Robert Evans and Prop dissect the crack epidemic's origins, tracing cocaine's 1855 extraction to crack's 1980s emergence as a $10 dose accessible to impoverished Black communities amidst economic collapse. They challenge moral panics by linking 1984–1989 violence to suburban cash influxes and flawed welfare policies that discouraged marriage, while exposing how media hysteria fueled racially disparate 100-to-1 sentencing laws. Ultimately, the hosts argue the epidemic subsided post-1995 due to reduced profitability rather than intervention, complicating Gary Webb's CIA pipeline narrative with evidence of local conversion and systemic policy failures. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ego Mode Introduction00:02:19
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
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I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tackling the Crack Epidemic00:05:27
Oh, prop.
Sophie.
Yup.
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 or eight hours talking about the crack epidemic, the CIA, 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 if we just did that for the first entire week of October?
Wouldn't that be a hoot?
I feel like this would be a good time because it kind of matches all the stuff that kind of happens when we sit around a table anyway.
We just talk about crack.
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, we're allowed to co-opt it.
So why don't we call it Kraktoberfest?
Listen, I'm with it.
You know what I'm saying?
Don't over, Cracktober, because Oktoberfest to me is a little too late to hose it for myself.
There will be no leaderhosen, but there will be whatever CIA agents wear.
Honestly, probably like Patagonia vests.
Oh, yeah.
Khaki Slacks.
Yeah, Khaki Slacks, Patagonia vests.
Yeah, hell of a lot of those.
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, but I think people are going to be happy.
I think you're all going to have a good eight-ish hours learning about everything there is to know about how the CIA actually, because that's like the thing everybody says, 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 just like the quick summaries people give.
It's worse than the street lore.
It really is what you get into it.
And I've really felt like, you know, we're always looking for ways to collab.
You know what I'm saying?
There's obviously there's a lot of mutual friendship, symbiotic-ness between our two podcasts.
Both shows.
So there's that.
We share a Sophie.
But I feel like finding that perfect Venn diagram, that perfect, you know, meme of the two guys holding hands.
Yeah.
What movie is that?
That's from Rambo, right?
Commando, what movie is that from?
Rocky.
Oh, that's from Predator, actually.
It's from Predator.
I knew it was one of them.
But Arnold is from Commando, so it's understandable.
Okay, so it's from Predator.
Yeah.
When they, that perfect, like where both our stories meet, it couldn't have met better than the crack epidemic.
She was having it right now.
And how we even got there.
Perfect, perfect storm.
And so this, so, so, so, this is episode one of five, because we're going to be doing Cracktoberfest all week.
And you can listen to all five episodes either.
They're available in the Hood Politics feed and the Behind the Bastards feed.
Listen to them wherever you get your podcast.
Yeah.
So I officially apologize to all the other podcasts you listen to.
You can go ahead and go to those feeds now and tell them you can.
Unsubscribe 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 Constant.
What's mandatory, my minimums?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
Wow.
Wow.
That was powerful.
Powerful.
Prop.
What's up, man?
How you doing?
How you doing, buddy?
Hey, homie.
You know what I'm saying?
Trickling down, quickening oreganomics over here.
You feel me?
Beautiful.
Now, prop.
Yeah.
This is our special week.
We did this introduction the last one.
I'm not sure which of these episodes we're going to introduce it on, but you and I are tackling the crack epidemic, the CIA, Iran-Contra, all of which are individual stories that are fucking wild and all of which also kind of deserve to be told together because they're interwoven.
Just a bowl of gumbo of bastards, man.
Yeah.
Which I feel like is like the perfect, uh, a perfect analogy because everything in gumbo is great by itself.
Yeah.
And then when you put it 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.
Prop.
Yeah.
How do you, how do you, how do you feel about crack?
Man, that doesn't seem like the right way to start this.
Let's, let's look.
Remembering the First Syringe00:03:24
Yeah.
It's what crack, it's so interesting how it went from like There was a time where it was like hip-hop was con.
I feel like it's one of the proof proof of concept that if hip-hop is given the right information, it does the right thing.
Cause it was, it was the butt of a joke to be like, you do crack, don't do crack, crack is whack, you know.
Uh, and then the self-destruction and we're all in the same game was about like, you know, you shouldn't do crack, you know.
And then all, so there was a moment where crack was terrible in our culture or the butt of every joke.
And then the crack sellers became all the rappers.
And then it was just, yeah, 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're not supposed 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 it about like crack?
The first time I do remember to you, 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 like, you know, sort of the Dare program, all the stuff around crack.
But I think really it was whether it was the movie New Jack Swing.
I mean, not New Jack Swing, New Jack City.
But really, it was like being in Los Angeles and like, what 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, 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, so I think my, and then just be somebody explaining, oh, that's crack.
You, you know, you smoke it like this or you shoot it up.
You know what I'm saying?
And 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, this is bad.
Matter of fact, now that I'm talking, I know you is a lot, but now that I'm talking, my neighbor, dang, I haven't thought about this in years.
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 like Cholo neighborhood.
So like my neighbor, they were, you know, into life, hardcore, 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 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, and like, they always smelled a little bit, like they weren't clean or whatever.
And my parents would like, my parents knew what's going on.
I didn't know what's going on, but my parents knew what's going on.
The History of Coca Leaf00:15:14
They would let them in.
They'd be like, dang, okay.
They ain't feed them no more.
You know, and then once they put it all together, it, and then, you know, again, people all hours of the night going in and out the house.
And then finally, I realized I live next door to a crack house.
It was like, it was this slow roll of like, wait, what?
Like, 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 realizing power.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, no, it's crack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and obviously for me, it was a much more distant thing, right?
Yeah.
That was a thing that, like, number one, crack was before anything else for me, like a euphemism for like something is addictive or also someone is silly, right?
Like, you're cracked out.
Yeah, exactly.
Crack pot or crack pot.
Yeah.
And it was the adults talked about crack like it was a plague, like it was a disease that had hit certain areas.
And the kids talked about crack like it was a euphemism, right?
It was like a, yeah, just kind of an explanative term that you could throw in.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, like, yeah, you're smoking crack, bro.
We're going to 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 coca tree.
And the coca tree grows mostly in Colombia, 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 cocoa leaves on 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 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 as a more serious drug, but it's nothing compared to what happens once you start making heroin, right?
Or morphine.
Yeah.
Marijuana, as it grows naturally, almost impossible to hurt yourself with.
Yeah.
Then now people start making it into shatter and stuff, and they're blowing up trailer parks and burning their brains out and shit, right?
Yeah.
You know, that's kind of the way to think about the way.
And this is the way in which indigenous people used cocoa, one of them for probably thousands of years, right?
I know we have evidence of coca use going back and as long, pretty much as long as there have been people in the area.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, 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, ooh, you know, and, and, and that that was just a normal part of life and maybe the roles of shamans and prophets and they've probably been chewing wild plants forever.
Yeah, it's the same thing with, you know, the coffee, which comes from Ethiopia, the Oromo 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, we're out in the woods or the jungle or whatever for a couple of weeks, you know, this shit will keep us moving.
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.
And maybe that had an impact on it, the fact that they had access to a really effective oral anesthetic.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, it's actually a real, it's a fucking amazing plant, obviously.
Yeah.
It gets a bad fucking rap because, well, novocaine comes from the coca leaf.
That's where it comes from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Novocaine and cocaine.
But he didn't get the song reference.
It's okay.
It's okay.
I did.
And I didn't get the song reference, but I'm glad that you brought up Novocaine because we get Novocaine from the coca leaf.
See?
Yeah, it's a bafflingly useful plant.
And it's the root of Novocaine and Lidocaine and crack cocaine.
They all come from the same thing, right?
What kind of cane do you want?
Yeah.
We want all sorts of canes.
Yeah.
Europeans really figured out what was up with coca in 1855.
They'd noticed people in the areas they were colonizing using it for a while.
But it wasn't until 1855 that pure cocaine was extracted from the leaves for the first time.
Again, you've got 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.
We're going to ruin a lot of raves.
Let's take this.
Yeah.
No, you already, you nailed the joke already.
There's no other way.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Yeah.
If you're going to snort a drug at a party, kids, ketamine's a lot better.
Anyway, so obviously the fact that they're not cosign officially.
Yeah, legally, no one is co-signing that.
Yes.
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 for it.
We get anesthetics like Novocaine and Lidocaine.
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 at about like 150 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, and there's a couple, cocaine, coca is not the only one.
Also, kava, which Hawaiian people, I believe, have been using, Polynesian people have been 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 of liquor and then someone's ripping a bone out of your skull, right?
Yeah, Then you're, then you're looking like a medieval movie.
It's real gnarly.
Yeah.
I was listening to a, I think, what was that?
What kind of pod was that?
Radiolab, the science one from WMIC.
But anyway, they were talking about like figuring out molecules for new medicines and stuff, right?
So if you figure this thing out, you know, 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 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 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 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, you got to chill, man.
You know what I'm saying?
And, you know, it was like, yeah, man, that was a little 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 at some point, some people figure out how to like supercharge it.
And so at the same time as you get these early anesthetics, you start getting pure cocaine.
Yeah.
Right.
Usually sold as a tincture.
So you just get a fucking dropper of cocaine water.
Right.
You can, now you can shoot that stuff up.
A lot of people injected it.
I believe Sherlock Holmes injected cocaine, I think, with heroin.
This is what guys like Freud are doing, right?
Most of them are not doing lines, you know?
They are taking it as a pure distilled tincture.
You can pick this shit up at the drugstore.
Now, this causes problems because cocaine is incredibly addictive.
And also not great for your body, especially if you're taking it a lot of it every single day because a doctor told you it's good for you.
That actually hurts you a lot, right?
You can chew coca leafs all day long and it's you're probably not, well, not all day long, but you can chew cocoa leaves on a regular basis and you're not dealing with too huge of a problem.
You're doing cocaine every day.
People are going to notice because it's going to destroy you.
Yeah.
I think people are going to notice all the time.
Yeah.
It's going to be like, hey, man, you know, I mean, I'm just doing my.
Yeah.
You're going to get really into white snake.
And yeah, then your heart's going to explode.
Hey, bro.
So we should make an album.
Hey, man.
Hey, we should make an album.
You want to make an album tonight?
Nah, fam.
Let's cut.
We got to bring back fucking Prague Rock, man.
That's what I want to fucking hear right now.
So Europeans, 1855, we get cocaine.
1914 is when the U.S. government decides, all 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.
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 1922, another law gets passed, which is one of the very first anti-drug laws in the United States that effectively stops legal U.S. 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 1970s, cocaine caught on big time as a drug for the rich and the upwardly mobile party set.
Oh, yes.
Sometime in the late 70s, and obviously there's a lot of history in other countries, especially in Europe outside of the U.S. I'm focusing on the U.S. here.
Sometime in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, 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 fucking cracks.
But we don't know exactly when it happened.
But sometime between the very end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, 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 much purer than powder cocaine, right?
Which is often 45% filler or more.
Crack is around 80% 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.
Yeah.
So from kind of similar amounts of raw product, more people can get high more often for less money.
So here's where I fill in pop culture for you.
So the legend is that it was a dude in Oakland that figured it out.
Oh.
Yeah.
That's that's the legend.
We don't know.
But that's that's the legend, right?
And once, you know, once it hit Cali with through like Freeway Rick and just some of the things.
It starts to hit and it starts.
It hits hard and ruins the Crips and Bloods.
But that's, but we'll get to that.
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 zeitgeist or comes out of black culture is actually its crack slang.
So like cooking in the kitchen, 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?
It's all crack slang.
You know what I mean?
A huge piece of internet slang right now that Garrison and I say probably more than is good for our health is based, right?
It's cracked.
That's the term.
It comes from freebase, right?
Like that's the origin.
And briefly, the right wing tried to take it in order to mean like ideologically pure.
And now it's just a general term for cool.
Yes.
And Lil B being the base god.
Yeah.
Lil B being the base god.
Like all these things.
Like, I think it's going to happen as this is going.
Like I'm going to 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 cultural standpoint, crack is like on the level of The Simpsons in terms of how it's influenced the way people talk and refer to things.
Yes, where rappers, where people call it rappers, athletes, they call themselves chefs because they're cooking in the kitchen, which is where you make crack.
You know what I'm saying?
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 $10 sale price made crack accessible to poor people who could never have come up with 200 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 is generally the case when you freebase something than railing it or insufflating to use the scientist.
Insoflation is the scientific term for snorting something.
Tell me something.
So for example, if you're taking like a powdered hallucinogen or a psychedelic, like a 2C or something, 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 if you're actually freebasing something, and I don't think you can freebase most of those drugs, although I don't know that anyone's tried, but freebasing hits you faster.
Like, for example, DMT, which is the drug, you know, that all of the tech gurus talk about.
Yeah.
The way in which they tend to take it in like the ceremonies that they're kind of co-opting from indigenous Latin Americans is ayahuasca.
You're drinking it as a tea.
It takes a while to come up.
You vomit a lot.
But you can also basically, you can basically freebase DMT 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 fuck 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, 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 reach that other, that 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 it's achievable.
It's achievable.
So you're looking at number, if you've got, if you're someone who uses cocaine and you're looking at, well, it's going to, a night of Coke is going to be 200 bucks, right?
That Intense First High00:03:40
Yeah.
Well, you're probably not going to do that.
Some people do get that addicted, but for most people, it's like, oh, okay.
So I will occasionally buy 200 bucks in cocaine for a night to party.
Crack's 10 bucks a hit.
Yeah, I was going to say it's $10 a hit.
It gets cheaper.
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.
Shit's rough.
You're feeling bad.
You know, anytime for pocket dollars, you can fucking get, right?
Yeah.
Any corner.
Anything with this shit.
Obviously, this becomes a problem.
Yes.
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 like quality cocaine.
It's harder to do that than it is smoking freebase because you can burn a shitload 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'd been used to.
Obviously, the other issue is that smoking freebase is so much harsher on the body than just inhaling powder.
You know, it's not good for you, obviously, to snort cocaine, and there's issues like deviated septum and stuff, health issues you get from that.
But you're not ruining your lungs when you're smoking, 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 it's it's it's all the worst parts of cigarettes and all of the worst parts of cocaine supercharge.
It's yeah, it ages you.
Yeah, there, yeah.
Like that, that used to be like for me, one of the biggest like deterrents wasn't him.
It wasn't none of them uh commercials, it wasn't a song, it was the sight of someone you went to school with that now looks like your grandparent.
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, 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 sight you can imagine because you're just like, I know these, I know y'all.
Like, you, how did you become this?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I think the point that we've built to here is that crack is indeed a hell of a drug.
Yes, um, yes, yeah, and uh, obviously, people get better very quickly get better at making it.
And I think you, you know, I, there's no proving where it came from.
Oakland's a pretty good guess in terms of the first people to figure that this shit out.
That, that, that, that would make total sense to me.
Yeah, obviously, the Bay Area is where innovation comes from.
I mean, all innovation, right?
You know, resistance, everything, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, but you know, who else is constantly innovating?
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 oxygen or hydrogodone, right?
Yes, right?
There's no difference, yeah, yeah.
Problematic Ways to Talk About Crack00:03:53
And when we get to the jail sentences, we could talk about why that's so problematic.
Yeah, yeah, we'll be talking about that now.
But first, here's the crack of products for you.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by: rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, Trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
I said, Oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Black Families and Systemic Poverty00:15:50
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
So there's a lot of misinformation and moral panic, and it is tough to kind of seriously talk about how fucking gnarly crack is for a lot of people.
And also not go to the moral panic shit that you get about it, which is what we're about to talk about now.
So I want to talk before we start talking about the crack epidemic and the moral panic it causes.
I want to talk about the struggles that black American families were going through as the 1970s gave away to the swinging 80s.
So from the post-World War I era to the 1960s, black Americans migrated from rural parts of the United States to cities across the United States in unprecedented numbers.
This is probably the most significant demographic shift that has ever occurred in the history of the United States.
Great migration.
There is a huge fucking thing that happens.
Yes, the Great Migration, and my family is one of them.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah.
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 fuck with you and your family if you do this on where you can live 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 service.
Obviously prop, like Elephant of the Room.
You know all this.
Like I'm not explaining.
I didn't even see it for the first time.
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 in anything more than the vaguest terms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't want to feel like I'm not explaining anything to me.
Did you know?
Did you know that this happened to you?
Yes, I do know.
Yeah.
Like our, 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 through Texas.
And that was, and traditionally between Texas and Oklahoma, most families from there probably got there because of the chance to become a cowboy, you know, where you could work for yourself.
And that was, you know, almost all of 90% of the boot on your neck.
Yeah.
And 90% of American cowboys were actually free slaves, you know?
And then, and then from there, we all went to Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego because of these housing projects, like the Watts Towers, that that right, 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 happens to most, to a huge chunk of people.
And they get forced into these neighborhoods like Watts, right?
And there's other neighborhoods in other parts of the United States because this is happening a lot in Southern California.
This is also happening just a shitload.
And the place it's primarily happening to is like the eastern seaway and chunks of the mid chunks of the urban Midwest, right?
Great Lakes region 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, right?
So they're being brought in 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 them, right?
As manufacturing and shit moves across the border.
It's also worth noting that a ton of these, particularly the black men working these industrial jobs are doing so in dangerous, like being exposed to like deadly chemicals, like in horrific ways that would have been that were illegal, but it happened, you know?
So while all this is going on, white families are considering their, you know, flight to suburban areas at an unprecedented takes off too.
Oh, yes.
And, you know, these suburban houses that cost about as much as three good lunches do today, they start moving into and accumulating wealth.
You know, 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 I read called a quote perverse unintended impact on the inner city.
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 in the predominantly African-American inner city.
Based on an extensive literature review, Small and Newman, 2001, identified the increasing concentration of poverty during the 1970s and into the 1980s, particularly 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 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.
Yeah.
Right?
That's a big part of it.
So the 1970s are a challenging decade for many people in the United States.
The economic stagnation, and this is across the board, right?
This is why Jimmy Carter loses re-election.
The economy shits 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 hardest, 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 literacy and other training that folks who'd grown up in economically disadvantaged schools didn't have access to, right?
Everything just builds upon itself.
So poverty and long-term unemployment are associated with a variety of other negative things.
Overcrowded housing, PTSD, teen pregnancy, school dropout, violence, crime, and drug and alcohol abuse.
As poverty worsens in the inner cities, all these things 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 60s.
It was around 70%, right?
So about 70% of black kids grow up in two-parent households.
For white kids, it's 90%.
So it's lower for black families up to the 1960s, but still the vast majority of kids are growing up in two-parent households.
Once you hit the 70s, or the late 60s, really, that number starts to drop like a fucking stone.
By the mid-1900s, only a third of black American children lived in two-parent households.
Yeah.
Like that, that I was unaware of how fucking sharp that drop had been.
Yeah, there's a, there's, there's, there's, depending on how hotep you are, there's a lot of answers to that.
Right.
Right.
But I do think that this, this moment is so, is so pivotal and so underreported in the sense that it's like so much of our culture now is came out of this moment.
So this is this inner cities you're talking about, especially along the eastern seaboard.
This is the Bronx, the movie, the movie Warriors, right?
Come out of it.
It's this.
It's this moment.
It's this overcrowding, underfunding, this city, you know, being a city of rubble and that there was, you know, broken down buildings everywhere because if you're a slumlord, it's cheaper to just destroy the building and get the insurance than try to, you know, fix it or, you know, be a responsible landlord, just burn it down and just let the rubble happen.
A big power outage 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 DJ Kool Herc 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 creates hip-hop.
You know what I'm saying?
It was out of this time.
This is what creates all this shit.
You know what I'm 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.
They were living in rubble.
You understand what I'm saying?
Because we were forced to with no music programs in our schools.
You know what I'm saying?
There was nothing provided.
No money for that.
There's no, you talk about the rubble.
It's not just, 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 in our Robert Moses episodes.
Black neighborhoods are bulldozed in a bunch, literally bulldozed in a bunch of countries, sometimes with like the military essentially helping to do it in order to make way for shit like overpass.
Yes.
That effectively then 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 30-ish year.
You know, obviously it goes back further than that, but this specific process, all of these things, these massive drops in wealth, this collapse of, you know, the rate of two-parent households in the black community, all of these things are the result of 30, 40 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 it's easy to say that, well, this community, all these black people got hooked on crack and that's why everything fell apart.
Shit was falling apart due to specific policy decisions for decades and it hit its height during the crack epidemic.
And that's critical to know.
Otherwise, you're going to wind up blaming crack for everything.
It's not to blame for everything.
Yes.
It just is not.
Obviously, it sure doesn't help.
Like it does not reverse any of these trends.
But that's like if it's like somebody has a heart attack while they're like during a fucking run, and then you hit them in the head when they finish it.
And it's like, well, you know, they were having problems before you hit them on the head.
Yes, exactly.
I don't know.
That's a bad way to, that's a stupid way to describe it.
No, but I feel you.
I don't know.
I'm getting somewhere.
So, yeah, during, we're going to 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.
Social policy may have inadvertently contributed to the decline in marriage during the 1960s.
Many states denied AFDC 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 1968.
However, even under the revised welfare policy, poor couples had an incentive to cohabit instead of marry in order to maintain welfare eligibility.
And this is one of the things, because one of the things that crack gets blamed for is the destruction of the black family, all of these black men who abandoned their families, right?
This is the right-wing line on what happens.
And no, in the 1960s, 20 years before we've got crack on the street, U.S. states are denying aid to families to single mothers who are suspected of living with a man.
And what usually happens before marriage is you cohabitate, right?
So suddenly you're penalized for that if you're not already married.
See, that's what I meant by like, depending on how hotep you are, because that's in a lot of like the black, like a lot of the black activist circles is like, that was a process of demasculating and devaluing the black man even further.
Yeah.
By being like, well, if y'all need help, you can't have no daddy in the house.
You know what I'm saying?
So it's like, well, dang.
And then what they talk about among our community is like what it might have done to our psyche.
Now I don't think this is very fair, but their argument is what it's done to our psyche to look at our women and be like, you chose the check over me.
You know what I'm saying?
And I think that's a, that's a very, that's a very manosphere 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.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, and that move right there, a strong case can be made.
It does a lot more damage than crack.
Yes.
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 Igo myth.
Pruitt Igo was a government housing development in St. Louis during this kind of period of time, I think 50s, 60s.
And that documentary does a good job of explaining how the way in which benefits were handled led to the dissolution of a lot of families and like kind of incentivize that.
It's a very dark story, but that documentary I felt did a really good job of it.
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 U.S. politicians are concerned, all of this is the fault of crack cocaine, which starts to enter U.S. inner city communities in 1981, 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?
So crack is immediately big business.
A lot of it gets sold to people who live in these 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 means, there's a graph going around Twitter right now that shows where money moves within 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.
Yeah.
Right.
Nothing else is doing.
There's 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 in now.
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 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.
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.
Money, Violence, and Birth Weights00:05:59
And the statistics on this are pretty bleak.
And I don't want to stray away from those either.
So I'm going to quote from an analysis in Chicago Booth University.
Quote, The rise in crack use from 1984 to 1989 is associated with a doubling of the number of murdered black males aged 14 to 17, a 30% increase for those aged 18 to 24 and a 10% increase for those 25 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 blacks rose by more than 25%, and black babies with low birth weights increased by 5%.
Now, this is really bad, but what's happening in the media as this massive murder surge happens is crack is being associated as a drug that makes people murder, right?
A drug that makes people lose their mind.
That is not what is occurring.
It's not.
It's the money.
Yes.
It's normal economics that happens everywhere else.
It's really like, what you're explaining, I think, again, is like if you just 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 funded?
It's like, you're going to go to the bank and let them white boys tell you, no, you know what I'm saying?
You're going to 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 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 the narrative, it's the narrative of every Jay-Z album, right?
It's 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 Nipsey Hustle.
It's like, so like you said, like you can have this media narrative of like, you know, oz 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 is self-generated and that I don't owe?
And it's like, where, I mean, where you, where you think, where you think we got that from?
We got it from the mafia.
Like, you learn from the mafia.
That's what they did.
You know what I'm saying?
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, this is, I mean, again, the, the point that we're making here is that crack, there are specific things.
And, and as we'll talk about, like babies with low birth weights, that's a, that's a part of that.
There are specific problems that are just due to the inherent characteristics of crack.
But the massive increase in murders and the proportion of kids who go into foster care, in large part because they've lost parents, that is due, the thing that has entered the community that has caused that violence is fucking cash.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
That's what when we're, the crack epidemic is a fucking cash epidemic.
It's a gold rush.
Right.
That's what you would like.
It's a gold rush.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So this is all fucked 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.
A 1985 article, and this is where the moral panic over crack starts.
There is a 1985 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 24-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 Chasnoff, and he claimed based on a couple of cases that children of mothers who used crack were smaller, sicker, and less social than other infants.
Now, to his credit, Chasnoff is like, hey, we only have a few people in this 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 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, an early, we start seeing this stuff.
We've all lived through this shit the last couple of years, right?
With these, you get these little studies about, oh, ivermectin or whatever.
There's this, and then suddenly that gets blown up to a bunch of guys, people taking fucking fish medicine or whatever.
And there's people dying and stuff.
This is one of the first times that happens because nobody listens to Chasnoff being like, so this is a really tiny study and we need to do more research before we draw any conclusions.
No, they lose their fucking minds.
Babies.
And by the way, the people losing their minds are the goddamn, the mainstream media, the legacy media.
And I'm going to quote from the fucking New York Times here.
As a medical writer, Harriet Washington wrote of this period in her book, Medical Apartheid, Dr. Chasnoff'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 distinguish 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 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 black women.
Yeah.
And this is where the real hurting starts.
This is what actually crack, gnarly drug.
A 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 pain.
Yeah, the crack ain't the bastard of the story.
No, no, it sure is not adjacent.
Yeah, it's adjacent to the bastard.
And you know what's adjacent to behind the bastards?
Stigmatizing the Crack-Smoking Mother00:03:52
Hood politics.
Well, hood politics deeply intertwined, especially this week.
Yeah.
But also the products and services that support this podcast.
So check this out and purchase things.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
The Myth of Crack Babies00:07:53
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we have returned.
What a five-dollar crack giveaway!
Sorry, little Dave's pill reference.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course, of course.
So I want to continue that quote from the New York Times about kind of 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 mother in the media.
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, famous for having never once been right, wrote a popular column in which he alleged that black women were spawning a bio-underclass of impaired children whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.
Krauthammer wrote, The dead babies may be the lucky ones.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
This guy still gets paid to write shit.
Oh man.
Fucking Charles Krauthammer.
Again, never been right in his entire life.
What kind of name is that?
Let me not drag it.
Stupid name.
Fuck him.
Yeah, but yeah.
I just again, when you are, when you write the words bio-underclass.
Yeah, come on, fam.
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.
Maybe that's not.
Am I doing the thing that men in wigs did a hundred years ago?
Yes, you are, Charles Krauthammer.
Yes, man.
So, yeah.
I, yeah, anyway, all this concern over unborn babies and crack fed nicely into the Christian extremist movement that had gotten Reagan elected.
Again, we've talked about this in our episodes on Focus on the Family, on Phyllis Schlafly.
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.
You can't segregate your schools, but that's not popular, sir.
They turn to abortion as like the real thing to hit.
And right as they're really getting the anti-abortion movement churning up, there's all this concern over unborn babies in crack, which really gels great.
And I'm going to quote from the Times again here.
News organizations embraced far-fetched 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 1990, 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 of their mother's drug use.
Man, there's so much sinister.
Like, I, I, I, I 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 reality of like, yeah, dog, like, yo, this, you shouldn't be doing crack while 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 some of this shit, 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.
That's dope.
And the New York Times is a huge, it's dope.
It's also like, this isn't the only time that happens, 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 shit that has nightmarish consequences on the world.
And then 20 years later, the, the, the good journalists will be like, oh, turns out we had a huge fall.
Like, like, we, we were largely responsible for this nightmare.
My bad.
It's on us.
So the Times amplifies what gets called the damaged generation theory.
Their editorial page argues in 1989 that it's going to cost more than $700 million to prepare 20-ish 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 just fucking nonsense.
Yeah.
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.
Now, there's evidence as to what happens when you do that.
And it causes women who are addicted to crack and 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 in many cultures drank alcohol regularly with babies and those babies came out and were fine and learned things, right?
Yes.
It's not good.
There are health consequences associated to smoking crack in the womb.
The data suggests the real harm comes from driving these women away from treatment and adequate medical care, which is what causes problems for the baby more than anything else.
Natural care.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, I mean, not good to smoke crack with a baby.
No.
Worse to do what we did.
I mean, it's the same, like, it's such a, just like a parallel for even immigration issues.
Like, if I know, you know, I'm saying that I, you know, a very minor, completely treatable thing is if I would just go to the clinic, you know, go to the county, you know, hospital, it'll be fine.
But if there are ICE agents out there, I'm not going to go.
You know what 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, 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 being logical here.
And they were being logical.
They're like, well, then no one's going to report anything because why would I, so then it's like, well, no, I'm not going to tell.
I'm not going to report nothing because 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 policy exacerbates the problem is what I'm saying.
It's like, and in so many other areas of culture, it's the same thing.
It's like, I'm not going to, shoot, I'm not going to do that.
I'm not telling y'all nothing because if you do, that's going to happen.
And that, and then that avoidance exacerbates the problem.
I said that already, but yeah.
Police Logic and Deportation Fears00:12:48
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, that's where the issue comes from.
In 1990, the New York Times' 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 both alarmist and unsubstantiated, which is again nice, but one of the things this does is that police and police unions and whatnot and political figures start flipping out about crack babies.
Like they're like it's a 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 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 howl, 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 passed a bill that included the 100 to 1 rule.
This made it mandatory to assign a 10-year sentence to anyone caught with 50 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.
Yep.
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 write up here.
An associated press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 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's uneven toll.
Following the passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine and other drugs, the black incarceration rate in America exploded from about 600 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 1,808,000 in 2000 to 1,808,000, sorry, to 1,808 in 2000.
In the same time span, the rate for the Latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615, while the white incarceration rate grew from 103 people per 100,000 to 242.
So 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 listener's sake, I like, let's, let me go back to the 100 to one ratio.
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, I, or a hundred ounces, or a hundred ounces, I mean.
So, one ounce of crack, same amount of jail time as a hundred.
So, if you ask, so if you, so just, I mean, come on, guys, put your thinking caps on.
If you got a one ounce of crack versus a hundred ounces of cocaine, which one of y'all you think is going to distribute the stuff?
Who you think's the salesperson?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Right.
Versus just the user.
Like, you telling me we get the same jail time?
Do you know how 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 shit up.
Like, this isn't, it's not a conspiracy.
These are laws.
Yeah.
Part of the reason why, because this is one of the things that's happening here, as we talk about in our Bill Cooper episodes, is that a lot of the black community, and 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 of why people would believe in conspiracies is that you could not seek to damage a community more than happens here.
Yeah.
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 you're saying these laws are saying, like, am I taking crazy feels?
I feel like we're being targeted.
Like, no, you're not.
You're just not.
Listen, you're fine.
You're fine.
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.
You're in jail more than us.
You're like, yeah, but I'm trying to tell you, fam, like, it just don't feel the same.
And it's like, like, well, there's got to be something going on here.
Yeah.
And it's worth noting, too, that this surge in arrests that we've just talked about, there is no increase in addiction treatment resources in these communities that follows the surge in arrest.
Zero.
I found an article in the Chicago Booth Review that analyzed a recent study measuring the impact of crack cocaine by University of Chicago professor Stephen Levitt and a bunch of other smart college guys.
It 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, 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 violence.
And therefore, while the effect of crack is not negligible, it is not as large as some of the doomsayers have claimed.
Damn.
It is not, the problem was not crack.
If people, if, if all drugs had been legal, right?
If we'd never had a prohibition culture and in 1981, an entrepreneur, some Mark Zuckerberg type, right, in Oakland had been like, I've invented crack and, you know, has his apple type announcement for crack cocaine.
There's some lives that'll be negatively affected, right?
Some families will be harmed.
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 shit.
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 shit as a result of that.
But you don't have neighborhoods destroyed.
I was going to say, Again, the lure around here is that like crack, there's there's there's the Crips before crack and there's the Crips after, you know, and the pre, like we talked about this in the, in the, when we first met in the Black Panther episode.
Yeah, it's like they're just the children, Chris were the children of the of the Panthers, you know what I'm saying?
Knuckling up, you know, fist fights, rough, rough housing, protecting their turf.
Crack is brought the guns.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, so like you saying that, like, is a yeah, it's a big that that's that's so important to to understand that nuance.
And it's, I have to, I want to emphasize here, like we had in 2020, this, 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 everywhere.
It's huge.
There's protests.
There's also a lot 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 organizations in a bunch of different states raising huge amounts of money through crowdfunding, right?
And there's a shitload of drama that comes from that.
And we're talking drama because 100 grand came in suddenly.
So people who have never seen that much money in their lives had a plan for it originally.
And then shit 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 $30, $40 million that you can put down in a few months.
Yes.
You can make that money fucking quick.
Immediately.
Of course people get murdered.
Yeah, I know, right?
Like, yeah, 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 1995, the link between crack and adverse social outcomes for black Americans disappears statistically.
The only exception is the homicide rate for black men aged 18 to 24, which remains elevated because now a bunch of different groups, the Crips 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.
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, the amount of crack consumed does not decline after 95, but the negative effects due to it on a societal basis among the black community stop.
And what's interesting is that this is because 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 continue to smoke, 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 addictive.
But after 95, new people don't really start in significant population amounts.
New people are not coming into the ranks of people using this drug.
The reason that the overall amount consumed 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 fear-mongering, but from social learning.
Yes.
What happens is the first generation of people who got addicted, it's bad.
It's really bad for them.
Yes.
And yeah, their younger siblings, their cousins, their kids see this and are like, wow, 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, I don't know if we should do that.
And like I said, like hip-hop got together and was like with 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?
Yep.
Yeah.
And that's, yeah.
Um that's that's what happens, right?
And so you get, you know, suddenly, 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.
It simply was not worth killing for the dollar amount of crack that people were likely to have on them, right?
If the same amount is worth $10 instead of $250, well, maybe it's not worth throwing down over, you know?
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 for the people who are like, if all of this stuff had been legal from the start, we wouldn't have had a problem.
That's strong evidence, right?
That 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 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 people trying to talk to their fellows to get them to stay away from this stuff that's pretty bad for you.
And it's one of those things, everything gets better in spite of the government, which if Ronald Reagan was the 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 actually believe in anything as a conservative, this is a perfect example of that.
Exactly.
Oh, the government just made this worse.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, here's your proof.
CIA Funding the Contras with Cocaine00:06:21
Yeah.
Actually, the free market did kind of solve this one.
Credit where it's due.
This is a case where it kind of works.
Touche.
So the crack epidemic is well past its height by 1995, but it remained a common subject in the news and part of the repeated attempts by guys like Joseph Robinette Biden to expand the prison industrial complex.
Black inner city communities were well in recovery by this point, but cracked was a fact, 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 August of 1996 that a, and again, 96, this is right when the crack epidemic is cooling off.
Things are starting to get better.
The black community is starting to breathe a little bit, right?
August of 1996, a young journalist named Gary Webb publishes a massive three-part investigation under the title, Dark Alliance, the story behind the 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 LA 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 LA Times.
But obviously, you know, they've got only a little bit of the LA Times' budget and they've got none of the cachet.
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 they're maybe, you could argue, the very first outlet who ever 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 shit, but he is kind of along those lines.
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 1997 write-up from the Columbia Journalism Review's Peter Kornblue summarizes what happens.
The long three-part series covered the lives and connections of three career criminals, Freeway Ricky Ross, perhaps LA's most renowned crack dealer in the 1980s, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes, a right-wing Nicaraguan expatriate described by one U.S. assistant district attorney as the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States, and Juan Norvin, Norvin in some documents, Menenzez Cantorero, a friend of the fallen dictator Anastasia Somoza,
who allegedly brought Blandin into the drug business to support the Contras and supplied him for an uncertain amount of time with significant quantities of cocaine.
The first installment of the series, headlined, Crack Plague's Roots Are in Nicaraguan War, opened with two dramatic statements.
And this is quoting from the original article now.
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Blood street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Uh-oh.
The second paragraph, which captured even more public attention, read, This drug network opened the first pipeline between Columbia's cocaine cartels and the 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 100% where that comes from.
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 Contras, 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 Nicaraguan drug dealers to bring cocaine into the United States so that they can sell it to fund a right-wing paramilitary in Nicaragua.
That cocaine is then being turned into crack because that's happening at the same time.
But yeah, the claims Webb made in his article are a bit different from the version of the story that spreads kind of virally.
What he provides is evidence to support the assertion that, quote, a cocaine for weapons trade supported U.S. 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 Contras.
We're going to 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 for cocaine trafficking and how that harms the community.
Webb pointed out that Ross, who was black, received a life sentence without parole.
Blandin, a Nicaraguan man, had smuggled cocaine in, whereas Ross had sold crack.
And Blandin serves just two years and then gets a bunch of money from the feds to be an informant.
So the primary gotcha the story had was that it connected the two right-wing dealer, not Nicaraguans, to the FDN 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 going to 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, all of this, how the actual crack and coke, well, the cocaine trade.
Because again, this is, if you want to, it's one of those things where like the inaccurate version of the story is the CIA brought crack to the inner cities.
The perfectly accurate version is the CIA allowed cocaine to be trafficked en masse into Southern California, which was then turned into crack.
And that's what caused the crack epidemic.
And then the other accurate for all the other 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 crap to the inner city.
It's just a little more detailed than that.
Yeah.
There's a few more steps in between, but the CIA did this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The CIA is 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 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 where I'm standing, not more than the New York Times.
The CIA Brought Crack to Inner Cities00:02:56
Ooh, right?
That's where I'm fucking standing here.
And not more than Congress, right?
Not one of the people passing these laws, right?
That's where I'm fucking standing.
Oh, yeah.
That's what it looks like to me.
Oh, y'all.
Multiple bastards.
I love it, man.
Yeah.
Well, I don't love it, but you know what I mean.
That's awful.
That's the crack epidemic in brief.
Yeah.
Prop, you got anything to plug here?
Maybe hood politics to show that we're doing in partnership with this week.
Yeah, this is definitely like a little newbie thing to where we're doing like, you know, a collaboration on this where this story takes place in the context of the stories that we're talking about on the pod.
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