Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Crack Works

Episode Date: July 20, 2019

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. Let's take a look back at the receding wave of the crack epidemic and its lasting legacy on America in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello everyone, it's me Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our episode, How Crack Works. And boy oh boy, does the title ever say it all, because we really, really explain how crack works.

So enjoy, How Crack Works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. 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 waves like, she's waving at the audience that isn't here.

She's waving to the world. It's a little weird, she may be on something. Josh, you know what's whack? The Zach attack, from Saved by the Bell? I don't even know what that is. You don't know what Saved by the Bell is, what's wrong with that? No, 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. 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, cause that's actually a pretty good show, but okay.

Yeah, 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. Refer to our hip hop episode now. Go ahead. No, I'm just saying people,

if they're confused about why we sound so stilted in square, just go listen to hip hop and that explains everything. People like that one, surprisingly. Yeah, that'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 was like, hey, I'm a graffiti artist and here's my work. Nice. And I was very impressed. And he is not on crack.

No, cause 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. Cocaine, which is a drug that had been sweeping the nation for about 10 years by then. Yeah. It was up to $150 a gram. That's thanks to the demand and the available income of its well-heeled, yuppie users who are willing to spend

that kind of money on it. Sure. It was very much an expensive, white, upwardly mobile person's drug. Yeah. Cocaine was. 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. Cocaine'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, because it was 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 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. And when Nancy Reagan became concerned, as is 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 US 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, series of articles in our 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 was 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 guerrillas 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, the 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 the whole Contra-Sandinista war in Nicaragua that raged in the 70s and 80s.

That's what we're talking about. Yes. The Sandinistas were a communist and that didn't fly so well with the U.S. who had long cherished Nicaragua for their farmland and liked 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. Like 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. Right. 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.

Yes. This Contra force. Yeah. 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 Webb in a second. But in the 80s, there was, you know, when the whole Iron and Contra thing broke out, there was the Cary committee who did some investigating on the Cary committee report from John Cary, 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, the LA Times, New York Times,

and I guess it was the Washington Post came out. 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. 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 that right? Yeah, great. Yeah, it's gonna be good. Good, I'm glad. He, I ran across him when I wrote an article on America's Army. Jeremy Renner?

No, 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 was 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. Yeah. Yeah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Gary Webb did all this investigation, did all this legwork, and he connected the dots pretty well.

But there's still this maddening question, 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, it'll give you some go juice and you can work more.

Yeah, and people still chew the heck out of it. Yeah, so 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 abuse 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.

Sigmund Freud was an ardent prescriber of it. And it was a very popular drug found in Tonics, Coca-Cola. Sure. 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, some circles.

But in 1914, it was made illegal with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. 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 Narcotic 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 inequity in Chinatown through opium. And Southern blacks were sniffing cocaine and it gave them superhuman strength when 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 kind of, if you keep that in the back of your mind and then pay attention to the drug policy that comes out later on from crack, you'll, 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 not shake it and all this white powder falls out. It makes like a tinkling sound on the way down. 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. Cocaine. 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, 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 it. 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. 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 cocaine in ammonia, you add ether to it and then you smoke it. But you're smoking something that has like highly flammable solution involved. Yeah, tell that to Richard Pryor. Yes, in 1980 when he was filming Bustin Loose, he caught himself on fire. 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 went a little cuckoo. Self-immolation. I think that may be the right story now. 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 him from? I mean, that was the long stories that he free-based

and I think he even came out later and said, like, yeah, I was free-basing, but I also purposely set myself on fire in the ravages of a free-basing binge. Gotcha. Okay. So free-basing, it was a thing at least as early as 1980, but it was difficult to do, it was a 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 free-base 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 a more intense high, 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. Yeah.

And they contain, the DEA says, between 75 and 90% pure cocaine, so it's quite a rush for you. Sure. 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, Mimmy.

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 in 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 licked.

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. That'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 gonna 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, oh, I'd like to do that again. Exactly, 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. It has to do with 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 wanna 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, 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. 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 its little neuron. Ways to be released again. Let me know when you have sex again. Or eat something. Or eat some pizza. 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. But 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 or well not long but you have this very intense pleasurable sensation.

Right. So basically the reuptake, they just shut that down so you're out there on your own. And it's just floating around, yes. Your brain's a big pleasure center. And then after I guess five to 15 minutes like the crack where it's often the dopamine is taken up once more.

That's right. And the high is over and you are left going, I wanna 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 amphetamine. You're gonna be at risk for heart attack.

Yeah. 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 gonna make you very energized at first. You might, although your senses may be heightened temporarily, your heart rate's gonna shoot through the roof. Your pupils are gonna dilate, your temperature's gonna rise. You're gonna 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 sidewall cause 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.

Yeah, I'd like this up. Like this is a thing. It's like toxic is all get out. Well, it's 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. And 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 wanna 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 addictive 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, high, but an intense high.

Yeah, and we don't wanna say like, the crack is not addictive, but we don't wanna 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. So we're talking about it being addictive. It's addictive because of the effect that it has on dopamine. Yeah. 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. Yeah, 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. Yeah, 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. Yeah. 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. Some people get addicted to it immediately and other people take longer. Yeah, 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 really quickly. 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 when I say we highly recommended

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, how to disassociate maybe triggers or 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. And there was another type of treatment that I hadn't heard of called contingency management. Had you heard of that? No, I hadn't actually. That's apparently fairly popular for crack treatment.

Well, what is it? Well, basically it's 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 to this. 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 giving stuff to... Incentivize. Yeah, 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. Gives someone a movie ticket, you know? You did good today by not smoking crack. Here's a movie ticket. Right. 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. Right. Or they call it bossa, or french fries,

or real tops, or glow. Glow. That's like, wasn't that the drug in 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, where 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 makes more sense than bossa. Well, that's... 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. Like 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. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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, powdered cocaine, cost $100, $150, and it was extraordinarily

favored predominantly by white people. Crack comes along 1985, five to 10 bucks, cheap, intense, high, and it becomes favored by African-American, 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 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 maybe raped and murdered people. 100 to one ratio. You had to get caught with 100 times the powdered cocaine to get the same sentence as somebody caught with 100th of that amount of Crack.

That's right, but it's not like that anymore. Well, hold on, there was 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, five years. That was the mandatory minimum for possession.

Five years in prison for nothing else. 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 100 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. There was blanket pardon to 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 arrests. No, not just that the sentences, I guess. It's still an 18 to one ratio. It used to be 100 to one, but it's still 18 to one, and people are like, why not just make it one to one? It's cocaine, and it's cocaine. Exactly, 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? And 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, that was another thing that came out of the 80s, was the so-called crack baby. Like, 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, you know, back in the 80s, Peter Jennings on the nightly news saying that, you know, 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 gonna be a lost generation of kids. Yeah, a nation of kids who are, you can't rehab, they're going to be, the babies are 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 deviance

when they grow up. Yeah, and this is not like, we're not rewriting history, man. That was like hardcore stuff that they were saying. Yeah. It was gonna be, one quote was, they will not be able 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's 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. And the guy, the doctor who wrote the original paper, Dr. Ira Chesnoff, 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 US government sponsored a 25-year study of crack babies, not a two-year study or a five-year study. 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. Basically, 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. They're scoring the same as non-crack babies, and they're all scoring lower because of poverty and basically bad postnatal care through adulthood. Right, like 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 gonna 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. But yes, but the crack baby thing never happened. It was another example of hysterics. So right about now, I wanna say, if it sounds like Chuck and I are being cavalier,

have been cavalier with the idea of crack, we're not being cavalier with crack or addiction. That's nothing to take lightly. But I think what's created a bit of a 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 it'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 gonna 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 abused 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. Right, we should say though, the crack epidemic also,

while the sentences were stiffer, the amount you got caught with was 100 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 you can, 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. Yeah. Crack babies, myth, crack, sentencing laws. Whack. Whack, Gary Webb. Whacked.

Whacked, very nice. I got nothing else, perfect. Chuckers, how about you take us out with some Listener Mail? 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 I was the 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 a U-turn onto another road and they were 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. Geez. Only suffered minor head injuries despite my carving totaled. As a result of the incident, I began having anxiety and PTSD symptoms that were triggered by police irons and intense stress.

Wow. 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 much worse.

Wow. 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 with innocent bystanders. And that is Rebecca. Well, thanks Rebecca.

Appreciate you sharing that. Sorry that happened to you. Glad you're doing better. Yeah. 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, S-Y-S-K podcast.

Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Stuff podcast, the howstuffworks.com. And as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.