Behind the Bastards - Cracktoberfest Part One: Constructing the Crack "Epidemic"

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Robert and Prop sit down to talk about an epidemic that wasn't. A five part seriesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 do 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 the table anyway. Let's 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 Cracktoberfest? Listen, I'm with it. You know what I'm saying? Don't over, cracktober, because Oktoberfest to me is a little too late a-hosen for my blood. There will be no leader hosen, but there will be whatever CIA agents wear. Honestly, probably like Patagonia vests and Kaki slacks. Yeah, Kaki 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 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 jokingly, 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 once 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? Obviously, there's a lot of mutual friendship, symbioticness between our two podcasts. Yeah, I produce 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 movies? That's Rambo, right? Commando? What movie is that from? 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 right now and how we even got there. Perfect storm. And 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 podcasts. Yeah. So I officially apologize to all the other podcasts you listen to. You can go ahead and go to those fees now and tell them. Yeah, unsubscribe them. Just burn them off of your phone. In fact, throw that old phone away. Get a new phone.

Keep it pure. Just specifically just for this. Yeah, exactly. All right. All right. Here's Congo. Let's go. What's mandatory, my minimums?

I'm Robert Evans, host of be behind the bastards. Wow. Wow. That was powerful, powerful prop. What's up, man? How are you doing? How are you doing, buddy? Hey, homie.

You know what I'm saying? Trickling down quick into Reaganomics over here. You feel me? Beautiful. Now prop. Yes. This is our special week. We had it.

We did this introduction the last one. I'm not sure which of these episodes we want to introduce it on, we want to talk about these vlogs. Yeah. We had it for six episodes today. So there is a lot of experience here on the show, and there was really good generosity and Tip Little. Yeah.

We've got to talk about that as well. Yeah. So we've got 800 episodes. It's a little bit ago that was reported to us by the city of Chattanooga for lockdown. 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 This is perfectly fine by itself without anything else around it. Yes a 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 Um Let's let's yeah. 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 couldn't I feel like it's one of the proof proof of concept that if hit Like hip-hop is given the right information It does the right thing because it was it was the butt of a joke to be like you do crack Don't do crack crack is whack, you know, 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 in our in our culture or the butt of every joke And then the crack sellers became all the rappers and then it was just 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 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 that it about like crack the first time I do remember that 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, I knew 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 Crack head was and being like yo, this is different

You know I'm saying so I mean and 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 all that's crack You you know, you smoke it like this or you shoot it up, you know, I'm saying it 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 In a life hardcore or whatever, but they were just they're just some of the most loving like people whatever, right? So anyway, they moved right and when they moved 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 odd as 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, I'm saying and just all the end 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 They would let him 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 at a 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 Role of like wait What like why did 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 yeah, and then just really 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, it was a thing that like number one crack was before anything else For me, uh-huh like a euphemism. Yeah for like something is addictive or also someone is silly, right? Like you're cracked out. Yeah, exactly crack or crackpot. Yeah, and it was the adults talked about crack Like it was a plague like it was a disease that it hit certain areas and the kids talked about crack Like it was a euphemism, right? Yeah, it was like a yeah, just kind of an Explanative term that you could throw in. Oh, yeah, like yeah, you're smoking crack, bro We're gonna talk today about the crack epidemic and how it happened and what happened as a result of it all cocaine Type drugs all cocaine derived drugs which include crack good old-fashioned blow also tinctures of cocaine

Which is how people used to take it back in the past come from the leaves of the coca tree And the coca tree grows mostly in Columbia, Bolivia and Peru on their own naturally The leaves can be chewed generally with something like potash for a mild to moderate stimulating effect with a little bit of euphoria Thrown in for good measure. I've gotten to chew coca leaves 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 you should think about coca the way we think about pot or the way we think about like opium poppies, right? 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 when she 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 yeah 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 coca one of them for Probably thousands of years, right? I know what we have evidence of coca use going back And it is long pretty much as long as there have been people in the area. Yeah, it's it's it's it's gotta be the most like naive thing to think that like You know these

Just plants that just grew outside that yeah, somebody didn't chew it and go Oh, you know yeah, and and and that that was just a normal part of life and maybe the rolls of shamans and profits and They've probably been chewing wild plants forever. Yeah, it's the same thing with you know the coffee Which yeah comes from Ethiopia the aroma people were kind of the first people using the coffee plant Mm-hmm 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 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

Cocoa 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 it's actually a really it's a fucking amazing plant. Obviously Yeah, it gets a bad fucking rap because well Nova Kane. Yeah, I was like from the coca leaf. That's where it comes from. Yeah Yeah, Nova Kane and cocaine. He didn't get the song reference. It's okay. It's okay. I did I didn't get the song reference, but I'm glad that you brought up Nova Kane because we get Nova Kane from the coca leaf see

Yeah, it's just it's a bafflingly useful plant Um, and it's the the root of Nova Kane and light a cane and crack cocaine They all come from the same thing, right? What kind of came you won't? Yeah, 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 leafs for the first time

Mm-hmm. 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. Let's we're gonna ruin a lot of raves like Yeah, now you're already you nailed the joke already. There's no other way. Yeah, that's exactly yeah If you're gonna snort a drug at a party kids Keta means a lot better. Anyway, uh, so obviously the fact that they're not 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 worse some early medical uses for it

We get anesthetics like Nova Kane and light a cane. This is a big deal and we don't talk again This is something that people don't think about but it was not we're we're at about like a hundred and fifty years or so of Effective anesthetics being widespread available, right? That is not a thing in surgery prior to this if you don't live in a place where there's a good natural oral anesthetic And there's a couple cocaine coke is not the only one also. Um, yeah, Kava, which a Hawaiian Yeah, I believe I've been using Polynesian people 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 a liquor and then someone's ripping a bone out of your skull, right? Yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, then you're then you're looking like a medieval movie. Yeah, really real gnarly. Yeah, I was listening to a I think what was that a kind of pot was that radio lab the science one from WIC, 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, I'm saying or poison and one of the researchers from China was like

Well, they're just molecules Like, you know and that that bifurcation the difference between like a good molecule and a bad molecule is like It's a very new and sort of Western way to look at this It's like they all have strengths and weaknesses, you know, 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, I'm saying and You know, and it was like, yeah, man. I was

Little too far. You know, I'm saying like there has to have been because again I feel like the point you're making at this stage and 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, right? 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. It's 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? Yeah, most of them are not doing lines, you know

They are they are taking it as a pure like distilled tincture You can pick this shit up at the 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 cocoa leaves all day long and it's you're probably not good Well, not all day long when you could 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 gonna notice because it's going to destroy you. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm gonna know Government all the time. Yeah, gonna be like hey, man, you know, I mean, I'm just doing my good Yeah, you're gonna get really into white snake and yeah, then your heart's going to explode. Hey, bro So make an album. Hey, man. Hey, we should make an album. You want to make an album tonight? Let's cut what we got to bring back fucking prog rock, man. That's what I want to fucking hear right now So Europeans 1855 we get cocaine 1814 is when the US 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 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 US extraction of cocaine, but of course the drug and various forms continued to flow into the United States from Latin America Up through its land and seaboarders in the 1970s Cocaine caught on big time as a drug for the rich and the upwardly mobile party set. Yes sometime in the late 70s and obviously There's a lot of history in other countries, especially in Europe outside of the US. I'm focusing on the US here

Yeah, sometime in the late 1970s or very early 1980s We don't exactly know when this happens because it's happening illegally, right? Yeah 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 crack Yes, 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 so 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. Uh, so the The legend is that it was a dude at Oakland that figured it out. Oh Yeah, that's that's the legend. We don't know that but that's that's the legend, right? And once

You know once it hit Cali would do like freeway Rick and in just some of it starts to hit and it starts It hits hard and ruins the Crips and Bloods, but that's the but we'll get to that Um, but I think what you're talking about as far as how to make crack all of half of the the slang that gets appropriated from hip-hop into The zeitgeist or comes out of black culture is actually it's crack slang. So like cooking in the kitchen, you know Chef yeah, you know a chef spin. Look at the flick of the wrist. All of that is about spinning Crack yeah over it. You know, I'm saying yeah, I it's all crack slang

You're 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 crack. Yes, it's it comes from freebase, right? Like that's where the origin Yes, 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 little baby in the base. God. Yeah, little baby in the base God like all these things have like I think it's gonna happen as this is going like I'm gonna keep pointing out rap lyrics to you to be Or no slang and being like that's about crack. Yeah, it is great And I really love that you point this out because from a a from a From a cultural standpoint. Yes crack is like on the level of the Simpsons. Yes in terms of how it's influenced

Yes, the way people talk. Yes, fair to things. Yes, we're rappers or people caught in rappers athletes They call themselves chefs because they're cooking in the kitchen Which is where you make crack? You're upset right? Yeah, 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, yes crack produced an intense but fleeting high that pushed many users to buy again and again until they ran out of money And that is one of the things about crack is that like it hits harder and faster as generally the case when you free base something Then railing it or insufflating. Yeah, it's the scientific insufflation is the scientific term for snorting something

Tell me something it's like 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? Yeah, 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 in some like if you're actually free-basing something Yeah, and I don't think you can freebase most of those drugs although I don't know that anyone's tried but free-basing hits you faster like for example DMT which is the drug, you know that all of the 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 as ayahuasca Yeah, you're drinking it as a tea. It takes a while to come up. You vomit a lot. Yeah, 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. Yeah, but it's much shorter, right? Yeah, most of my uh, most of the people that I do know that either got hooked and got off that you could communicate with You know, I'm saying who figured out a way fought their way through to get off the stuff. That's what they say they were 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, I'm saying it's like you never really reached that other hot that high again But that first high they're like you're there's there are no words for it 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 gonna it a night of coke is gonna be 200 bucks, right? Yeah We're probably not gonna do that. Some people do get that addicted but for most people it's like, okay So I will occasionally buy 200 bucks in cocaine for a night to party. Yeah Yeah, cracks 10 bucks a hit. Yeah, I was gonna say it's 10 dollars a hit. It's cheaper that and that's how it is That's how cheap it is at the start. It gets a hell of a lot cheaper So that's something you're having a bad day. Shit's rough. You're feeling bad You know any time for pocket dollars you can fucking on any kind again, right? Yeah any corner any corner. Yeah

Obviously this becomes a problem. Yes Um, so obviously this of course leads to overdoses Um, 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 the 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 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 super charts, right? So it's yeah ages you yeah there Yeah, like that that used to be like for for me one of the biggest

like deterrents Wasn't it wasn't none of them uh commercials. It wasn't a song. It was the site Of someone you went to school with that now looks like your grandparent And and it was just and the fact that like and just That nothing else mattered like how are you you're just sitting? It 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 prog knowing yo ass, but like uh out here like the site it's It is probably the most heartbreaking site you can imagine because you're just like I know these I know y'all like you

How did you become this? Yeah, yeah, so I I think the point that we built to here is that crack is indeed a hell of a drug Yes, yeah And uh, obviously people get better very quickly get better at making it. I think you you know I I there's no proving where it came from Oakland's a pretty good guess in terms of the first people to figure that the shit out That that that that make would make total sense to me. Yeah, obviously the Bay Area is where innovation comes. I mean all innovation, right? You know resistance everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah Um, but you know who else is constantly innovating? Oh

The sponsors of this podcast. Well, yes pharmaceutical companies a.k.a. John dealers. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah 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 oxy or hydrocodone, right? Yes, right? There's no difference. Yeah. Yeah, and when we get to the jail sentences There's a big difference. Yes. We can talk about why that's so problematic. Yeah, we'll be talking about that now But first

Here's the crack of products for you During the summer of 2020 Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations And you know what? They were right I'm trevor erenson and i'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the fbi

Sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation In the first season of alphabet boys We're revealing how the fbi spied on protesters in denver At the center of this story is a raspy voiced Cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns He's a shark and not on the good badass way And nasty sharks

He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi Is not based on actual science The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences and a life without parole My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday

I'm molly herman join me as we put forensic science on trial To discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in csi How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize That this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up Listen to csi on trial on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space And when I was there as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories

But there was this one that really stuck with me About a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth His beloved country the soviet union is falling apart And now he's left defending the union's last outpost This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world Listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

Oh, 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 Um and also not go to the moral panic shit that you get about it. Yeah, which is which is what we're about to talk about now Yeah, um, 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 swing in 80s So from the post world war one era to the 1960s black americans migrated from rural parts of the united states To cities across the united states and unprecedented numbers This is probably the most significant demographic shift that has ever occurred in the history of the united states

Great migration is a huge fucking thing that happens. Yes, the great migration and my family is wonderful. Yeah Right. Yeah, and yeah Um, so because there's all sorts of bullshit restrictions on where and which are many of which are legally enforced But a lot of which were just sort of like guys will show up outside of your house and 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 survey. Obviously prop like Elephant in the room, you know all this like I'm not explaining it Yeah, we'll see you 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 and in anything more than the vegas terms. Yeah Yeah, I don't want to feel like i'm not explaining this to you Anything we're working on did you know? Yeah. Yeah, did you know that this happened to you? Yeah. Yes. I do know Like our again to add some color to this like you'll probably get to this also too But like my family, you know, uh, my father's side how we got to california was was through texas and That was and and traditionally between texas and oklahoma most families from there probably got there because of

The the chance to become a cowboy, you know where you could work for yourself and that was you know, almost all of 90 percent of a boot on your neck. Yeah 90 percent 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 these uh housing projects like the watts towers that that these housing vouchers that brought specifically Jason petty's family to california, you know what i'm saying? yeah, and that's like

that's what happens to Most to a huge chunk of people and they get forced into these neighborhoods like watts, right? And and there's other neighborhoods and other parts of the united because this is 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 sea 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 as strike breakers and stuff and this is And then as soon as that happens, right? You have so you have that being done by these capitalists and then we get NAFTA, right? So suddenly what jobs they had start to fall out from under, right? As manufacturing and shit moves across the border It's also worth noting that a ton of these of the particularly the black men working these industrial jobs Are doing so in dangerous

Like it being exposed to like deadly chemicals like in horrific ways that would have been That were illegal, but it happened, you know Um So while all this is going on white families are considering their you know flight to suburban areas at at an unprint that takes off too Oh, yes, um, and you know these suburban houses that cost about as much as three good lunches do today They start moving into an accumulating wealth Yeah, they go up hundreds of thousands of dollars in value by the time the owners reach retirement age Yeah, now when the civil rights movement wins its major victories, obviously a lot had gotten better for black families

But this has what one journal of social welfare paper Paper I read called a quote perverse unintended impact on the inner city 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 then a parter 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 stagnant and this is across the board, right? This is why jimmy carter loses reelection 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 hit the hardest hit region of the country

Yeah, 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 percent, right? It's about 70 percent of black kids grow up in two-parent households for white kids. It's 90 percent. So it's lower For black families in in up to the 1960s, but still the vast majority of kids, right are growing up in two-parent households Once you hit the 70s that or the six 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 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

It's so pivotal and so under reported um in the sense that it's like So much of our culture now is 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. Yeah the movie warriors, right come out. 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 slum lord

It's cheaper to just destroy the building and get the insurance then try to you know, uh fix it or or or You know be a responsible landlord just burn it down and just let the rubble happen Uh a big power outage in in uh in new york, which is what which actually happened Which is what the movie warriors takes place in but it's ultimately it is this moment that DJ cool herk from From from Jamaica moves over. You know what I'm saying and plugs his turntable into a power line and does the first park jam Which 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 was this moment and it was but it's important to understand. It's like, oh, yeah They was cool. They were throwing parties in the park. Well They were living in rubble Yeah, I'm saying because we were forced to with with no music programs in our schools Yeah, I'm saying nothing. It was nothing provided. No money for that. There's no money. It's also yeah 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

Yes, 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 overpasses 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 these massive drops in wealth This 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. Yeah, 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. Yes decades and it hit its height during the crack Yes, and that that's critical to know otherwise. You're gonna wind up blaming crack for everything. It's not to blame for everything. Yes Um, it's it just is not um

Obviously it sure doesn't help. You know, like it does not reverse any of these trends But that that's like if it's like uh, 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 We're getting somewhere. Yeah, so yeah During we're gonna be talking about crack today. Obviously and it plays a role in this But again, this is this is going on for a long time and I want to quote again from that paper

I read from earlier 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 mary in order to maintain welfare eligibility and there's a this is one of the things because one of the things that crack gets blamed for is The destruction of the of the black family all of these black men who abandoned their families, right?

This is the this is the right wing line on what happens and no in the 1960s 20 years before we've got crack on the street US 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? Um, so suddenly you're penalized for that if you're not already married See, that's what I mean by like depending on how hotep you are because that's in a lot of like the black like the 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, uh Well, if y'all need help you can't have no daddy in the house You know I'm saying yeah, it's like well dang and then what they talk about among our community is like what it might have done To our psyche not I don't think this is very fair But their argument is what has done our psyche to look at our women and be like you chose to check over me You know 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? Uh, I mean and that That move right there a strong case can be made. It does a lot more damage than cracks, right? Yes, there's a really good documentary if people want to know more about this and like the kind of the human side of this called the Pruitt Igo myth Pruitt Igo was a government housing development in st. Louis During this kind of period of time I think 50 60s And that documentary does a good job of explaining how the way in which benefits were handled Um led to the dissolution of a lot of families and like kind of incentivize that it's a very dark story

But I that documentary I found I felt did a really good job of it Um, so obviously the cause of all of these problems is complicated and goes on for a while But where the credit comes as far as the media is concerned and as far as us politicians are concerned All of this is the fault of crack cocaine which starts to enter u.s. Intercity 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? Um, so crack is immediately big business a lot of it gets sold to people who live who live in this communities But and this is often ignored

Much if not most of the money comes from people who lived elsewhere outside of the inner city often in more affluent areas who would drive into inner city communities to buy crack and What this actually is means There's a graph going around twitter right now that shows Where money moves within 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 like really not other meaningful ways money is coming from outside into the inner city. Yeah, so That's part of why this is a big deal. We've talked about how negative the impact is on people But one of the things this means is that there's fucking money coming now um So of course the fortunes to be made meant that a lot of money was on the table for people who were willing To be more violent than other people 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. Yeah There are of course significant social costs due to the use of the drugs There's people who neglect their kids and mistreat their partners and spend money that are needed for other things but narcotics Um and the stats statistics on this are pretty bleak and I don't want to stray away from those either So I'm going to quote from a 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 percent increase for those aged 18 to 24 and a 10 percent 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

And foster care more than doubled fetal death rates and weapons arrests of racks of blacks rose by more than 25 percent And black babies with low birth weights increased by five percent Now this is really bad But what what's happening in the media as this massive murder search 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 it? No, it's not. It's it's the money. Yes. It's normal Economics that happens everywhere else. It's really like what you're explaining. I think again 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 fun did it's like you gonna go to the bank and let them white boys tell you

No, you know, I'm saying you're gonna keep you have to keep, you know Dressing up and kind of shucking and jiving for these people to come invest in your things or it's like you go get 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 it's the narrative of every jz's 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, I'm saying it's yeah It's it's nipsey hustle. It's like so like you said like you can have this media narrative of like You know, all this is terrible. You did it on the backs of each other, which might be true You know I'm saying but that being said it's like

Where else is there any other influx of capital that like that is self-generated and that I don't owe And it's like where I mean where you where you think where you think we got that from we got it from the mafia Like yeah, you would learn from the mafia. That's what they did jobs ahead. 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, I mean And it's it's uh, 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 like characteristics of crack Yeah, but the massive increase in murders and the proportion of kids who go into foster care in large part because they've lost parents

Um, that is due the thing that has entered the community that has caused that violence is fucking cash Right. Yeah, that's what the crack epidemic is a fucking. Yeah cash epidemic. It's a gold rush. Yes That's the way to put it. It's a gold rush. Yeah, exactly. Um, 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 Mm-hmm. The author of this article is a guy named dr. Ira Chasnov 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 Chasnov 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 we've all lived through this at 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 um This is one of the first times that happens because nobody listens to Chasnov 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 crack babies. Yes By the way, the people losing their minds are the goddamn the mainstream media

The legacy media and i'm gonna quote from the fucking new york times here As a medical writer Harriet washington wrote of this period in her book medical apartheid Dr. Chasnov's provisional research was swallowed whole then regurgitated in a racialized form by newspaper magazine and even medical accounts Americans were told on the nightly news that crack exposure in the womb destroyed the unique brain functions that 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 dorthy 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. Yeah, this is what actually this is 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 Jason. Um, yeah, it's it's adjacent to the bastard And you know what's adjacent to behind the bastards the politics The wild hood politics

Deeply intertwined especially this week. Yeah, but also the products and services that support this baby this podcast so Check this out and purchase things During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the fbi had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations And you know what? They were right I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series

alphabet boys as the fbi Sometimes you gotta Grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the fbi spied on protesters in denver At the center of this story is a raspy voiced Cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen

Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI? isn't based on actual science The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest. I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm molly herman

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match And when there's no science in CSI How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize That this stuff's all bogus It's all made up Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space

And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories, but there was this one that really stuck with me About a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down It's 1991 and that man sergey krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth His beloved country the soviet union is falling apart And now he's left offending the union's last outpost This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world

Listen to the last soviet on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts We have returned My little Dave's pill reference Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course, of course Um So, um, I want to continue that quote from the new york times about kind of how how this all works Legal scholar dorthy 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 him stupid. Fuck him. Yeah, but um, yeah, I 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 Am I doing the thing that men in wigs did a hundred years ago? like Yes, you are charles krauthammer. Yes, man. So Yeah, um 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. So they turn to abortion as like the real thing to hit Um and right as they're really getting the anti-abortion movement churning up There's all this concern of her unborn babies and crack which which really gels great

Um, and i'm gonna 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 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 I'm saying and and the reality of like, yeah dog like yo this you shouldn't be Doing crack while you're pregnant fam. You know I'm saying it like yeah, 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 I'm saying and that that that kind of hurts also, you know, yeah yeah, um This so so this and and This new york times article i'm quoting from is a modern one where they are kind of taking themselves in the past to task For what they did and the new york times is a hue 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 journals will be like, oh turns out we had a huge fault like like we were largely responsible for this nightmare Our 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 dollars to prepare 20,000 children in the state of florida for school because of like how damaged they were from crack There's zero evidence of this. That's just a lie. Yeah, 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 he asks authorities to suspend parental rights for women who are addicted to crack um

Now there's evidence as to what happens when you do that and it causes women who are addicted to crack and 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 and and those babies came out and were fine and learned things, right? Yes Um, 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 here. 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 uh, just a 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 at there I'm not gonna go. You know I'm saying and even when even with the uh, even during the whole like Sort of crack down, you know under president trump about federal, you know That mandatory reporting to like immigration And from the police why the police was like, I'm not doing that and they're like and it's not like I'm patting the police on the back But I'm just just being logical here and they were being logical. They're like, well, then no one's gonna report anything Because why would I so then it's like, well, no, I'm not finna tell I'm not finna 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 uh policy Exacerbates the problem is what I'm saying is like in all in In in so many other areas of culture. It's the same thing. It's like I'm not gonna shoot. I'm not finna do that I'm not telling y'all nothing because if you do that's gonna happen and that and then that avoidance Exacerbates the problem. I said that already. But yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's that's where the issue comes from in 1990 the new york times as 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 is both alarmist and unsubstantiated Which is again nice. But one of the things this does is that police In police unions and whatnot and political figures start flipping out about crack babies Like they're like like it's like it's an alien life form coming to the planet earth to do us harm And we have to ready our fucking guns to fight the invaders, right? That is how they talk about this And as the paper of record it was the times's 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 hundred to one 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 to what this Is what quote unquote Destroyed a generation to the extent that that actually happened. This is what does it and i'm going to read a quote from an ap right up here An associated press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that between 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 is 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 1808,000 in 2000 to 1808,000 sorry the 1808 in 2000 In the same time span the rate for the latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615 well the white incarceration rate grew from 103 people per 100,000 to 242 so yeah you're looking at

number one the rate At the start of this of this process the rate of incarceration for blacks in america is six times what it is for Americans and then it triples. Yeah, it's so yeah. Yeah, I think like for the listeners sake I like Let's let me go back to the hundred to one ratio in In that like so what we're saying is one ounce of crack

Gets the same amount of jail time as a hundred pounds of cocaine Like I or a hundred or a hundred ounces. I mean, yeah, yeah, 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 you got a one ounce of crack Versus a hundred ounces. Okay, which one of y'all you think is going to distribute this stuff Who you thinks the salesperson?

Do you know what I'm saying versus just the user like I 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? I mean Yeah, so just like like hear how sinister And purposeful This is Like we're not making this shit up like this. Is it it's not a conspiracy. These are laws

Yeah part of the reason why because this 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 this has 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 they then happens here. Yeah, right like this. It's surgically targeting 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 yeah, and you're saying like am I taking crazy feels I feel like we being targeted like no You're not yeah, 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. It isn't you're in jail more than Yeah, like yeah, but I'm trying to tell you fam like it just don't feel the same and it's like Yeah, 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 and 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 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 in a 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 effective right some 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 gonna say like the again of the lure around here is that like crack there's there's There's the the crypts before crack and there's the crypts after you know and the the pre like we talked about this in the in the when we first met in the

Black Panther episode black. Yeah, it's like they're just the children Chris were the children of the of the Panthers, you know I'm saying and knuckling up, you know fistfights rough rough house and protecting their turf it crack Is brought the guns Yeah, and uh, and yeah, so like you saying that like is a Yeah, it's a big That that's that's so important to to understand that nuance

And it's I have to I want to emphasize here like We had uh 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 is everywhere is huge. There's protests Yeah, 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 a hundred grand came in Suddenly and so people who have never seen that much money in their lives had a plan for it Originally 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 in the Bloods who were very different organizations prior to crack looking at 30 40 million dollars that you can put down in a few months, right? Like you can make that money fucking quick immediately Yeah, of course, of course people get murdered. All right Um Like yeah, it's it's there's no other way for that to have gone now What's most interesting about the crack epidemic to me is what stopped it after 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 in the Bloods and the U.S.

And the 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. Yeah Um, but the other stuff we've talked about including like infant birth weight and stuff that goes away Crack use in terms of overall quantity remained stable So the number of people 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 because this is because The there's no expansion in the number of people smoking crack. What researchers find is that people who had been smoking crack don't stop, right?

They continue to smoke Um, but new users stop doing the drug So the people who are already addicted stay addicted because it is crack cocaine and it's very addictive addictive But after 95 New people don't do that 95 new people don't really start in in significant population amounts New people are not coming into the ranks of people using this drug. Yeah 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, they're younger siblings. They're cousins. They're kids See this and are like wow seems like I shouldn't do crack

I am because yeah, 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 that 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 That's that's what happens, right? And so you get, you know, suddenly, you know, the 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 hit 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? The same amount is worth ten dollars instead of two hundred and fifty dollars. Well, maybe it's not worth throwing down over, you know Um, and so in spite of everything the government had actually done The problem got better in part because crack got cheaper and more available, right? That is 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. Yeah, it's it's the it's the community taking agency It's people talking to each other. It's people making Why is 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. Um And it's one of those things Everything gets better in spite of the government, which if Ronald Reagan was a guy who actually meant anything that he said, right? Yeah 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

Yes, if you're actually Believe in anything is a conservative. This is a perfect example of that, right? Oh the government just made this worse Yeah, exactly like here's your proof. Yeah Actually the free in the free market did kind of solve this one Credit where it's due this is a case that kind of works. Um 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 fat crack. Sorry was a fact of life now As were the tens of thousands of young black men serving decades of time for possession And it was into this climate in the august of 1996 that a and again 96 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? Um 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? Yeah, it's a big it is a national level outlet even though it's called the la times. Um, but obviously, you know They've got only a little bit of the la times his budget and they've got none of the cache But what they do have is a working understanding of this thing That's probably going to be a big deal in the future called the internet, right? The san jose mercury figures out that the internet is where journalism can go viral and there 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 he he is kind of

Along those lines Um, but the san jose mercury publishes this whole investigation dark alliance Simultaneously online and in print, which is again kind of the first time this has been done for a big investigation This 1997 write-up from the columbia journalism reviews. Peter corn blue 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 us assistant district attorney as the biggest nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the united states And won norvin norvin in some documents menin says canterero a friend of the fallen dictator anastasia

samosa who allegedly brought blandon 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 plagues 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 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 Oh, 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 made it all comes out of this article Right because this article is the first time that you have someone saying in a very condensed clear form

The cia brought crack to the inner city by in order to fund the contrast, right? That is that is the way this is now That's actually not what the article says because the cia is not bringing crack anywhere with 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 um But yeah, uh the claims web made in his article are a bit different from the version of the story that spreads kind of Viroly what he provides is evidence to support the assertion that quote a cocaine for weapons trade supported us 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 web pointed out that ross who was black received a life sentence without parole Blandon a nicaraguan man had smuggled cocaine in whereas ross had sold crack And blandon serves just two years and then gets a bunch of money from the feds to be an informant um

So the primary gotcha the story had was that it connected the two right-wing dealer Not nicaraguans to the fd in freedom fighters and showed that they somewhat inexplicably had escaped a prosecution for a weird number of crimes and This is the point at which I think we're gonna have to bring things to a close for the day because we've got we'll be talking about in part two Nicaragua the contras all of this how the actual crack and coke well the cocaine trade because again this is if you want to But it's one of those things where like The the inaccurate version of the story is the cia brought crack to the inner cities the act perfectly accurate version is the cia allowed Uh cocaine to be trafficked in mass into southern california, which was then turned into crack

And that's what caused the crack epidemic. Yeah, and then as payment for the other accurate Yeah as payment 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 crack in the inner city It's just a little more detailed than that. Yeah There's a few more steps in between but yeah, I 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 gonna we're about to talk in part two all about the cia and some other groups

Is yeah, the cia has got a lot of blame for this, but um Where i'm standing not more than the new york times Oh, right. That's that's where I'm fucking standing here and if not and not more than congress, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah people passing these laws, right? Um, that's where I'm fucking standing. Um, it's all y'all. 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 the crack epidemic in brief. Yeah, um prop you got anything to plug here, uh, maybe hood politics The show that we're doing. Yeah, this is in partnership with this week. Yeah, this is this is definitely like a

You know a little a newbie thing to where we're doing like, you know a collaboration on this where? Uh, this story takes place in the context of the stories that we're talking about on hood pop alphabet boys Is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations In the first season we're diving into an fbi investigation of the 2020 protest It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns But our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get a podcast

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With the soviet union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world Listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest. I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday Listen to csi on trial on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts