdose
victims are white, has been wildly different, particularly in the
way that elected officials and law enforcement talk about addiction.

(02:12):
Police departments across the country adopted treatment first policies that
postponed or forwent criminal prosecution for opioid possession and diverted
drug offenders to treatment programs. Police officers in the small
town of Laconia, New Hampshire, a state hit particularly hard
by overdose deaths, carry business cards that read the Laconia
Police Department recognizes that substance misuse is a disease. We

(02:34):
understand you can't fight this alone. One reason that most
opioid addicts are white could be because they are more
likely to be prescribed pain medication. One study showed that
doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication for their
black patients, believing falsely that they have higher pain thresholds.
But we spoke with Eco Yanka, a law professor at
Shiva University, who finds this treatment first rhetoric a little

(02:57):
bitter sweet. He says that while it's heartening to see
local law enforcement and elected officials talking about addicts as
victims instead of moral degenerates, it's not like any of
this is based on new information. He said. We spent
two generations locking up young black men for any reason
we could, in large part covered by the War on drugs,
and then we have an explosion of addiction in the

(03:17):
white community, and suddenly everyone starts reading all the science
that's been around for two decades. Yanka is one of
many voices calling out the clear racial divide between the
hyper criminalization and moral outcry over crack addiction and the
leniency and compassion shown towards opioid addiction. When pregnant black
mothers became addicted to crack, it created a national panic

(03:38):
over crack babies. Today, a baby is born addicted to
opioids every nineteen minutes, but there's no parallel vilification of
opioid moms. The crack baby panic of late nineteen eighties
was sparked by one preliminary study of just twenty three
infants and led to predictions that an entire generation would
grow up sickly, brain damaged, and heavily dependent on social services.

(03:58):
Longitudinal studies have since exposed the crack baby myth, showing
that full term babies born to crack addicted mothers show
no health differences compared to their peers. One of the
key talking points of the presidential campaign was the economic
toll of globalization on rural, mostly white communities, and how
the ensuing joblessness and hopelessness helped to fuel the opioid crisis.

(04:22):
We spoke with Maya Slavitts, a New York based journalist
who has written extensively about addiction. They said, the reason
we saw crack hit black neighborhoods the way it did
in the eighties and nineties was because they had high
unemployment levels and were hit hard by d industrialization, all
the same things we're seeing in rural white communities now.
Yanka says that plenty of sociologists and economists were making

(04:43):
those connections back in the nineteen eighties, but their voices
and data were drowned out by a media narrative that
preferred to place the blame for the crack epidemic on
negligent black mothers and absent black fathers. While we'd hope
that the narrative surrounding today's opioid epidemic wouldn't change if
its racial demograph were reversed, we can at least speak
glad that some of the people facing addiction aren't going

(05:04):
it alone, and that some of the programs being created
will help all of our struggling citizens in the future.
Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other topics,
visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.