It is an uncomfortable truth that the most pleasurable drugs are also the most dangerous. As a Canadian crack user put it, ‘a drug which induces a secular parody of Heaven commonly leads the user into a biological counterpart of Hell’.22 But this oscillation between bliss and bedlam was made still more dramatic by the setting in which cocaine was increasingly being taken. In the 1970s, cocaine had epitomized the ease and wealth of middle-class America. As it fell out of favour with its first mass market in the 1980s, it was repackaged as crack for the move downmarket. The backdrop changed from poolside parties and upscale nightclubs to abandoned lots and burnt-out cars. Taking cocaine was no longer an accessory or an adjunct to wealth and ease, but an end in itself. Where the rich had shared it, now the poor jealously guarded it. Once it had lubricated communication and dissolved barriers. Now it made people self-conscious to the point of paranoia. Regular crack users might buy a $10 vial four times a day, and binge without sleeping for days on end. They would go on ‘missions’, a term borrowed from Star Trek (another American vision of blissful escape from the present), to raise money, whether by robbery, fraud or prostitution. Then they would buy crack and ‘beam up’. Between raising the money, finding and then buying from a dealer, and securing a place to smoke in peace, crack users had little time for idleness. Lurching from euphoria to dysphoria, from slavish submission to aggressive isolation, crack kept its users frantically busy, and many of them were soon making more money than ever to support their drug habits. To onlookers, these new cocaine users seemed as irredeemable as they were unrepentant, lost in a wilderness of their own making. But crack was also a great motivator, unleashing enormous energy and productivity wherever it went.
Ted told me how he had first realized what a different beast crack was from cocaine. ‘I would work from time to time as a bicycle courier with this Puerto Rican kid called Jose. He was a hard-core messenger who looked like he went to the gym every night. He was a universally respected guy, but Jose started smoking crack and just went downhill so fast. It was like “he borrowed $5 from you too?” In six months his reputation went from golden to complete fucking shit.’ Cocaine’s reputation fared no better. In 1985, the number of people using the drug on a routine basis soared from 4.2 million to 5.8 million. The following year, cocaine-related emergency room admissions went up by 110 per cent.23
Crack users were a dealer’s dream customers. In the mid-1980s, traditional organized crime groups controlled only a quarter of the drug-trafficking business of New York City.24 Until then, Colombian traffickers had been shipping cocaine mainly into Miami, but with word of the discovery of crack and the huge sums to be made by selling it, they moved into New York in a big way too. Since the Colombians were too small in number to manage the transition from elite to street distribution, they recruited Dominican groups to handle street sales. To this day Dominicans dominate cocaine wholesaling in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, working closely with Colombian suppliers and local street gangs.
A booming market for crack cocaine, largely kept within the confines of poor communities with high unemployment and plentiful new arrivals also attracted the attention of Jamaican posses. Delroy ‘Uzi’ Edwards was one of the first Jamaicans to start selling crack in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. From 1985, his Renkers gang branched out to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC. By 1989, Jamaican gangs were supplying crack to forty-seven cities across the United States, and even to small rural towns in Iowa, Kentucky and South Dakota. Jamaican criminal gangs are still New York City’s most prominent wholesale and mid-level cannabis distributors. They are also active in cocaine markets across the Northeast, though their dominance has been reduced as smuggling routes have moved west from the Caribbean into Mexico.25
On the East Coast, crack-houses were supplied by Jamaicans, Colombians and Cubans. West Coast crack-houses were mainly run by the Bloods and Crips, gangs that had started out in the early 1970s as hybrids of the street gangs and revolutionary political groups of the previous decade. Their political aspirations were suffocated by a general lack of leadership and had been completely subsumed by the 1980s, as both gangs became obsessed with protecting themselves from rivals and enriching themselves through the drugs trade. Crack-houses in the Midwest were supplied by the Young Boys Incorporated and the Chambers Brothers. Billy Chambers was one of many grocery store owners in Detroit who used to sell marijuana to supplement their legal earnings. In 1984, the state of Michigan revoked his liquor licence, and Chambers cast around for an income to replace what he had once generated selling alcohol. He wasted no time in ‘rocking it up’ as the customer waited, with Chambers and a brother running their crack business ‘like a couple of frazzled short order cooks’. He started to buy from two wholesalers who epitomized the transition from cocaine for the rich to crack for the poor. The first partner was white, had sold cocaine in the 1970s to a well-heeled crowd, and still had connections to a Colombian in Miami who worked for the Cali cartel. The second partner was black, and had the contacts needed to sell drugs in the most deprived neighbourhoods of Detroit. Together they built a staggeringly successful business that pulled in $100,000 a day for two years. At its height the Chambers Brothers’ crack-selling venture was reputed to be the most profitable privately owned business in the city.
This rags to riches story was repeated with local variations across the country, by people like Ricky Ross in Los Angeles. ‘I couldn’t come into the house with new shoes or new clothes or my mom would have a fit—she didn’t know that I was selling cocaine until I was rich. So I just kept saving my money, and buying more drugs. My childhood friends would all be walking, but I’d be driving a nice car, and they’d want to know how I got the car. “Oh, I’m selling cocaine now,” I’d say. “Teach me how to sell cocaine,” they’d say. So my friends started to get involved, and before long we’re making a lot of money, and I’m eating at McDonald’s whenever I want to. At our height, some days a million dollars would come through our hands in a single day. Next thing I know, the whole neighbourhood is selling.’
William Adler, the biographer of the Chambers brothers of Detroit, ascribes the crack whirlwind to ‘the head-on collision during the 1980s of the cultures of greed and need’. Even the local DEA office in Detroit admitted that ‘kids in the ghetto who couldn’t get jobs or couldn’t get to jobs because they didn’t have transportation out to the suburbs could rock up cocaine and sell it on any street corner’.26 On the one hand, the Chambers brothers were the lead characters in an archetypal American story of entrepreneurial success. They had identified a niche market, studied and overcome barriers to entry, bought wholesale, tracked inventory, managed cash flow, analysed risk and expanded aggressively until they cornered the market. Plenty of those involved in the upper echelons of the cocaine business, such as Lance in South Jamaica, Queens, craved the respect granted to their counterparts in the legal economy and regarded themselves as successful businessmen whose stock-in-trade happened to be illegal. ‘The structure of the business is like a Fortune 500. We’d have different titles for different positions, but it all basically remains the same as in corporate America. You have your CEO, your supervisor, your treasurer. You might be the captain; you have your lieutenants, your soldiers. We were responsible for feeding over five hundred families in twenty-three states.’ By 1988, people in all the big cities of the United States were making ‘crazy money’ by selling crack cocaine. Ricky Ross told me that ‘when we went to restaurants, our tips would be so big that they’d give us the food for free’.
On the other hand, cocaine dealing was against the law, and any financial success its practitioners enjoyed was the fruit of ruthlessness, violence or intimidation. Their entrepreneurial zeal might have been respected by their peers, but it was anathema to wider society, and was disowned as a perverse parody of the American dream. In some neighbourhoods, entire blocks became outdoor markets, with up to a hundred sellers competing for trade on less than friendly terms. Drug dealers became the favourite
targets for robbers: they were among the few people who still had money in their pockets in poor neighbourhoods. Being aggressive and threatening became the only way to avoid being robbed. Teenagers entered the business, and soon learnt the value of a reputation for ‘acting crazy’. Marc, who once worked as a crack cocaine seller in South Jamaica, Queens, was under no illusion that selling crack cocaine was easy. ‘It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. It’s pure capitalism, you know? Say you’re selling drugs in the South Bronx, say at 138th and 3rd Avenue, and another crew of guys is selling the same drugs as you two blocks away. The block they’re on is making about $2,000 a day, and the block you’re on is making about $2,000 a day. They decide, “You know what? You’re a punk. You’re a pussy.” So they move you. If people feel that they can take stuff off you and not have to pay you, you might as well go and get a job. What are you going to do? Who do you get now? You can’t call the police. That’s a complete no-no up in these parts. It’s pretty much you and your gun.’ Ricky Ross explained that ‘people were already gang-banging, but now we were able to afford more expensive weapons, more expensive cars, and better houses and the police started noticing it more. Gang-bangers [gang members] driving Rolls-Royces and Ferraris is more newsworthy than a gang member getting caught with a rusty .22 pistol that barely works, you know?’
The chaos engendered by the rush for ‘crazy money’ and the wider public’s disgust at this terrible parody of entrepreneurial success prompted a resolute whack on the head from the local police. Manuel had been unemployed for a long time when his then-eighteen-year-old son Mano started selling crack. Mano quickly became the main breadwinner in the family. ‘I try to keep my eye on him,’ Manuel told ethnographer Rick Curtis in 1996. ‘They don’t steal it from nobody, that’s one thing. The guys that work out here work hard in a way, but it’s still wrong. I got my own opinions. Nobody puts a gun to nobody to use drugs. But the law says that’s a law. The only thing I say to the police is “take him if he’s done something wrong”. But you don’t have to beat on him, knock him all silly.’27
Older, more senior dealers like Lance saw how dangerous the business had become. ‘Ninety-five per cent of those who get involved with selling drugs on the streets have a three- or four-year run, at most. It’s a rude awakening. You’re either paralysed and in a wheelchair for life, or you’re in jail for twenty years or better. Or you just straight meet your Maker. That’s it, end of story, dead. Three outcomes.’ Between 1985 and 1992, the murder rate in New York City doubled, largely because of the anarchy of the crack market.28 But still business boomed. As more of the Latino drug sellers who had pioneered street sales went to jail, more blacks, whites and heavy drug users took their place. In 1990, police in Detroit found that 60 per cent of those they arrested for selling cocaine were crack users who sold the drug to fund their own drug habit.29 These user-sellers would invariably flit between two concurrent fantasies: the first was to become a millionaire by selling crack; the second was to have an endless supply of crack to ‘smoke lovely’. One fantasy or the other impelled them to the end of each day, when they would more often than not find themselves as broke as they had been at its start, having pushed crack on anyone who happened to be passing by and antagonized plenty of people in their neighbourhood in the process. Because these street-level dealers were wont to smoke their consignments, and often absconded with the money they had made selling crack, they were regular victims of brutal ‘beatdowns’ from their supervisors.
As more people spent more money on more crack, whole communities started to come apart at the seams. Crack made prostitutes of most of the women who used the drug, and transformed the world’s oldest profession, with the drug dealer replacing the pimp. Many women lost custody of their children, and spent the rest of their increasingly short lives trying to escape life on the streets and get their children back from relatives or child protection services. One response to the chaos of the streets was the rise of the ‘freak-house’, usually the apartment of an elderly single crack user who traded his lodgings for free crack and sex from five or six crack-abusing women. In return, the women got a place to cook, sleep and bring paying customers who would come to have sex with all of the women, a practice known as ‘flipping the freaks’.
Even the drug users and sellers of Bushwick in Brooklyn welcomed the police crackdown when it first came. In the four years that followed passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the police arrested over 8,000 people in Bushwick. The prison on Rikers Island, where thousands of crack dealers served time for possession with intent to supply, was said to resemble a Bushwick block party. However, by 1992 when 10 per cent of local people reported having been physically assaulted by a police officer, it was clear that police tactics were alienating whatever popular support they might once have garnered, as well as having precious little impact on street sales. Bushwick was ready to riot, and for the next eighteen months the neighbourhood was virtually occupied by a small army of police officers.
It has been speculated that a quarter of the street price of drugs compensates the seller for the risk he runs of being caught and sent to jail; in the late 1980s, the average American street dealer stood a one in four chance of going to jail for selling cocaine.30 A further third of the price compensates for the risk of being physically harmed.31 Unsurprisingly, many drug dealers joined a gang to minimize those risks and gangs have grown as the war on drugs has intensified. There are said to be 2,000 gangs in Los Angeles today, most of which derive a sizeable portion of their income from the drugs trade.32 The gangs of Chicago are thought to have 70,000 members.33 In the Colombian city of Medellín, another city struggling with industrial redundancy and a booming illegal drug economy, there were 6,300 gangs in 2003.34
Violent, clandestine drug-dealing gangs made life in the inner cities still more complicated. ‘I was involved in gangs in east LA from the age of eleven,’ Luis Rodriguez told me. ‘I became a hard-core gang member by the early ’70s, and then eventually I got into drugs. I became an addict, and spent seven years on heroin. I got involved with the violence, shooting people. LA and Chicago were the two gang capitals of the United States. Gangs make sense for drug sales because they’re an organized force. You can get a large number of young people out there doing sales. Many of the gangs that they’re dealing with almost everywhere in the country in 2008 have roots in Chicago or LA—Sur-13, the Latin Kings, the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords, the Latin Disciples, the Bloods and the Crips. By the ’90s, Mara-Salvatrucha had started spreading out too. Drugs were always involved in Chicago and LA, but to the side. By the ’80s they were central, and I saw the change in the gangs, going from being a group of guys who had a camaraderie, who were willing to love and care about each other, to becoming more connected with drugs in the ’80s.’
The rise of these gangs made calls for a tough response even shriller, but as Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos in Santa Cruz, California, told me, it has become all too easy to imagine criminal masterminds and conspiracies in lieu of real knowledge about how the drug economy works. ‘The gangs don’t have the capacity or the funding to deal with all that organized crime stuff. You have higher level activity, but it’s mainly territorial or to survive the prison system. They’re not real strategic organizations that can get involved at those high levels of trafficking, but the immigrant gangs are easier to target than organized crime. We had a raid in November 2007, when they arrested thirty-two members of Mara-Salvatrucha, and they’re getting ten-year terms just for conspiracy.’ As we will see in the next chapter, the Republicans’ crusade against drugs and vice has long been stymied by their fondness for easy answers to difficult questions.
3
A Rush to Punish
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people. It is an instrument for the people to restrain the government, lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
Patrick Henry, American colonial revolutionary
By 1986, crack coc
aine was creating huge problems of abuse, neglect and self-destruction for its users. Their dealers seemed to be driven by just as insatiable an appetite for money and power. But the press showed little interest in covering the story. To make ‘news’, journalists need sources, people to whom authoritative statements can be attributed. Both needs dispose them to reproduce the line taken by the police and government, for news is often made by the passage of a law or by a public statement in the wake of a bizarre murder or suicide. Few news stories can simultaneously please newspaper editors, advertisers and politicians, while attracting readers in droves, quite like the death of a star from a drug overdose. Public discussion of drug use thus tends to centre on the most dramatic examples of drug use, a tendency intensified by the journalist’s desire to tell a dramatic story.1
Eric Sterling was legal counsel to Congress in 1986 and told me about the background to the death of basketball star Len Bias. ‘Members of Congress are very aggressive, competitive men and women. They play basketball, and they have a court in the House gym. In June 1986, the lead college team was from the University of Maryland, right outside Washington DC, and the star of the team was a gifted athlete named Len Bias. The best professional team was the Boston Celtics. At the end of the NBA season, Len Bias gets hired by the Boston Celtics, so the best collegiate player in the country goes with the best professional team in the country. He flies back from Boston to his dormitory at the University of Maryland, and celebrates his million-dollar contract by drinking and snorting cocaine, and he dies.’
Cocaine Nation Page 8