We also know that the effects of crack were greatly exaggerated crack is no more harmful than powder cocaine. We now know that an astonishing 85 percent of those sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were black, even though the majority of users of the drug were, and are, white. In 1986, Congress passed the infamous Anti-Drug Abuse Act, setting penalties that were 100 times harsher for crack than for powder cocaine convictions. Along the way, complex economic and social forces were reduced to criminal justice problems resources were directed toward law enforcement rather than neighborhoods’ real needs, such as job creation. Entire specialty police units were deployed to “troubled neighborhoods,” making excessive arrests and subjecting the targeted communities to dehumanizing treatment. Over the next few years, a barrage of similar articles connected crack and its associated problems with black people. The message was clear: crack makes poor people of color crazy and violent. It describes an incident in which “a man apparently using cocaine held four people hostage for 30 hours in an East Harlem apartment.” That cocaine use was never confirmed was minimized and since East Harlem was almost exclusively black and Latino, there was no need to mention the suspect’s race. So problems related to crack were described as being prevalent in “poor,” “urban” or “troubled” neighborhoods, “inner cities” and “ghettos,” terms that were codes for “blacks” and other undesired people.Ī March 7, 1987, New York Times article, “New violence seen in users of cocaine” offers a potent example. By this time, of course, references to race in such a context were no longer acceptable. While powder cocaine came to be regarded as a symbol of luxury and associated with whites, crack was portrayed as producing uniquely addictive, unpredictable and deadly effects and associated with blacks. As important, the rhetoric that laced those early conversations about drug use didn’t just evaporate it continued and evolved, reinventing itself most powerfully in the mythology of crack.įrom its earliest appearance in the 1980s, crack cocaine was steeped in a narrative of race and pathology. Although the Harrison Act did not explicitly prohibit the use of opiates or cocaine, enforcement of the new law quickly became increasingly punitive, helping set the stage for passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (alcohol prohibition) in 1919 and, ultimately, all our narcotics policy until 1970. With this as background, drug policy in the decades following takes on a sharper focus. Indeed, at congressional hearings, “experts” testified that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” When the Harrison Act became law, proponents could thank the South’s fear of blacks for easing its passage. Opponents, mostly from Southern states, viewed it as an intrusion into states’ rights and had prevented passage of previous versions.īy 1914, however, the law’s proponents had found an important ally in their quest to get it passed: the mythical “negro cocaine fiend,” which prominent newspapers, physicians and politicians readily exploited. Proponents of the law saw it as a strategy to improve strained trade relations with China by demonstrating a commitment to controlling the opium trade. This unprecedented law sought to tax and regulate the production, importation and distribution of opium and coca products. Eventually, it helped influence legislation.Īround this time, Congress was debating whether to pass the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, one of the country’s first forays into national drug legislation. In some cases, suspicion of cocaine intoxication by blacks was reason enough to justify lynchings. Between 18, numerous articles appeared exaggerating the association of heinous crimes and cocaine use by blacks. Preposterous? Yes, but such reporting was not the exception. Bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the ‘fiend.’” It also produced “a resistance to the ‘knock down’ effects of fatal wounds. Cocaine, in other words, made black men uniquely murderous and better marksmen.
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