The New Yorker Radio Hour - Donovan Ramsey on “When Crack Was King”

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

“When people think of the crack epidemic, they think of crime,” the journalist Donovan X. Ramsey tells David Remnick. “But they don’t necessarily know the ways that it impacted the most vulnerable—the ways that it changed the lives of people who sold it, who were addicted to it, who loved people who sold it or were addicted to it.” Ramsey’s new book, “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era,” weaves the stories of four people who survived the epidemic into a historical analysis of how crack led to the erosion of dozens of American cities—but also of how the crack epidemic eventually ended. “I didn't know what life was like before crack,” Ramsey, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987, says. “I wanted to understand the ways that it shaped our society.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. The journalist Donovan X. Ramsey was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1987, the very height of the crack cocaine epidemic. I didn't know what life was like before crack, and I wanted to understand the ways that it shaped our society. Ramsey has written an account of the crack era of the 1980s and 90s, and it's called When Crack was King, a people's history of a misunderstood era. And that I was also very interested in just questions of addiction and how we as a society deal with addiction on an individual level, but also at scale.

The newest and one of the deadliest drugs sweeping the country today is crack, a potent, inexpensive, highly addictive form of cocaine. It infects families, whole communities, and its mere presence changes the lives and perceptions of everyone who comes near it. Crack has become the street drug of choice in the United States, a cheap, powerful high. What does Crack do to the mind and body, and why is it the most addictive drug in history? Once you try it, you hope to it. Those sometimes sensationalized stories about crack were a regular presence on the nightly news.

But Ramsey was after something much deeper. he weaves together the lives of four individuals bound up with the epidemic and forms an analysis of how crack devastated so many lives and really changed the country. You know, I was a young reporter at the Washington Post in the early 80s, and when you're a young reporter very often, you do what's called night police. You're covering crimes, fires, and accidents at night. And the crack epidemic really took hold in Washington in those years. And you write in your book, we don't discuss the crack cocaine epidemic properly because we barely understand what happened.

What do you mean there? What was or is the dominant narrative about the crack era? You know, the dominant narrative is really a official, often police narrative. And when people think of the crack epidemic, they think of crime. They think of the ways that it's spilled over into mainstream culture. But they don't necessarily know the ways that it impacted the most vulnerable. The ways that it changed the lives of people who sold it, who were addicted to it, who loved people who sold it, or were addicted to it.

So, you know, the story is much bigger than just the crime story. And the toll that crack took on our cities, The story is also, you know, about personal devastation and the reasons that people wanted to do and sell drugs. But it's also about the ways that communities overcame the crack epidemic, that, you know, we as a nation never took the time to celebrate the fact that the epidemic was over and to have serious discussion about the factors that led to cracks decline, you know, to sort of figure things out for myself. to sort of set the record straight for people who, you know, think that they understood the period, but really didn't. And then to also give young people who are coming of age, who are starting to, you know, experiment with drugs, some type of authoritative, multifaceted chronicle of exactly what happened. Jonathan, one thing you don't mention in your answer there was something that's done, that's crucial in your book, and that is race. What is the role that race plays and how crack was talked about in real time in the 80s

and the way we should think about it now? Yeah. Well, you know, crack was seen as a problem for black and Latino people in America's gettos. It wasn't seen as something that the entire nation was actually struggling with, you know, just like anything else, any other major trend. The majority of people in America are white, so the majority of people, who used crack were white. It was used at disproportionate rates by black and Latinos. And because crack was often sold in black and Latino neighborhoods, our neighborhoods became sites for the epidemic.

And then it became associated with just black and Latino people. And like anything that becomes associated with marginalized people in this country, it becomes a tool to then further marginalized lies, to deride, and to, you know, really often, you know, also use as a means to just ignore those communities. You know, when I look back at how crack was treated in the literature, mostly by the mainstream media, I see just tremendous stereotyping and pathologizing and so little empathy. And, you know, today, when we're looking at something like the opioid epidemic that is primarily, you know, having an impact on white Americans, you see a completely different approach by both the media and the average person. And for me, that's a shame, right? Because addiction

is a big problem that I think that we as a nation still need to figure out ways to grapple with. And, you know, we shouldn't waste the opportunity to learn from it just because the communities of folks, you know, dealing with addiction are black or are Latino. It's a wasted opportunity. Now, you make the argument that there were a number of external forces that played a role in this extraordinary rise of cocaine and crack use. What were those forces? AIDS, for example, is one thing you point out. You know, it was really important to me as a black person that grew up in a neighborhood that was hard hit by crack to be able to contextualize these stories and to be able to contextualize this phenomenon. Because oftentimes black folks, our lives are not given context.

And, you know, people, or I should say, the media, doesn't really work hard to make meaning of the things that happen in black people's lives. You know, when I looked into the research and when I did my interviewing, what I saw was that there was great disaffection among black and Latino folks in America's urban centers. That's a word that we use a lot now when we talk about white folks in rural America, disaffection, a sort of hopelessness about, you know, the future and about their prospects. So you look at things like terrible housing conditions,

you look at, you know, record high rates of unemployment, you look at so much disappointment from the civil rights and black power movements that left people really kind of feeling rudderless. And then you have then this perfect substance that comes about a stimulant, something that makes you feel good and euphoric, in a time where you want to feel good and euphoric, for it, and it's super cheap and accessible. So, you know, that's how, you know, crack came to be, and I think that's why so many people became addicted. Who turned you on to crack?

An old girlfriend of mine one evening had invited me to take a ride with her, and we did so, and she bought some crack, and we went back to her place, and she began to smoke and asked me if I wanted to try it. So at first I was a little bit reluctant, but then I said, all right, well, I'll give it a try. And my very first night, I believe, I spent $60. The next morning, I was at the bank's door before it opened, and I spent another $400.

Your book is structured, I think, rather brilliantly, around the stories of four people. Elgin Swift, Lenny Woodley, Kurt Schmoke, who's the longtime mayor of Baltimore and Sean McCrae. Tell us about these figures and why you picked them to be kind of emblematic of the period that you study? It was really important to me to be able to show different sides of the epidemic. That also includes going to different cities, so each of them, you know, is from and lived, you know,

through the period in a different city. And it was essential, I think, first, to include a person. who struggled with addiction because they are who we hear from the least. It was also really important for me to talk to a former dealer because, you know, that is a figure that I think, you know, we hear a lot about, but the stories are either glamorized or completely vilified. Because I think policy is so important when it comes to sort of moderating events

like the crack epidemic, it was also really necessary, I thought, to talk to a mayor. And then lastly, with Elgin, I wanted to talk to someone who was not directly involved in using drugs or, you know, who was not a big-time drug dealer, but who just loved people in that community to be able to illustrate the sort of secondhand impact. You have a person in your book, a young man, young black man named Sean McCrae, who was awarded a scholarship to an elite private middle school, and then not long after he starts selling crack cocaine. What does Sean McCrae embody for you in this book? I should say that Sean is one of the characters that annoyed me the most in writing his story. How do you mean?

Because he just made so many poor decisions. But it was important for me to include Sean because I think he's so representative of the young male American spirit. He was energetic and ambitious. He wanted to be with his friends. He wanted to do well. And he made bad decisions in pursuit of all those things. And I think that, you know, anyone who has. been a young man that's had a little bit too much testosterone coursing through their veins,

understands making poor decisions for those reasons. I think that had he been born in a different context, you know, he would have been a part of the gold rush, or he would have worked on Wall Street, or he would have been involved in some other boon in American history. It just so happened that he came about in a context where he could become rich by selling crack. So despite the many opportunities that he had available to him, a basketball scholarship that took him to Catholic middle school and high school and then ultimately to college where he did graduate, he was still drawn to this promise of the American dream, which was that you could get rich for very little effort and then, you know, live your life fabulously.

Sean returned to Keystone that fall, but he couldn't quite shake what he'd seen back home. He was plenty busy with basketball practice, his work-study job, and an 18-credit schedule, but he wondered if it was all a waste of time. The sad truth was that he'd seen drug dealing do more for guys than he'd ever seen basketball, college do. He worried he was missing out on something big, maybe the opportunity of a lifetime. Your title is when crack was king. What did you mean by that title? I was inspired by the friend.

raise King Cotton as it related to cotton in America during the period of slavery. And the way that a commodity could shape an entire society, but also start a war. And when I thought about how powerful of a substance crack was in my community, it was to us what cotton was to the South. It impacted everything. It, for a period, was the local economy. And it started a war. What are some of the more popular myths about crack and its effects?

What did we get wrong about the drug itself? Yeah. Well, you know, there's been a lot of great reporting recently about the crack baby myth. That, you know, there was a study that was done, I believe around 85 by a guy named Ira Chasnov, who he studied about a few dozen expected mothers who had used crack and then studied their babies, these cocaine-exposed babies. Dr. Ira Chasnoff of Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital runs the oldest program researching cocaine and the newborn. It appears that cocaine has just as devastating effect on pregnancy and the newborn as heroin.

Chasnov told reporters that cocaine exposure was causing some babies to be born with brain damage, and that others were overwhelmed by even simple eye contact with the mother. And from that, one study became all the reporting about crack babies and how there would be this generation of children, mostly black and Latino, who would be severely damaged really beyond repair and would be this huge expense. decades later, a researcher named Halem Hurt out of Philadelphia, the Einstein Hospital, did longitudinal studies and saw that across hundreds of cocaine exposed young people, that there was no measurable difference between these people and their peers, that what she believes Chasnov was seeing was

cocaine exposure causing premature birth. And he was then ascribing things associated with premature birth to cocaine exposure. Now, of course, it's not a good idea to use any drug, any stimulant caffeine, right, tobacco, nicotine, while you're pregnant, that there are all types of complications associated with that. But the facts were not what he said they were and not what he said they would be. Crack epidemic shape politics and policy? I think that tough on crime politics really crystallized around the crack epidemic, that they come at the tail end of a trend that was already happening with Nixon, you know, law and order in response to the civil rights and anti-war movements,

and that that administration seized on marijuana and heroin as ways of further criminalizing people involved in those movements. And I think that you saw incredible traction of those politics, and then you then see it being picked up in states like New York under Rockefeller, and then it just explodes under Ronald Reagan. And I should say, though, right, that this is not just conservatives and moderates. These will also be the politics of people who considered themselves, you know, progressive during that period that our current president, Joe Biden, was a big time drug warrior, anti-crime warrior. Well, it's hard to say who wasn't. The 1994 crime bill comes along. This is during the Clinton administration. And it's supported also by a lot of black politicians as well. There was a kind of, obviously not everybody supported it. and in the rearview mirror, it was responsible for an explosion of mass incarceration in this country.

But, you know, you had a lot of people that were in favor of this in a kind of, in their policy decision making, and maybe you could argue a moral panic coming out of the crack epidemic. Yeah, I mean, you couldn't lose, right, with those politics, that there was, and it's important to say, a serious crime problem, in the country, and record murder rates in major cities during the 80s and 90s, really peaking, I would say, around like 1990, 1991. Black Americans, people in these cities were really vocal about wanting solutions. I think it's important to note, though, that asking for solutions is not the same thing as developing draconian policies that then incarcerate, you know, scores and scores of the people that you're supposed to be trying to help. But if you're not for decriminalization of crack, of heroin, of hard drugs, as it's put,

what policies would have been better at that period, in your view, around 1994, than the crime bill that we did get? Well, you know, I do not believe. in policies like mandatory minimum sentences, that, you know, look, I'm not a legislator, right? So I'm not able to, you know, right now come up with what I think would have been the magic bullet. But what I can say was that is that taking discretion away from judges who do this thing professionally to be able to say this person should go to jail for five or a hundred years was not a good idea.

I think that the 100 to one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, which we know and knew then where the same substance was not a good idea, that that was something that was going to fuel mass incarceration and do it in a way that was unequal. Was that distinction racist? In other words, the distinction between powdered cocaine and crack cocaine? I think that, you know, the policy is like race neutral on its face, right? But I think that when we look at how it breaks down from then policing all the way up to the actual sentencing, that that becomes racist. It is a race-neutral policy that is applied in a racist way.

You said earlier that it started a war that crack cocaine really swept the country and was a dominant thing. What is its legacy now that we're in 2023? Crack's legacy is, I would say, a missed opportunity to understand how devastation at a societal and community level can lead to serious consequences. That, for me, it's bigger than a substance. It's about entire communities falling through cracks. No, no pun intended. But it's also about how individual people and communities can pull themselves out of it. That it was the power of community that saved the most vulnerable people during the period.

It was grandmothers taking in grandchildren while their kids were running the streets. It was churches doing, you know, gun buyback programs. It was, you know, the nation of Islam, in some cases, busting up housing projects and kicking out drug dealers, that those things didn't end the epidemic, but they kept people alive long enough for the epidemic to end. And for me, that's a major lesson that we can take away from the crack epidemic, is that people and communities are strong,

and that when we face other drug epidemics, which we are and which we will, that that's where we should put our investment. Donovan Ramsey, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Donovan Ramsey's new book is called When Crack was King. One thing we did want to note, Ramsey mentioned Ira Chasnov,

the researcher who studied led to the crack baby myth. Chasnov contradicted his own findings as early as 1992, well before the later research that also disproved it. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. I hope you'll join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow,

Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistants from Harrison and Keithline, Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.