Stuff You Should Know - How Crack Works

Episode Date: September 25, 2013

Back in the mid-1980s a new and extremely potent drug hit the scene: crack cocaine. In short order, America was in the grip of both a sweeping addiction and a state of hysteria over use of the drug and the social consequences of crack, like crack babies. Now, 30 years on SYSK takes a look back at the receding wave of the crack epidemic and its lasting legacy on America. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is Operation Trade Bomb, an Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Jerry just waved, like, she's waving at the audience that is here. She's waving to the world.

It's a little weird. She may be on something. Josh, you know what's whack? Uh, the Zach attack from Save by the Bell. I don't even know what that is. You don't know what Save by the Bell is? What's wrong with that? I know what that show is, but I never heard of the Zach attack.

It's just Zach being Zach. Oh, gotcha. That is whack. Yeah. Well, never mind. I thought Crack was whack, but the Zach attack is truly whack. No, I disagree. I was gonna say, no, it's not right, because that's actually a pretty good show, but okay.

Yes, Crack is whack. Listen to this. We're like Eminem up in here. We're what? We're like Eminem up in here. Yeah, I guess so. Your perdori hip-hop episode now, people, no, I'm just saying people, if they're confused about why we sound so stilted and square, just go listen to hip-hop and that explains

everything. People like that one, surprisingly. Yeah. It's a good one. Man, we got a good email from a, or a Facebook post from a graffiti artist. Oh, yeah? Yeah, good stuff. Nice.

I can't remember his tag, but it was like really nice. Like he was complimenting us or he was just saying, hey. No, he's like, hey, I'm a graffiti artist and here's my work. Nice. I was very impressed and he is not on Crack. No, because he's not whack, right? Exactly. So, Chuck, I have a little intro.

Great. Just, if you'll bear with me, the year was 1985. Okay. I was 14. Okay. What is it? It's one year PBG. Yeah, very early on.

Um, cocaine, which is a drug that had been sweeping the nation for about 10 years by then. Yeah. Uh, was up to $150 a gram. That's thanks to the demand, um, and the available income of its well-heeled, yuppie users who are willing to spend that kind of money on it. Sure. It's not much of an expensive white, uh, upwardly mobile person's drug.

Yeah. Cocaine. Sure. Wall Street. Yeah. And there were, at the time, articles that kind of said, cocaine's probably not that addictive. We shouldn't worry that much about cocaine.

Yeah, early on. It's not a very big deal. Yeah. It was mostly, like I said, a white drug. That same year, 1985, a new drug hit the scene. It was cheap, five to 10 bucks, a pop. Yeah. It gave you a very quick, very intense high.

Yeah, short lived. And it swept through lower income African American areas of the United States. And all of a sudden we had a problem. An epidemic. Yes. Yeah. Cocaine in a different form. Yeah.

The country went crazy for it. And not only was it cocaine in a different form, it was cocaine being used by a different demographic. Yeah. That, as we'll see, America has always been threatened by and always made legislation to dampen drug use among. Yeah. It's pretty interesting when you dig into this stuff.

And so in 1985, when people started to get worried, Nancy Reagan became concerned. Mm-hmm. And as usual, she started to lie. And we will get into what allegedly might have happened and why crack might have been introduced in this country. Because some people think it was the U.S. government. Straight up. CIA.

Yeah. That's a really good point. So what you're referring to is Gary Webb's Dark Alliance article, right? Yeah. It's a piece of articles and now book. From 1996, I believe, Gary Webb was an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News. And they had a front page story where he basically figured out the connection between the CIA and the crack epidemic that started in, I think, 1984 in Los Angeles.

Yeah. South Central. There's a dude named Freeway Ricky Ross who's still around, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. And he was the largest cocaine distributor, African American cocaine distributor in LA. He was big time. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he had a new product called Crack.

And it became very popular very quickly. Yeah. And Gary Webb in 1996 traced the origin of this epidemic back to, through Ricky Ross, back to some Nicaraguan freedom fighting gorillas that were backed and trained and possibly commanded by the CIA. Are we getting into this? Should we just go ahead and dive in? Let's just dive in.

Yeah. Do you want to? Yeah. Why not? Okay. All right. Here's the deal in Nicaragua, a Central American country. In the 1930s, a man named Anastacio Samosa took power.

And then about 40 years later, in 1979, the people revolted over through him. And they were called the Sandinistas. Yes. So, you know, the whole Contra-Sandinista war in Nicaragua that raged in the 70s and 80s. That's what we're talking about. Yes. The Contras were communists and that didn't fly so well with the U.S. who had long cherished

Nicaragua for their farmland and like to have a toe in their pond, so to speak. Oh, yeah. And so communism there didn't fly. And so they said, you know what, I think maybe we should fund the Contras, maybe give them a little bit of financial assistance. Yeah. And the Contras weren't just one group. They were, that was like an umbrella term for any democratic or anti-communist group

that was trying to paramilitarily overthrow the socialist leadership in Nicaragua. That's right. So we decided to help fund their civil war and the problem was, though, there wasn't a lot of dough like that we could say, like, hey, let's use this money to do this. Yeah, because it was a secret war. Yeah. There was no congressional approval. It was a proxy war with the Soviet Union at the time.

So some allege that this is when the Reagan administration and the CIA got together to literally introduce cocaine dealers and cocaine to South Central and crack cocaine to spread throughout the ghettos to raise money and use that money to fund the Contras. So here's the thing, like that was never proven and Gary Webb never ever said he did not. He didn't say that the government directly introduced it on purpose or with the aim of creating an epidemic in the ghetto. He found connections between the CIA and drug lords. Right.

Specifically, Ricky Ross on one end and then the CIA backed and possibly commanded the Nicaraguan Democratic force, this Contra force. So their business, their group was funded entirely from cocaine sales and trafficking and that all went to this guy, Ricky Ross. And there's no way that the CIA didn't know about this. Yeah. And there were at the time, well, we'll get back to web in a second. But in the 80s, there was, you know, when the whole Iran Contra thing broke out, there

was the Cary Committee who did some investigating, the Cary Committee report from John Kerry, obviously, found that quote, the Contra drug links included payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras. And then later on, there was an internal CIA investigation in the 90s where they found that there is no evidence that the CIA actually brought drugs into the United States. However, and these are all quotes, however, during the Contra era, the CIA worked with a variety of people to support the Contra program.

And let me be frank, there are instances where the CIA did not in an expeditious or consistent fashion cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity. So basically, the internal investigation said, well, there might have been some people we were dealing with that were doing this, and as it turns out, we didn't really do much about it. Right. So as far as you can go without hyperbole, and it's still pretty shocking, the CIA backed,

trained, and possibly commanded at least one guerrilla group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, and the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the FDN, sold cocaine to Freeway Ricky Ross. Freeway Ricky Ross is where the crack epidemic originated. Yep. And so just to finish up with Webb, though, after he wrote this Dark Alliance series, he was shunned by mainstream press in the United States, sadly. All three of the major newspapers, you know, the LA Times, New York Times, and I guess was the Washington Post came out.

And they were not only shunned, they like tried to discredit him. Oh, yeah. They wrote articles. They put 17 reporters in 20,000 words to a three-day rebuttal of Dark Alliance. That was the LA Times. Yeah. Rather than pick up the story, they tried to de-demolish it and Webb. New York Times suggested he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong.

He already had wanted to pull it surprise at this point, I think, or something else. And the Mercury News defended it for a little while and then backed off and apologized. He ended up quitting and committed a very weird suicide in which he shot himself in the head twice. Yeah. Who knows? Obviously, if you get on the Internet, there are tons of outlets that say, well, obviously, it's not a suicide.

It was a murder. So who knows about that? Other people have said, no, it does look hinky, but the first shot wasn't fatal and he was able to do it twice. Who knows? Draw your own conclusions. That's some raw nerve right there. But he claimed that there were people like, you know, he saw what he thought were CIA people

like climbing up his fire escape and stuff the previous days and who knows? All I'm saying is they're making a movie about it with Jeremy Renner this summer. Oh, is it right? Yeah. Great. Yeah, it's going to be good. I'm glad. I ran across him when I wrote an article on America's Army.

Jeremy Renner? No. Oh, Webb? Yeah. He wrote an expose. America's Army is this. It's a video game and it's basically like a training game for the Army where you can play this free game, but you sign up to be contacted.

If you're any good at it, the Army contacts you and he did this. It's like a recruiting tool through video games, but the Army categorically denied that's what it was. But that's obviously what it was and Gary Webb, one of his last expositions on that. And you know, we should mention that today, all three of those major news outlets all say, boy, we kind of got that one wrong. Yeah. We shouldn't have done that to Gary Webb.

Maybe we shouldn't have driven Gary Webb to his possible suicide. Yeah. So, so Gary Webb did all this investigation, did all this, like we're going to connect the dots pretty well, but there's still this maddening question and tantalizing question. Who invented crack? It came out of nowhere. And so to kind of answer that, which we can't, you have to look at how crack is made and to look at how crack is made, you have to go back a lot further than the 1980s.

You have to go back to the 1880s and actually a little further before then when cocaine first was introduced to the United States after it was isolated, the alkaloid was isolated from the cocoa plant in the mid 19th century. Yeah. And that's when it was isolated in, I mean, for centuries, people in South America were wise to the fact that if you chew on this plant, yeah, it'll give you some go juice. Right. More.

Yeah. And people still chew the heck out of it. Yeah. So it was, it was no secret to the South Americans, but like you said, it was the mid-1880s when it was actually isolated and became a narcotic, an abused narcotic drug. Right. But first, you could buy it all over the place. You could order it through catalogs.

You can, doctors could prescribe it. Norman Freud was an ardent prescriber of it. And it was a very popular drug found in Tonics, Coca-Cola, for real. That's not a myth. And cocaine was, everybody loved it for a while. Yeah. Until, well, not until they still loved it and still do today, I imagine, in circles. But in 1914, it was made illegal with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act.

And right, which do you remember I said earlier that like everything, like this crack has a real history of, it shows the history of racism in regards to drug laws. So the Harrison Narcotics Act outlawed opiates and cocaine for the first time in the United States. And it was based on concerns like China men were luring white women to their dens of iniquity in Chinatown through opium. And southern blacks were sniffing cocaine and it gave them superhuman strength and they were raping white women as a result.

So those two things were passed. And we have federal legislation from 1914 as a result of those kind of fears. And if you can, if you keep that in the back of your mind and pay attention to the drug policy that comes out later on from crack, it's been going on since then and it continues to today. Are you saying a pattern emerges? A pattern emerges. So cocaine is, cocaine powder is, you have to actually manufacture it.

You don't find a cocoa plant and like shake it and all the white powder falls out. It makes like a tinkling sound. It is made by dissolving the paste, the cocoa paste in a mixture of hydrochloric acid and water. Then you add some potassium salt, separate out the bad junk, maybe add a little ammonia and then the powder is separated out and you've got cocaine powder. And from there you can sniff it. You can add a little water to it and inject it.

Or you can make something called freebase. Yeah. I never quite understood what freebase was. I thought it was a, I thought freebasing was a thing. It is. Yeah, but freebase is also, it's a noun and a verb. Right. Okay.

So maybe I do understand. You freebase, freebase. Oh. You see? I've been doing it wrong. You verb the noun. Okay. So you've been doing it wrong.

This stuff doesn't work. Yeah. I don't know what everybody's so excited about. So with freebase, you take cocaine and you add something highly flammable, say ether and you, after you dissolve the, the cocaine in ammonia, you add ether to it and then you smoke it. But you're smoking something that has like a highly flammable solution involved. Yeah.

Tell that to Richard Park. Yes. In 1980 when he was filming Bustin Loose, he caught himself on fire because he was smoking freebase. He was smoking freebase and drinking 151 proof rum one night. And I think he was doing it in his garage too, which so it was unventilated and he caught fire. Yeah.

But you know what? There's also reports that he set himself on fire on purpose. Oh, really? That he poured the stuff all over his head and let him match. Oh, we want a little, a little cuckoo. Self-immolation. I think that may be the right story now. Huh.

I just saw a documentary on him and I think that's what they say. I'm so glad you just corrected me mid podcast. Do you know how many emails you prevented us from? I mean, that was the long stories that he freebased and I think he even came out later and said like, yeah, I was freebasing, but I also purposely set myself on fire in the ravages of a freebasing binge. Got you. Okay.

So freebasing, it was a thing at least as early as 1980, but it was, it was difficult to do multi step process and you needed something like ether. Ether is not the easiest thing to get your hands on. Sure. And dangerous obviously. Sure. But there was a way to smoke cocaine and freebase was the way to do it, but that never really got a big foothold in any demographic in the country.

It was just kind of a thing that some people like Richard Pryor did right looking for more intense. I guess then all of a sudden mysteriously out of nowhere, there is crack cocaine. Yeah. Crack is also manufactured, but it doesn't require something like ether or anything flammable. No. You dissolve it in a mixture of water and either baking soda, sodium bicarbonate or ammonia and you boil it up, separate it out into the solid, cool it down and then break

it up and you've got your little white ish or tan crack rocks. Right. And if you buy it on the street, supposedly they range in size from 0.1 to 0.5 grams and they contain the DEA says between 75% and 90% pure cocaine, so it's quite a rush for you. Sure. And because it's so easy to make crack from cocaine, like nobody imports crack across the border into the U.S., it's all coke that comes into the U.S.

And then Wesley Snipes converts it into crack in a factory operated and run by naked people. Because he doesn't trust them. What was that? New Jack City. Oh, man. I was like, played. Yeah. Man, I forgot all about New Jack City.

That was great, Mimee. It was. And they call it crack because it makes a crackling sound. That's the baking soda when you put the fire on it. And speaking of put the fire on it, that's how you do it. You have a little, I mean, there's different kinds of pipes, but the most often crack pipe you will see is the little straight shooter. A little glass tube.

Yep. I find them on my dog walks in my neighborhood. Do you really still live there? Yeah. Crack is still around. It's not like it went anywhere. Oh, okay. You thought, oh, they got that problem all under control.

It's lit. So you have the crack in one end and then a filter of some kind like steel wool or something in the other. You heat it up with your lighter. Yeah. Under, like on the outside of the glass tube, or you can, I guess, hit it with the flame. But I think if you light it under the glass tube, it's generally the way to do it, I think. Yeah.

It vaporizes it. That's right. And you smoke it. And pretty much immediately, you're going to feel the effects. It's an immediate rush that lasts only about 10 or 15 minutes. And that's something that I didn't used to know. I learned it a few years ago, but I had no idea. I thought a crack high was like, you know, a couple of hours or something.

No, I think it's one of the shortest highs on the market. Which is, I guess, why it's so addictive and dangerous and rampant. Because you come down and you're like, I'd like to do that again. Exactly. Because every 15 minutes. It's a short high, but it's also an extremely intense high, too. So yeah, it's addictiveness or potential for addictiveness is really high. Yeah.

And so I know this article summarized very nicely for you exactly how it reacts with the brain. And so why don't you go ahead and just lay it on people. All right. Let's do a dopamine, as we know. Yeah, dopamine. It's like your pleasure center. It's the basis of the reward system that we have, which is how we learn to eat and how

we learn to have sex to reproduce. Like we feel good when we do certain things, so we want to do it again. And the basis of that is dopamine. So in the brain, the way it functions normally is neuron will release dopamine and it'll travel to a neighboring neuron causing it to fire and release a pleasurable sensation. And then that dopamine molecule travels back to the original neuron via a transporter and is reabsorbed. So it does its little thing and then goes back home and it's good, right?

There's a certain finite amount of pleasure humans are designed to experience naturally. Yeah. So when we say reabsorbed, we said that a lot, I don't think people understand. That means basically it turns that off again. Right. It does its thing and it's done. Yeah. It doesn't do its thing and do its thing and do its thing and do its thing.

It does its thing once and goes back to the original neuron. Exactly. It sits on the couch in this little neuron. Waits to be released again. Let me know when you have sex again. Or eat something. Or eat some pizza. Yeah.

So with crack or other drugs that target the dopamine system, they interrupt the process. Crack specifically interrupts the process of reuptake or reabsorption. So you're smoking the crack, right? And it triggers this dopamine release. A flood. Or yes. Yeah. The crack attaches to the transporter, which keeps the dopamine from being reabsorbed,

which means it's just floating around in the synapse, the area between two neurons. Like hitting that one neuron again and again and again. And it does it all throughout the brain, or all throughout the ventral tegmental area. And you have this long, well not long, but you have this very intense pleasurable sensation. Right. So basically the reuptake, they just shut that down. They say you're out there on your own. And just causing pleasure.

And it's floating around. Yes. Your brain's a big pleasure center. And then after, I guess, five to 15 minutes, like the crackware is off and the dopamine is taken up once more. That's right. And the high is over and you are left going, I want to do that again. Exactly.

I guess we should talk about some of the effects of crack use, obviously just like with cocaine, any kind of stimulant like that or inphetamine. You're going to be at risk for heart attack, sometimes on the spot. And because you smoke it too, like it has real potential for problems with your respiratory system and your cardiopulmonary system in general. Yeah. Stroke is also a risk. It's going to make you very energized at first.

You might, although your senses may be heightened temporarily, your heart rate's going to shoot through the roof. Your pupils are going to dilate. Your temperature's going to rise. You're going to be pretty anxious or irritable as you start to come down. And then you could be really aggressive and you could be more prone to start a fight with a cop and feel like you have superhuman strength. Or say some crazy stuff to a passerby on the sidewalk because you have a bunch of gunk

on the corners of your mouth. That's true. If you have it with alcohol, that's not a good combination because that produces a chemical called cocaethylene in the liver. What's up? This is a thing. It's like toxic is all get out. Well, the crack or cocaine and alcohol produce a third drug, basically a hybrid drug that's

more than the sum of its parts and it creates a longer lasting, intense or high from crack. But it's also really toxic to the liver, really bad for you. Yeah. As if alcohol itself wasn't. Yeah. And it's not like you have to do anything to it or to get this thing. Like you just drink and smoke crack and your body does the rest. Your metabolism breaks this stuff down and creates this cocaethylene.

It's like alcohol on cocaine. So as we said, it's super addictive and of course all this stuff, whenever you hear about drugs being addictive, it's all dependent on the person, of course. One person might smoke crack and never want to do it again. One person might be hooked immediately. Yeah. It all depends on your susceptibility to addiction, which varies greatly. For sure.

I remember learning when I was a kid that you smoke crack once and you're addicted for life. Yeah. I heard about heroin too. Yeah. But there is a very high potential for abuse with crack because it's short term, short time, high, but an intense high. Yeah.

And we don't want to say like, crack, it's not addictive, but we don't want to spread the misinformation. If you smoke it once, you're hooked for life. Yeah. Which was really big in the 80s in the Nancy Reagan war on drug era. Like a lot of misinformation was put out there just to scare people. Yeah. Yeah.

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So we're talking about it being addictive. It's addictive because of the effect that it has on dopamine. But it's also deletrious to your health because of the effect that it has on your dopamine reward system. Well yeah, because, and I know we've covered this in other drugs, if you do enough drugs like this, it rewires your brain to the point where it just isn't working the same any longer and you actually need it. Your brain has like something, some sort of sensor in there that's like, okay, there's

way too much dopamine going on. This person should not be feeling this much pleasure. So I'm going to just stop producing as much dopamine naturally. It doesn't need it. I'm going to destroy the dopamine that's floating around in the synapses. I'm going to reduce the level so that when you now, when you stop smoking crack, the let down is way worse because you don't have as much natural dopamine as you did before you started smoking crack.

And so you're craving your desire for crack to get back up is much more intense, much higher. Yeah. And here's the thing with crack, which is a little weird. Many times you need to smoke more and more of it because of what you were just talking about because you need to get that high. But sometimes it'll actually make you more sensitive to it and you will get super high off crack, even as an addict, super quick and you could super die instantly.

Which I'm not sure if they've reconciled how it can do both of those things depending on who you are. Well, I think it's the same thing, it's like, you know, some people get addicted to it immediately and other people take longer. No, but I'm just talking about how it affects you. But I guess it's the same with alcohol because some hardcore alcoholics take a long time to get drunk and some get drunk like really quickly. Right.

Yeah. So I guess it's the same deal. I guess it probably have to do with metabolism. A person's metabolism, right? I guess so. So once you are fully addicted, if you stop smoking crack, which by the way, I speak for Chuck too and I say we highly recommend it if you smoke crack to stop smoking crack. Yeah.

And if you haven't started yet, then just keep that up. Yes. Do not start smoking crack. No reason to. If you listen to this podcast after you became addicted to crack, if you withdraw from crack, you're going to experience a pretty big come down in general. Yeah. Severe depression, anxiety, cravings, you're going to be not fun to be around.

You're going to be really irritable and anxious and exhausted yet agitated all at the same time. Yeah. The good news is that your brain will eventually restructure itself to return its dopamine levels back to normal or somewhere near normal. So you won't be depressed or withdrawn or anxious or irritable for the rest of your life. It's just while you're undergoing withdrawals, that's what it's going to be like and it won't be pretty.

It won't be pretty. No, and there's no medication designed to specifically treat crack. And most therapies are pretty standard rehab therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches you how to basically go through life, resisting the temptation of smoking crack. Right. How to disassociate maybe triggers like places you go. Yeah.

Just from that lifestyle. Yeah. Just to decouple your mentality from being addicted to standard rehab treatment. Pretty much. And we covered that extensively in addiction. There's another type of treatment that I hadn't heard of called contingency management. Had you heard of that? No, I hadn't actually.

It's apparently fairly popular for crack treatment. Well, what is it? Well, basically, you are rewarded for not smoking crack, which I'm sure goes over really well with Republicans. Where's my reward? Exactly. I haven't smoked crack ever. Well, you haven't been addicted.

You have to be addicted. So you're given like a voucher or something. You make it like 30 days, you get a free movie ticket or something or like you're given stuff to incentivize. Yeah. And incentivize not doing crack. And I'm sure stuff that is healthy, good for you, distracts you from thinking about crack, that kind of thing.

I hadn't heard of that before this article. Okay. Give someone a movie ticket. You know? You did good today by not smoking crack. Here's a movie ticket. I always like the street terms. We should go over those real quick because 90% of street terms I think are probably just

made up by the media. Yeah. You know, I always feel like they probably just call it crack or rock. Or they call it bossa or french fries or real tops or glow. Glow. That's like, wasn't that the drug and strangers with candy? Was it? Glow.

Jerry rubbed on her gums and they call it like glow? Probably. That was great. Rock sand. That's my favorite. Yeah. Hotcakes. CDs.

What is that? Candy sugar. Yam. Jelly beans. I guess that kind of makes sense. Jelly beans and french fries make sense. French fries does? Yeah.

Because, I mean, doesn't it look kind of like little pieces of french fries? Yeah. It's more, it makes more sense than bossa or real tops. Or here's one, there's no way that anyone in the history of humanity has ever called crack this. Electric Kool-Aid. Yeah. They got the wrong drug there.

Yeah. That would be acid from the famous book. What is that? I don't know. I think those are newspaper writers who've never been on the streets. The kids today are on the electric Kool-Aid. So one thing that we talked about, about crack, is the weird sentencing laws dating back to 1914.

And up until 2010, when we passed the Fair Sentencing Act, if you were caught with one gram of crack cocaine, you would get as much time as someone caught with 100 grams of cocaine powder. Yes. And let's go back over this. In 1985, a gram of cocaine, powder cocaine, cost $100, $150, and it was extraordinarily favored predominantly by white people. Crack comes long, 1985, five to ten bucks, cheap, intense, high, and it becomes favored

by African-Americans, statistically speaking. Yeah. So some might allege that the US government actually had a hand in introducing crack to the ghettos and then made stiffer sentencing once people were addicted to crack to put. And I'm not saying crack users are like awesome people and people should do this, but it's a nonviolent crime and they were being put in prison for the same amount of time as white counterparts who may be raped and murdered people. A hundred to one ratio.

One hundred to one. You had to get caught with a hundred times the powder cocaine to get the same sentence as somebody caught with a hundredth of that amount of crack. That's right. But it's not like that anymore. Well, hold on. There's one other thing, too. There were mandatory minimum sentences that were extraordinarily harsh.

Just getting caught with a little bit of crack on you. Any amount of crack, I believe. You got five years automatically. Yeah. Five years. That was the mandatory minimum for possession. Five years in prison for nothing else. Like you could just be walking down the street and get caught with crack and never have committed

another crime in your entire life and you would get five years in prison for that. And that was from the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which screams Nancy Reagan. And that was a big deal. It was the law of the land until 2010. Yeah. And finally, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reverted the ratio to one to 18 instead of one to a hundred by weight. And it got rid of that mandatory minimum.

And now Attorney General Eric Holder is actually trying to get some retroactivity in these sentences and not trying to. They are actually releasing some people from prison. Yeah. I remember we talked about that in the presidential pardon episode. That was something that a lot of people were calling for, was blanket pardoned nonviolent crack users who had been busted under these mandatory minimums. Here's an idea, rehab somebody.

But even still, there's still a skew in the ratio between crack and cocaine. Probably a rest. No, not just that the sentences, I guess. Yeah. It's still an 18 to one ratio. It used to be a hundred to one, but it's still 18 to one and people are like, why not just make it one to one? It's both it's cocaine and it's cocaine.

Exactly. Like what's the problem here? So yeah, there's been a long history of, I guess, racism. Just put plain and simple. There's really no other way to put it. Racism among drug laws. Yeah. And since they introduced the retroactivity releases, they've reduced 7,300 sentences for

an average of 29 months per inmate and saved American taxpayers $530 million in the process. Other people will say, you're letting drug offenders out on the streets. Why are we doing this? So there are two sides, obviously, opinion-wise to that story. We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that people are upset about it in some circles. Oh, sure. It's not like, oh, it's a great idea categorically. Yeah.

Yeah, there's problems with it for sure. Can we talk about crack babies? Yeah. The other thing that came out of the 80s was the so-called crack baby. There was a huge, part of this crack epidemic wasn't just addiction. It was babies being born addicted to crack. And thanks to a paper from 1985 by a guy named Dr. Ira Chasnoff, the crack baby fear started sweeping the nation.

I mean, huge, man. There's a New York Times video that you can go watch, it's like 10 minutes long. It's called Retro Reports. Is that what it was called? Yeah. Yeah, it was really good. And it basically kind of brought, and I remember now, back in the 80s, Peter Jennings on the nightly news saying that babies are, and it's not Peter Jennings, of course, it's whoever

wrote the story. It was Peter Jennings. Dan Rather. It was Tom Brokaw, People Time Newsweek. It was everywhere. Basically saying these babies are being born addicted to drugs. It'll ultimately cost, crack babies will cost the United States $5 billion. Yeah, they were saying it was going to be a lost generation of kids.

And yeah, a nation of kids who are, you can't rehab, they're going to be the babies or aloof. They shake. They avoid eye contact. They avoid eye contact with their own mothers, which proves that they're going to be anti-social deviants when they grow up. Yeah. And this is not like, we're not rewriting history, man, it was like hardcore stuff that they were saying.

Yeah. It was going to be, one quote was, they will not be able to hold, to hold a job or form meaningful relationships. Right. So they were expected to completely overwhelm the education system. Maybe not even have an IQ of 50 is another quote. Yeah. And then completely overwhelm social services.

So basically there is this whole generation of kids that were expected to be totally messed up because their mothers had smoked crack while they were pregnant. And so women were having their kids taken away from them. Some women were arrested. Yeah. And the guy, the doctor who wrote the original paper, Dr. Ira Chasnoff, started to very quickly back off of his original statements, which he's still today, he admits, he was pretty mouthy and not very savvy, pretty media naive, I guess you could put it.

Yeah, for sure. And he said he would give these long-winded statements and then the press would just pick out the juiciest part and this guy single-handedly created the crack baby myth because it never panned out in any way, shape or form. And what they were saying was like the twitchy babies that you're seeing on TV when they're talking about the symptoms of being a crack baby, that's premature babies. Like you take any premature baby who's premature for any reason. And they're going to display these symptoms that are supposedly associated with crack

babies. Yeah, they did. The U.S. government sponsored a 25-year study of crack babies, not a two-year study or a five-year study. The 25 years they followed these babies up into adulthood is now over. The funding ran out and they found that by age four, the average IQ of cocaine-exposed children was 79, the average IQ for the non-exposed children was 81. When it came to readiness at age six, about 25% in each group scored in the abnormal range.

All of the findings said it's the same as these other kids, but here's the deal. They weren't doing the study against crack baby babies and white suburban kids. They were doing it against a like model, which was other poor black kids basically that were not crack babies. And they said they are all below average, so the deal is it's poverty. It's not crack cocaine. Other score in the same is non-crack babies and they're all scoring lower because of poverty and basically bad postnatal care through adulthood.

Right. You might not have any problems physiologically or cognitively from being exposed to crack in the womb, but if your mom's still smoking crack after you're born, you're probably not going to get the best care from your parents as possible. Yeah. And they did find in that same study that children that were being raised in like a supporting encouraging house, even in poverty-stricken conditions, tended to excel. So it was poverty they found out and postnatal care, like you said.

And being born premature. Yes, but the crack baby thing never happened. It was another example of hysterics. So right about now, I want to say if it sounds like Chuck and I are being cavalier, have been cavalier with the idea of crack, we're not. We're not being cavalier with crack or addiction. That's nothing to take lightly. But I think what's created a bit of freneticness or passion maybe in this one is just this

idea that we are able to look back now 30 years on and say, wow, like America was genuinely hysterical and that's something to be amazed by and a little disconcerted with too. Yeah. Of course, you should not take cocaine or smoke crack when you're pregnant. No doctor on earth is going to say that's a good thing. But the crack baby was a myth and the one Emory professor that was in that New York Times researcher in the New York Times video came out and said, you know what, alcohol

does much more physical damage and is much more widespread as an abuse drug during pregnancy than crack or cocaine ever is. But they're not locking ladies up that are pregnant for drinking and the reason they were doing it back then is because they were poor black women. We should say the crack epidemic also, while the sentences were stiffer, the amount you got caught with was a hundred times smaller to get the same rap as getting caught with powder cocaine, there was something that came out of this crack epidemic. That was a real threat and that was the rise of the modern inner city gang, at least as

far as we know it, like Crips and Bloods and folks and all those guys. They came out of this era, they were able to buy the guns that they bought and fight the turf wars that they fought because they had this incredibly addictive drug that they could sell and control pretty easily in their hands all of a sudden. So where that came from, who knows, but the big problem with the crack epidemic that you can trace directly back to it is the rise of the modern gang, drug gang. So in summary, crack, whack, crack babies, myth, crack, sentencing laws, whack, Gary Webb, whacked, I got nothing else, perfect.

Well since I said something perfect, I am going to tell you to go ahead and research crack more on our website, HowStuffWorks.com, one of our websites these days. You can type crack into the search bar and I'll bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it's time for a message break. 2023 is already well underway everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business and the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right, because with stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage and shipping labels right there from your home or office or home office.

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trip. Chuckers, how about you take us out with some moose and a male? All right. This is from Rebecca and it is about PTSD and police chases. I've been a fan of you guys since the inception. I've listened to every episode. I always wanted to write in until now I didn't have a reason listening to the police chase podcast made me want to share my story.

Years ago as a victim of a police chase, some teenagers had stolen a car and were pursued by the cops. I'm not sure what caused them to pursue at high speeds, but they did. The chase resulted in the kids t boning my car when I was stopped at a red light. The kids tried to take an incredibly sharp turn, essentially you turn onto another road and they're going way too fast. The chase escalated to an on foot chase and it actually did end in arrests. I ended up having to be cut out of the car with the jaws of life.

Only suffered minor head injuries despite my carving total. As a result of the incident, I began having anxiety and PTSD symptoms that were triggered by police irons and intense stress. I had to receive treatment similar to some of what you discussed in the PTSD episode. All is well now. It didn't take too long with therapy to overcome everything. I just wanted to share the downside of police chases. I don't think that incident required a high speed chase and the result could have been

much worse. I really wish that police would stop to think before they pursued for minor crimes and would get fined even or have some sort of penalty for causing accidents within the 5 strangers. That is Rebecca. Thanks Rebecca. I appreciate you sharing that. Sorry that happened to you. Glad you're doing better.

If you want to share a personal experience from something that we have talked about in this episode or another one, you can tweet to us. That's why I escape podcasts. Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Stuff podcast at discovery.com and then check out our website. Stuff you should know.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there with 18,000 agents across the country who are ready

to help you 24-7, 365. That's getting to a better state. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours in European River Cruises. And right now, through January 30th, use promo code HEART20 to receive 20% off your tour. That's promo code HEART20 through January 30th.

Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's gatethenumberonetravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. The South Dakota Stories, Volume 1. She was a city girl, but always somewhere else in her head. Somewhere where bison roam, rivers flow, and people get their hiking boots dirty. Like actually dirty.

So one day she fled west and discovered this place of beauty, history, and a delicious taste of adventure. But before she knew it, she was driving away with memories to share and the hopes of returning. Because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.