1989 SPECIAL REPORT: "CRACK TALES"

Описание: The crack epidemic was a surge of crack cocaine use in major cities across the United States throughout the entirety of the 1980s and the early 1990s.

This resulted in a number of social consequences, such as increasing crime and violence in American inner city neighborhoods, a resulting backlash in the form of tough on crime policies, and a massive spike in incarceration rates.

In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in Colombia, trafficked through The Bahamas.

Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent.
Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to "crack", a solid smokable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop.
As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York, Miami, Houston, and in the Caribbean.

The word "crack" may have first appeared in a media publication in the sub-headline of a Rolling Stone article on May 1, 1980, titled "Freebase: A Treacherous Obsession: The rise of crack cocaine and the fall of addicts destroyed by the drug".

The article said that freebase made its "strongest inroads" in the music industry of Los Angeles and at this time, in 1980, the similar crack form had just been starting (and in a few years would become predominant and also move to the East Coast and elsewhere).

The article describes both the earlier free base method of purifying cocaine to make it smokable which started in 1974 and the newer but similar crack making process. Freebase was made by users who would combine cocaine with baking soda and water and then extract the base salt, "freeing it" with ammonia. This achieves a lower melting point and when heated with a lighter, the vapors are inhaled (but the substance was dangerously flammable).

A less volatile but similar process was developed by dealers around 1980 where street cocaine is dissolved in a solution of water and baking soda and then dried out into "crack rocks". As the rocks are heated, it makes a crackling sound and this is how the substance got its name. It was not until 1985 after an article in The New York Times describing crack use in the Bronx, New York titled "A new, purified form of cocaine causes alarm as abuse increases" that within a year, more than a thousand press stories were published.

Initially, crack had higher purity than street powder.

Around 1984, powder cocaine was available on the street at an average of 55 percent purity for $100 per gram (equivalent to $293 in 2023), and crack was sold at average purity levels of 80-plus percent for the same price.

In some major cities, such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Houston and Detroit, one dose of crack could be obtained for as little as $2.50 (equivalent to $7 in 2023).

According to the 1985–1986 National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee Report, crack was available in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Kansas City, Miami, New York City, Newark, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Phoenix.

In 1985, cocaine-related hospital emergencies rose by 12 percent, from 23,500 to 26,300. In 1986, these incidents increased 110 percent, from 26,300 to 55,200. Between 1984 and 1987, cocaine incidents increased to 94,000. By 1987, crack was reported to be available in the District of Columbia and all but four states in the United States.

Some scholars have cited the crack "epidemic" as an example of a moral panic, noting that the explosion in use and trafficking of the drug actually occurred after the media coverage of the drug as an "epidemic".

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