4 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Crack, America's Most Vilified Drug
When it comes to crack, racism leads to rampant misinformation.
August 2, 2013
It's no secret that crack cocaine carries a
stigma. While casual pot-smoking and cocaine use
are tolerated in college dorms and clubs, crack
cocaine is often considered to be on a different
level -- a "hard" drug, like heroin. Few well-off
people would casually do, or suggest trying crack
cocaine, and if they did, they'd likely get a
litany of concerned responses from friends.
Powder cocaine use, however, maintains an element
of glamor; it's associated with the culture of
elites, from socialites like Paris Hilton to Wall
Street traders. Crack, many people think, is such
a hard drug that using it once could cause a user
to act recklessly, even dangerously, become
addicted, or die. But most of the claims about
crack cocaine's potential for destruction have
proven exaggerated or flat-out false.
As neuropsychiatrist and Columbia University
researcher Carl Hart told AlterNet, the hype
around crack has a lot more to do with political
expedience -- politicians cynically vilifying
poor black people for electoral gain -- than the
drug's actual potential for harm. Hart, the
author of a recent book, High Price, says
targeting crack cocaine in black communities was
easier than addressing more grave concerns like
poverty, unemployment and dwindling federal aid for struggling families.
Crack rose to prominence in poor, black, urban
environments (and not in the suburbs) not because
of its overwhelming strength but because it was
an affordable source of pleasure to communities
deprived of basic resources. Crack caught on,
certainly, but it did not ravage cities the way
the media and politicians have claimed. Most
people never become addicted, and those who do
are likely vulnerable to the conditions in their
environment that make addiction more likely.
Here are four myths about crack that arose thanks to drug war propaganda.
1. Crack in the ghetto.
Despite racialized images of crack users, data
from National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
reveals that people reporting cocaine use in 1991
were 75% white; 15% black, and 10% Hispanic.
People who admitted to using crack were 52%
white, 38% black, and 10% Hispanic. From a
rational perspective, these numbers should not be
surprising: whites are, after all, the majority,
and have a long-standing tendency to use drugs at
rates higher than blacks. Nonetheless, in 2009,
the U.S. Sentencing Commission released data
showing no drug matches crack in terms of
racially biased convictions. According to the
data, 79% of 5,669 sentenced crack offenders were
black, 10% were Hispanic, and only 10% were white.
As far back as the early 20th century, cocaine
use by African Americans was considered a threat
to the safety of white America. A 1914 article in
the New York Times warned, "Murder and Insanity
Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They
Have Taken to 'Sniffing' Since Deprived by
Whiskey Prohibition." The article, by Dr. Edward H. Williams, proclaimed:
Most of the negroes are poor, illiterate and
shiftless...Once the negro has formed the habit
he is irreclaimable. The only method to keep him
away from taking the drug is by imprisoning him.
And this is merely palliative treatment, for he
returns inevitably to the drug habit when released.
[Cocaine] produces several other conditions that
make the "fiend" a peculiarily dangerous
criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary
immunity to shock -- a resistance to the "knock
down," effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired
into vital parts that would drop a sane man in
his tracks, fail to check the "fiend."
"In other words," Hart wrote of the passage in
High Price, "cocaine makes black men both
murderous and, at least temporarily, impervious to bullets."
"What shook me" about the article, Hart writes,
"was how similar the article was to modern
coverage of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s." He
continues, "The message is that that crack users
are irretrievable...The terms inner city and
ghettoare now code words referring to black people."
"The language is not as egregious in the '80s,
but we all knew what it meant," Hart told AlterNet.
Hart points to the popular 1986 documentary 48
Hours on Crack Street as an example of the
racialized images of crack users. Even theNew
York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/04/arts/tv-reviews-cbs-on-crack-street.html>noted
the incessant focus on seemingly mentally unwell,
poor black New Yorkers as the face of the crack
trade. "We were meant to think the derelict was a
crack addict; it was just as likely that he was
an alcoholic," the Times remarked.
Hart said language commonly used to describe
crack users"poor," "troubled areas,"
"inner-city," "ghetto"implies, "black people, and poor people, basically."
In 48 Hours on Crack StreetHart says, "All the
people selling drugs and misbehaving were black,
and so when you associate these images with black
people, the only conclusion a viewer can draw is
that these are the people using these drugs."
"The main thing we did with those images is make
people believe the real problem was crack
cocaine. Crack was making these people behave so
poorly, and in ways we found egregious," Hart
told AlterNet. "So, if the real problem is crack
cocaine, all you have to do is get rid of crack.
You convince the people that all of your efforts
have to be placed on ridding the society of
crack. Now you don't have to deal with issues
like unemployment, lack of skills, job
trainingall you have to do is say we're going to
rid ourselves of this drug in our
society....Nobody asked about whether people were
employed, or responsible before crack cocaine,
committing crimes before cocaine."
Hart points out that problems associated with
crackchildren raised by family members other
than their parents, violence and
unemploymentexisted before the height of the
so-called epidemic, and continue to plague the same communities today.
"The unemployment rate for black folks before
crack cocaine hit was nearly 20 percent. It was
the highest before crack cocaine was introduced,
and remains high today after crack cocaine is no
longer considered this big problem," Hart told AlterNet.
Plus, how ravaging can a substance be that,
during its peak years, never exceeded an annual
use rate of 5% among high school seniors? Hart
points out that "The daily ratethe one most
likely to lead to addictionnever exceeded 0.2%."
But because so few Americns had tried the drug,
sensationalizing it was even easier than say, marijuana.
2. Crack vs. coke.
The only difference between the crack and powder
forms of cocaine is the removal of hydrochloride,
which allows for a higher melting point, and the ability to be smoked.
Crack cocaine is typically produced by mixing
powder cocaine with baking soda and water over
heat. The process removes hydrochloride and
allows for an oily freebase of cocaine to float
above the liquid residue. Separated, the freebase
cocaine dries into a rock-like shape. But on a
molecular level, crack and powder cocaine are still nearly identical.
[]
What makes crack cocaine more potent is not its
form, but the method by which it is ingested. As
with other substances, smoking creates a quicker,
more intense high than snorting.
Nonetheless, the law treats crack as if it were
far more potentially damaging or threatening to
society than powder cocaine. Before the Fair
Sentencing Act of 2010, federal criminal
penalties for crack treated 1 gram of the drug as
equal to 100 grams of cocaine.
Now, the disparity has been reduced to a still large 18:1 weight ratio.
3. Crack babies.
Recent research has found that claims suggesting
crack-exposed infants would grow up with severe
mental or physical deficiencies were exaggerated
and misinformed. Amid a surge in crack cocaine's
popularity and the doom-and-gloom media frenzy
surrounding it, a 1989 study in Philadelphia
found that the mothers of nearly 1 in 6 babies
born in Philly hospitals tested positive for
cocaine. Crack paranoia led to wildly exaggerated
claims about "crack babies" (and villainized
black mothers as "crack whores"), including a
social worker's televised prediction that
crack-exposed infants would not reach an IQ past 50.
Amid the hype, in 1989, Hallam Hurt, then chair
of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center
and now a pediatrics professor the University of
Pennsylvania, began a nearly 25-year study on the
effects of in-utero cocaine exposure on 224
babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992.
Half were exposed in-utero; half were not. All of
them, however, came from low-income families, and almost as many were black.
"We went looking for the effects of cocaine,"
Hurt told the Philadelphia Inquirer, but the two
groups performed the same on development and
intelligence tests. They were both, however,
underperforming compared to the norm. "We began
to ask, was there something else going on?"
As
theInquirer<http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study>reported,
"they found that 81 percent of the children had
seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard
gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot;
and 19 percent had seen a dead body outsideand
the kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those
children who reported a high exposure to violence
were likelier to show signs of depression and
anxiety and to have lower self-esteem."
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the
outcome of inner-city children than gestational
exposure to cocaine," Hurt told theInquirer.
Still, she was not the first to draw such a
conclusion. Doctors cannot tell the difference
between crack-exposed and poverty-exposed
infants. And among other studies, a 2001
<http://www.ussc.gov/Legislative_and_Public_Affairs/Congressional_Testimony_and_Reports/Drug_Topics/200205_RtC_Cocaine_Sentencing_Policy/ch3.pdf>comprehensive
review of the effects of in-utero exposure
determined: “[T]here is no convincing evidence
that prenatal cocaine exposure is associated with
any developmental toxicity difference in
severity, scope, or kind from the [consequences] of many other risk factors.”
4. Crackheads.
Even at the peak of crack's popularity, only
between 10 and 20 percent of users became
addicteda rate similar to cocaine and other
drugs. Users who do become addicted to crack are
more affected by a combination of other factors,
like a lack of positive reinforcement, financial
stability, and a strong support network.
What's more, crack cocaine is not as
unpredictable as some may think. Hart told
AlterNet that claims that using crack for the
first time can cause users to become addicted or
violent are wildly imaginative. "We have given
thousands of doses of crack cocaine in our lab,
and we get predictable effectsincreased drug
dose, increased effectsand nobody has died or become violent."
As Hart explains in his book, any violence
related to crack cocaine is more closely linked
to the drug trade. In 1988 in New York City, for
example, only 2 percent of crack-related murders
were committed by addicts looking to score.
Crack does not make users sleepless bags of
bones, either. "People have this notion in their
minds that folks who smoke crack are very skinny,
but it's actually a weak appetite suppresant,"
Hart told AlterNet, "The kids on Adderall are
getting more of an appetite suppressant than cocaine."
Challenging the myth that crack causes users to
go days without sleep, Hart said, "Certainly,
when you smoke or take it, initially you'd be
alert...But it's one of the best drugs to take
and party at night because you can actually go to sleep."
Hart explained that the half-life for
crack-cocaine is less than an hour, whereas
amphetamines and marijuana have half-lives up to
twenty-four hours. "The pharmacological effects
are short-lived, so notions about appetite
suppression and decreased sleep for long periods
of time is just not consistent with pharmacology."
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/4-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-crack-americas-most-vilified-drug?page=0%2C0
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