The destruction wrought by hard drugs in cities like Baltimore met with little resistance. Growing divisions in the black community weakened unity and resolve at a time when both qualities were in short supply. In 1968, the poorest fifth of black households was getting by on an average of $10,600 a year. By 1995, this figure had actually dropped, to $10,200. The richest fifth of black households, meanwhile, had seen their average annual income go from $60,000 to $84,000, and many had used that money to move to the suburbs. In better times, the children of the poor have had opportunities to make their way up and out through the education system, but this is not what has happened in Baltimore. In 1990, one in five high school seniors dropped out of school before they even graduated.12 One parent was very often a single woman, with few skills to trade and laden with childcare responsibilities. Many young people grew up without the support of their parents, the encouragement of their peers and elders, or reasonable educational opportunities.
The new jobs created by the information-driven economy often passed inner-city residents by. In response to what was politely termed ‘economic restructuring’, the unemployed went back to school, enrolled in what training programmes they could find, found good jobs and struggled to keep them, or settled for temporary jobs in service industries. Some moved to other states or other countries, looking for work or an easier life elsewhere. Others resorted to what James Scott has called ‘the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, and feigned ignorance’.13 Growing numbers fell out of the legal economy altogether. Many sought solace in alcohol or drugs.
I sat out one freezing Sunday afternoon talking to Ted in a diner near his house in Williamsburg, New York. Ted had spent the past twenty years selling cocaine, and was adamant that, for his customers at least, cocaine use was unproblematic. I asked him why he thought he and his friends had been able to take cocaine for so long without significant problems, whereas crack cocaine had been the undoing of so many people. ‘Discovering drugs is a part of adolescent risk-taking. By the time I was twenty-five I had done every drug you could name ten times. You don’t want someone to discover drugs as an adult. By the time I had any money at all, I was pretty much inoculated against becoming an out-of-control drug addict. The person who is going to become an out-of-control cocaine user is going to be someone who is naive about drugs. In the 1980s you had a whole lot of poor, minority folks who were naive, at least about crack. “Studies show that poor people are often depressed?” No fucking shit. In the ’80s, New York was really fucked up. There were no jobs. All of a sudden crack comes along, and you get to be poor and feel great. Of course you’re going to get out of control with that shit.’
Hopeless poverty goes a long way to explain why so many people developed crack habits; it also accounts for there being so many willing suppliers. Ricky Ross, who benefited from the Contras’ cocaine-smuggling and went on to become the first and biggest crack dealer in the United States, told me how he first got involved in selling drugs. ‘I was a youngster. Uneducated, uninformed, unemployed…I mean, you could just keep going on with the “uns”. I was looking for opportunities. I wanted to be important in the world, somebody who was respected. Basically I wanted the American dream, so I guess I was ripe for the picking. The opportunity came in the form of drugs, and I latched on to it.’ Marc started selling crack cocaine in South Jamaica, New York City, at the age of sixteen. Like most of those I talked to about their drug-selling careers, he had served a prison sentence, which had given him ample time to consider how and why he had become a cocaine seller. ‘There’s a song by Jay-Z, and he says, “even righteous minds go through this”. You can be a good kid, and just get caught up. It’s the fast money disease. Say you need the money for something. Back when things were popping on the streets, it was nothing to double your money up. People do it for all kinds of reasons. Personally, I was doing it to belong, and to prove that I could do it better than my brother. For some, it’s just the law of the streets, you know? But like this guy Andre I knew used to say, “you can’t do the right thing the wrong way”. There were people out there who had good intentions, but ultimately that didn’t solve the problem.’14
The fall-out from economic restructuring was one factor animating the growth of the crack economy. The second was an economic crisis in the Caribbean and Latin America, which soon came to transform many of America’s inner cities. The farming economies of countries such as Colombia and Peru were shrinking, feeding a stream of unemployed farmers and labourers who gravitated towards the biggest cities in search of work. They ensconced themselves as best they could in the shanty towns that sprang up on the peripheries of cities like Lima, Caracas and Kingston. For millions, their first experience of urban life also gave them their first taste of what it meant to be illegal. They worked, if they worked at all, in the informal economy, where their wages went untaxed. They often had no access to basic services, and found themselves maligned by mainstream society and unable to count on the protection of the law. Many of these migrants from countryside to city kept going until they arrived in the United States. In the space of twenty years, traditional village-based societies in countries like the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Guatemala, whose members had been schooled to have strong moral objections to drugs and criminality by the Catholic Church, were uprooted and transplanted into urban milieux. Once there, the attitudes to drugs and crime of many of them became more pragmatic. Alex Sanchez runs an organization called ‘Homies Unidos’ in Santa Cruz, California, which tries to act as a counterweight to the forces pulling young people into the cocaine economy. ‘I came to Santa Cruz as a kid because of the United States’ war in El Salvador. We didn’t have a lot of things in my community. The alley, with the broken glass and the smell of urine, was my backyard. The community wasn’t there for me, and my parents weren’t either because they were both working two jobs. Other people were selling drugs to feed themselves, or to feed their craving for drugs. The drugs and the alcohol were just a dose to reduce the pain that we were going through, and the hunger that we felt. It was the gang that gave me shelter.’
Economic and political change dislocated many Americans, both north and south of the Rio Grande, but several additional factors ensured that the cocaine economy became a key employer of the surplus labour. One was the launch of the legal lotteries that many states set up as a way of increasing tax revenues, which all but wiped out the numbers game. Players who had been accustomed to spending a good part of their day standing on street corners, running from the police and living on their wits, started to look elsewhere for a hustle. Another factor was cheap cocaine. A host of policies introduced by American free marketeers unintentionally made cocaine production more profitable than ever. In 1981, the Reagan administration decided on a tough-sounding programme to wipe out the Mexican marijuana crop, which was then the main source of the cannabis smoked in the United States. Herbicides were sprayed from light aircraft on to the marijuana fields, a tactic also deployed in Jamaica and Colombia at various times in the early 1980s. In response, plenty of Colombian cannabis farmers switched to coca cultivation. Almost simultaneously, the USAID programme of building highways in the interior of Colombia and Bolivia, which was intended to boost legal exports and provide alternatives to drug production, inadvertently made cocaine exporting easier.
Former legal counsel Eric Sterling takes up the story. ‘The US, by its subsidy of domestic sugar production, lowered the global price of sugar, so sugar cultivation in Peru became unprofitable. You had Peruvian sugar farmers, desperate for work, moving up the valleys to grow coca. In the early ’80s we had legislation, that I helped to write, that gave the Department of Defense the authority to put law enforcement detachments on naval vessels. We started using AWACS aircraft to fly over the Caribbean and monitor ship traffic. Marijuana now started going up in price. If you’re a Colombian marijuana smuggler you say “they’re stopping my boat traffic. I have a million
dollars to invest. I’m not going to invest it in a pot shipment that’s bulky and pungent, that’s going to creep along by boat and get intercepted. There is a market for cocaine that is continuing to grow, so I’ll invest it in cocaine, put it in an airplane, and drop it somewhere off the coast of Florida.” So at the very time that the powder cocaine market has peaked, you’ve got more cocaine than ever coming into the country.’ This inevitably led to a big fall in the wholesale price of cocaine in the United States.
In the early 1980s, Wall Street executives, most of whom had no history of drug or psychiatric problems, started to show up at drug treatment clinics asking for help in overcoming their cocaine habits, only to be turned away on the grounds that cocaine wasn’t addictive. Then several high-profile cases began to challenge the prevalent belief that cocaine was risk-free. The comedian Richard Pryor almost died from burns sustained after his hair caught fire while he was free-basing cocaine in 1980.15 The actor John Belushi died of a cocaine-heroin speedball overdose in 1982.16 By 1984, Rolling Stone magazine was running articles telling its readers how to get off cocaine. As people wised up to the risks inherent in habitual cocaine use, the drug started to lose its cachet and Colombian exporters began to open up new markets for what was by now a much more affordable drug. Consequently, once cocaine made land in the United States, it was increasingly sent into the inner cities rather than the wealthier suburbs.
But cocaine’s journey into the inner city was also aided by changes in the policing of the drugs trade, particularly in New York City. In 1983, Mayor Ed Koch launched Operation Pressure Point in a determined attempt to put a dent in drug-selling operations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The police ensnared drug dealers in ‘buy and bust’ operations, and the building and fire departments worked together to condemn and bulldoze abandoned buildings. Pressure Point was deemed a great success in Manhattan, where it paved the way for the gentrification of the Lower East Side, but the pressure the authorities exerted only pushed heroin and cocaine users and their dealers across the Hudson River into Brooklyn, where many of New York’s recent immigrants lived. ‘I started copping at Alphabet City, on the Lower East Side,’ Robert, a cocaine user from Newark, New Jersey, told drug ethnographer Rick Curtis.17 ‘When Operation Pressure Point started, the boys told me things had moved over to Williamsburg. Then they cracked down over there because of the new housing, and the place was virtually cleaned up apart from a few bodegas [off-licences] up and down Broadway that you could buy cocaine from. So the whole scene closed down and I started coming down to Bushwick.’
In the mid 1980s the neighbourhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York, was near the bottom of any property developer’s wish list. It had lost its manufacturing jobs, and house prices had slumped. So many people wanted to sell houses in Bushwick, and so few wanted to buy them, that many home-owners resorted to torching their properties to cash in on their insurance policies. The vista of abandoned shop-fronts and burnt-out houses in Brooklyn neighbourhoods like Bushwick, Crown Heights and Flatbush was only brightened by the little buoyancy the marijuana business could provide. Rastafarians in Brooklyn had been selling marijuana imported from the Caribbean in their grocery stores since the 1960s, and many small businesses had been financed by money made from selling ganja. But the spraying of the ganja fields of Mexico caused a drought in Bushwick, and raised the price of marijuana across New York City. Marijuana smokers started casting around for alternatives, and many found it in cheap cocaine.
When a drug user snorts powdered cocaine the active ingredient takes effect in three minutes. Injecting cocaine in solution, the drug takes effect in fourteen seconds. The fastest way to feel the cocaine high is to smoke it, but in powdered form cocaine decomposes before it reaches the temperature required to turn it to vapour. The solution, albeit a dangerous and technically challenging one, was free-basing. To ‘free’ the ‘base’ drug in the form of a vapour, cocaine is heated with ether over an open flame, and then inhaled. With no ganja to sell, but lots of cocaine, the dealers of Bushwick held free-base parties to encourage their regulars to switch from smoking marijuana to inhaling free-base cocaine.18 Free-basing was largely confined to New York City, where it was initially consumed in unobtrusive settings by an inner circle of drug dealers, and mainly white, middle-class people who were familiar with cocaine and keen to try it in a new way.19
One who was there was Lance, a cocaine wholesaler from South Jamaica, Queens, who was rumoured to have given many of the best-known crack dealers in New York City their break into the business. ‘In the Reagan era, cocaine was considered to be a rich man’s high,’ he told me. ‘From 1974 to 1984, a kilo of cocaine cost anywhere from $42,000 to $44,000. But from the summer of 1984, the price of coke dropped dramatically to about $16,000. A lot of actors and stars were free-basing. Me and my brothers were the connects, selling cocaine on a large scale. It was coming in through the Bahamas. Back then, there wasn’t no terrorist threat, you were able to just put cocaine in your suitcase, get on the plane, and bring it in.’ Ricky Ross told me about the cocaine scene he found when he first started selling the drug in Los Angeles. ‘At that time, the only people that were doing cocaine were very up-class. In my neighbourhood that meant pimps, PCP dealers, doctors, and entertainers. My first customer was a friend of mine, who was a pimp. He came back a second time, and it snowballed from there. Next thing I know, I know all the pimps in LA.’
Not only was cocaine getting cheaper—it was also getting stronger. Street-level gram purity went from an average of 25 per cent in 1981 to 70 per cent by 1988. Widely available, cheap and powerful cocaine wrong-footed everyone, including its dealers, many of whom soon learnt how naive they had been in thinking they could control their free-base consumption. Wealthy marijuana dealers who had until then regarded drug addicts with incomprehension or disdain found themselves selling everything they owned to buy cocaine. Doris was a cocaine addict for twenty years. She told me what she remembered of the time. ‘Here in Harlem, we had a lot of big-time cocaine dealers we’d buy our coke from. I’d ask, “Hey, where’s so-and-so?” And people started saying, “Oh, he’s up in the base-house.” I didn’t know what they were talking about, but three or four months later, you’d see the same big-time dealer who’d always dressed so nice looking completely unkempt, with runned-over shoes and his hair undone. He had gotten caught up in this free-base, and he was in the grips of it.
‘Making free-base was a long process,’ Doris went on. ‘There were two or three pages of instructions, and unfortunately, the solvent tended to ignite. Then someone discovered that all you really needed was some baking soda and some water, and you could bring that cocaine powder back to a rock form.’ This variety of cocaine makes a cracking sound when it is heated, hence its name. Crack cocaine began as a rescue plan for drug dealers intent on recuperating the money they had lost to their free-base habits.20 Preparation and packaging of the drug was done in-house, and the drug was sold at prices that people were accustomed to paying for marijuana. By selling $10 vials of crack instead of $50 bags of cocaine powder, dealers could market their product to people who’d previously thought of cocaine as being out of their reach. ‘So they started putting it into vials, with a coloured cap to distinguish its source, putting it out on the street, and making it commercial. That’s how crack was born.’
In Williamsburg, New York, Ted watched as crack cocaine ruined what he assured me had previously been a ‘civilized’ cocaine scene. ‘Crack is not a drug. It’s a marketing scheme. It’s like the McDonald’s of cocaine. It’s cocaine for poor people. It’s the same high as coke, but in a different setting. I might be selling coke out of my apartment, but I’d take great care not to bother my neighbours. I’d call the police on the guys selling crack on my street. They had no class to them. They didn’t give a fuck.’ Crack was not a new drug. It was just an easy way to take cocaine in its most powerful, inhalable form. However it is taken, high doses of cocaine can have damaging cardiovascular, respiratory and
neurological effects, as well as cause gastrointestinal complications like abdominal pain and nausea. Though the effects of the drug on the heart are still not clear, cocaine has been associated with heart attacks. Large doses can also lead to disinhibition, impaired judgement, grandiosity, impulsiveness, hypersexuality, hypervigilance, compulsively repeated actions, and extreme psychomotor activation.21 A peculiar characteristic of this cocaine-induced psychosis is formication: the hallucination that ants, insects or snakes are crawling under the skin.
Aficionados of powdered cocaine can experience these problems, but the urge to take large doses is more pronounced in crack users, and this stems from the incredible rush that the crack user feels. Groping for words, crack-takers describe the ascent as akin to a whole-body orgasm, the most intense sense of being alive the user will ever enjoy. Someone using cocaine in powder form might feel something similar, albeit less intensely, since the drug takes effect more slowly when it is snorted, and there is a limit to how much cocaine the membranes in the nose can absorb. In crack form, there is no such limit, which means that users tend to binge on the drug for hours or even days, repeating the dose every twenty minutes or so, until either their funds or their ability to remain awake are exhausted.
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