Those who said ‘yes’ to drug use would be punished. As the punishment failed to deter the crime, it became still more draconian. In 1998, Congressman Mark Souder tabled an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which had provided grants and loans to students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford higher education. The Souder amendment denied financial aid to any student with a drug conviction. Since 2000, 200,000 students have been denied financial assistance because of prior drug felonies.58 Rapists, muggers and murderers were not affected by the amendment, nor were those found guilty of crimes committed while under the influence of alcohol. After a lot of criticism, Souder amended his amendment in 2006; today it applies only to those who have violated drug laws while enrolled as students.
The anti-drugs message was carried from schools into the workplace. In 1995, 78 per cent of America’s employers did some sort of testing for illegal drugs; by 2004, the percentage had dropped to 62 per cent. Many companies now admit that they drug-test their employees not because they want to, but because the government mandates them to do so.59 The United States still spends $1 billion a year to drug-test about 20 million of its workers.60 As well as being expensive, drug tests can have unintended consequences, as Rusty, the former Department of Corrections narcotics officer, told me. ‘In the Dallas area, we’ve lost twenty-two kids to “cheese”. It’s a mixture of heroin and Tylenol. One of the reasons that kids are doing cheese is that the authorities are testing for pot in schools. Pot is bulky and it smells, but this stuff is about the size of an aspirin. The kids can snort it, some of the older ones mainline it, and it’s killing them.’ Drug warriors might argue that such deaths are the unfortunate but inevitable price to be paid for sending ‘the right message’.
4
Cutting off the Lizard’s Tail
Woe unto them that…follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!
Isaiah 5:11
The crack epidemic seemed to be both completely destructive and completely resistant to intervention. Marc spent his teenage years selling crack cocaine in South Jamaica, Queens: ‘As a child growing up there was no way to escape being around drugs. It was just something that the adults in the community did. You were a child and you stayed in a child’s place. Sadly, the streets become a rite of passage, so when it’s time to become a man, that’s how it gets established in our community.’
At the start of 1995, leading experts predicted an explosion in crime in the years to come. The rate at which young people were killing one another was expected to double by the millennium, prompting Professor James Alan Fox, one of the most widely quoted criminologists in the popular press, to say that ‘the next crime wave will get so bad that it will make 1995 look like the good old days’.1 President Clinton sounded equally pessimistic when he said, ‘we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around, or our country is going to be living with chaos.’2
But instead, and quite without warning, crime fell sharply in the United States in the late 1990s, in all categories and all over the nation. Homicide rates fell to their lowest levels for thirty-five years. Wrong-footed by the sudden onslaught of peace on American streets, the pundits struggled for explanations. Some cited the ageing of the population, others the new and tougher gun control laws, and still others the strong economy. Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, has looked at the relative merits of the explanations given, and found that most do not hold water. He found that there is in fact little relationship between unemployment rates and property crimes. Nor is widespread gun ownership a determining factor in the number of crimes committed. There are approximately 65 million handguns in the United States, but only one in 10,000 of them was used to kill somebody in 1999. Many Americans like to think that the death penalty is an effective crime deterrent, and the evidence suggests that to some extent it is, but even on death row, the probability of being executed in any given year is only 2 per cent. Members of the Chicago street gang that Steven Levitt studied before writing Freakonomics had a 7 per cent chance of being killed while selling drugs in any given year, which didn’t seem to deter them from going into the crack game.3
Increases in the number of police officers and the number of people sent to jail certainly played a significant role in reducing crime in the United States in the 1990s. New York City led the list of cities experiencing this ‘crime drop’, with a 73 per cent decline in the number of homicides between 1991 and 2001.4 The New York City Police Department grew in size by 45 per cent over the same period, an increase three times greater than the national average. But neither was likely to affect drug sales or drug use.5
Levitt found an interesting and frequently overlooked factor that went a long way to explain falling crime rates: the legalization of abortion in 1973. Children born because their mothers were denied an abortion are substantially more likely to be involved in crime, even when taking account of the income, age, education and health of the mother. After 1973, far fewer unwanted children were born, as more women chose to have abortions. Between 1985 (when an unwanted child born in 1973 would have turned twelve) and 1997 (when he or she would have turned twenty-four), homicide rates fell by a quarter in states with high rates of abortion but increased by 4 per cent in states with low rates of abortion.
But the development that accounts for the largest part of the decline in crime rates is the one that seems to have elicited least comment, and that is the maturation of the crack economy and the sheer exhaustion resulting from ten years of extreme criminal violence. ‘We don’t understand a lot of things until they affect us,’ Ricky Ross told me. ‘Around ’86, I started to question myself. Until then, I had been so far removed from the streets. I was selling to dealers with $400,000 of their own, so I really didn’t see the suffering. But I started to see my cousins getting strung out, and then my aunties, my baby-mama, you know, people that I cared about, and it started to affect me.’
For twenty years, Doris’s life had been ruled by her craving for cocaine. She told me that she was part of the generation of drug users in Harlem that graduated from heroin to cheap, widely available cocaine in the early 1980s. ‘Most of my friends are dead. A lot of them died from AIDS, from shooting up. A lot of them just died from the street life. It destroyed so many families. I know so many people whose children are in the prison system because of crack, because they put the drug ahead of their kids. I adopted my niece’s son because she was so cracked out that she couldn’t keep her kids.’
Young people like Marc, who had been selling crack in South Jamaica, Queens, since he was a child, reacted to the violence of the crack business, the personal devastation wrought and the incarceration of whole communities by turning their backs on crack.6 ‘In 1990 I was sixteen years old. That was the height of the crack epidemic. New York was knee-deep in crack vials. I saw my older cousins, who were fourteen or fifteen years older than me, doing it. We were the first generation to see what this shit was really about. For us, it was completely off-limits, and it is to this day. We were like “smoking that shit? Are you crazy?”’
Many young people had spent the late 1980s living with unremitting hedonism, violence and fatalism. Almost a third of Bushwick’s eighteen to twenty-one year olds reported having been caught in a random shoot-out, and almost a quarter said that they had been shot at or threatened with a gun. Some young people reacted to the violence by staying off the streets entirely. Javier, from Bushwick, was sixteen in 1993. ‘About ten of the people I grew up with got killed and I think I grew up ahead of my time. Most of the time you find me with people who are like mid-thirties, forty years old. I feel safer, you know? I don’t have to deal with what’s going on in the street. Once in a while I’ll hang out with one of the fellas I grew up with, but then you try and draw back, ’cause you don’t want to get caught up in what he’s doing, especially if the police are looking for him.’7
‘He takes it hard,’ Doris said of her nephew. ‘You love your mother, even if she is sleepi
ng in a basement and smoking crack. These children have seen their parents be called crack-heads, they’ve seen the devastation, and they don’t want any part of it. For them, it’s heavy, heavy marijuana smoking.’ Neither the rise of the crack economy, nor the war on drugs could put young people off drug-taking for good. In 1999, more than half the students of the United States had tried an illegal drug of some kind. The marijuana drought that kick-started the crack economy had not lasted long, and by the late 1990s, marijuana was cheaper and more readily available than ever; 82 per cent of high school seniors said that they found it easy to get their hands on marijuana.8 Teenage marijuana smokers began cussing crack users for their compulsiveness and even assaulting them out of sheer spite. Young crack users weaned themselves off the drug by smoking first wulla joints, a regular marijuana joint laced with crack cocaine, and then the Philly blunt, a joint rolled in the tobacco casing of a cigar, which became the sanitized offspring of the wulla joint.
Most of the big crack-selling organizations had completely disregarded the welfare of the people they employed and the customers they served. Many teenagers had served sentences for crack distribution, during which time their employers had not bailed them out, hired lawyers to defend them, or looked after their families. Ariel had been selling crack in New York City when he was arrested. While in prison on Rikers Island, he reflected on the business. ‘My foster mother spoke to the owner and asked if he could bail me out. My bail was only $5,000. At that time, I had $10,000 out in the streets that different people owed me. He said “Well, whoever works for me and gets arrested has got to be a man. Do the crime, do the time.” That right there pissed me off. Five thousand dollars? You’re telling me that you couldn’t bail me out? I don’t want to hear that.’9
Abandoned to the criminal justice system, many young crack sellers formed gangs to protect one another from violence in prison. Aside from the protection they offered their members, many of these gangs highlighted the importance of family and community, the destructive effects of violence and drugs, and the urgent need to foster some pride in their communities. From 1993, young Puerto Ricans in New York City underwent something of a rebirth. ‘Before I was a Latin King, I used to sell drugs a lot in school,’ said Ariel. ‘During my time on Rikers Island, I started seeing the light more and wanted to follow a more spiritual path. It’s not all about selling drugs any more. It’s about giving back to the community. I want to stay in the young tribe to help my younger brothers, to let them know that gang-banging is not the way of life. Believe me, I know it, and it’s time for another path.’10 Gangs have been cited as justification for the tough law enforcement approach to dealing with participants in the crack economy, but gangs such as the Latin Kings and the Ñetas were instrumental in encouraging their young members to ‘uplift’ their communities on their return. Many gangs struggled to impose some semblance of order on what had become an unmanageable situation, as part of a return to the values of ‘brown pride’ that drugs and the war on drugs had done so much to corrode.
Luis Rodriguez’s memories of the spirit of community organization that had animated Latino barrios in the 1970s encouraged him to reconsider the purpose of the gangs. ‘Many of the gangs now refuse to call themselves gangs. They are street associations. They’re trying to eliminate drugs from the communities, which is very difficult when the dealers are their padres and soldiers from the streets, and drugs are still often the only way to pay the rent.’ Hence the Bloods and the Crips, two of the most feared gangs in the United States, have been renamed ‘Brotherly Love Over-riding Oppressive Destruction’ and ‘Community Revolution In Progress’ respectively by members determined to salvage something of worth from the havoc wreaked by the drug economy. This revival of popular self-help organizations, led by older gang members and adopted by younger members, explains why gangs became more powerful just as violent crime started to fall.
As the epidemic stabilized and crack cocaine stories fell off the front pages, a rapprochement of sorts was reached between the legal and the illegal economies. Many drug sellers were in prison and many drug users were in shelters for vagrants. Others left the city, were hospitalized or died. The process of collapse that had begun when the inner-city neighbourhoods lost their industrial base, reached a frantic and gory end as the unemployed stripped everything that could be sold to buy crack. The takings were hoovered up by crack dealers and ultimately reinvested in more productive parts of the country. An expensive Italian restaurant built in what had until then been a drugs market near the waterfront in Williamsburg, New York City, speaks volumes about the processes at work. It was financed by a loan from the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), now defunct but renowned at the time for offering a safe haven to fortunes made from the drugs business. The Panama City branch of BCCI had been the principal repository for money raised by the Nicaraguan Contras through sales of crack cocaine on the streets of Los Angeles.11 The restaurant soon became a beacon for developers looking to exploit sky-high property prices in Lower Manhattan. Sales of crack cocaine on the West Coast inadvertently paid for the redevelopment of what had been a prime crack-selling site on the East Coast.
Selling crack is still a daily operation in the United States. Even with the waning of the crack epidemic in the early 1990s, police forces kept a tight lid on inner-city communities by implementing zero tolerance policies. Between 1993 and 1996, arrests for serious crimes in New York City rose just 5 per cent, but arrests for minor offences such as marijuana smoking, jaywalking, riding a bicycle on the pavement and drinking in public almost doubled, and young drug offenders were sent to prison in ever greater numbers.12
Zero tolerance policies have not put an end to drug dealing. Instead, drug markets have become more discreet, integrating themselves further into local communities as the police have regained control of the streets. Today, most drugs in most markets are sold through closed systems: drug sales are less likely to be conducted on street corners or in drug-houses, and more likely to be arranged by mobile phone, with runners making deliveries to private houses. The gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods proceeds apace in cities across the United States, but the appearance of sobriety is deceptive, as a bar worker in New York City’s Lower East Side attested. ‘There’s richer people living in this neighbourhood, where ten years ago you still had the arty farty freaks who could sort of afford to live here. Now, you don’t have that much of a street style, you know? What you have now is a gated community that lives in their apartments and that totally caters to a delivery clientele. I would say that the availability of drugs is higher than it was.’13
In Williamsburg, New York City’s archetypal derelict-turned-hip neighbourhood, cocaine dealers like Rico have had to move with the times. ‘The police made my business. They created it. Before, there was a line of people standing on the street, waiting to cop out of the door of a building. You could buy it like it was a supermarket. Who’d bother to call me on the beeper? But when the police destroyed them, they created my business.’14
The key drivers of the cocaine economy have not changed since the early 1980s. When neither the public nor the private sector will provide jobs, people have to create work for themselves. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, 40 per cent of adult men have been self-employed at some point in their working lives, and start-up companies account for almost a quarter of all new jobs.15 Some are legal ventures, but in poor neighbourhoods most new businesses stay off the books. Street-side car repairs, hairdressing, babysitting, and house painting are usually too insecure a way of making a livelihood for their practitioners to survive without other family income. Nearly all of them are hindered by low incomes, inadequate training, paltry social networks linking them to market opportunities, and problems securing loans.
These new enterprises include the business of selling drugs. The cocaine business has proved to be a lifeline for plenty of Americans who would otherwise be without a job. In Milwaukee, at least 10 per cent of all young male La
tinos and African-Americans make money from the drug economy, and the rate is higher in bigger cities. Bolo, a cocaine seller from Bushwick, attests to the sheer ordinariness of selling drugs for a living. ‘Most of the fellas who work for me need the money. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not going to bring in a kid who just needs money to buy a pair of sneakers. I’ll bring a guy with me who has to support his family. I told everybody, “nobody here is getting rich. All we are doing is surviving.”’16
Talk of the ‘crazy money’ to be made selling crack cocaine was wearing thin even in 1988, when crack selling was at its height. That year, the average earnings of retail drug dealers in Washington DC were estimated to be no more than $28,000 a year.17 Street-level sellers earn roughly the federal minimum wage, which at the time of writing stood at $6.55 per hour, so most of them have low-paid legal jobs too. Even among senior dealers, more than a quarter also have legitimate jobs to make ends meet, a third report gross receipts from drug sales of less than $500 a month, and just one in six reports receipts of more than $5,000 a month. The stereotypical ‘drug baron’ and the outlandish fantasies of enrichment that created him are the staple fare of tabloid leader writers, but the personification of wealth and vice in one individual masks the reality of widespread, low-level drug dealing. More than 60 per cent of the revenues from America’s drug economy go to the low-level wholesalers and retailers who make up the bulk of the drug economy’s workforce.18 Senior members of drug-dealing organizations generally take no more than 25 per cent of total revenues.
Cocaine Nation Page 12