Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  41. Cited in Sterling, ‘Beyond Just Say No.’

  42. Available online at .

  2. Building a Hard Drug Economy

  1. Edward M. Brecher and the editors of the Consumer reports, Licit and Illicit Drugs: the Consumers Union report on narcotics, stimulants, depressants, inhalants, hallucinogens, marijuana (Mount Vernon, NY: Consumers Union, 1972).

  2. Drug Enforcement Agency: A Tradition of Excellence 1973–2003, US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, p. 38; and Michael Agar, ‘The Story of Crack: Towards a Theory of Illicit Drug Trends’, Addiction Research and Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1 January 2003, p. 15.

  3. Cited in Agar, ‘The Story of Crack:’, p. 15.

  4. Cockburn and St Clair, White Out: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, p. 299.

  5. Ibid., p. 310.

  6. Ibid., p. 309.

  7. Admittedly this statistic dates from 1991, but it is the only one I have been able to locate. See P. Reuter, R. MacCoun and P. Murphy, Money from Crime: A Study of the Economics of Drug Selling in Washington, D.C. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1990).

  8. David Henderson, ‘A Humane Economist’s Case for Drug Legalization’, University of California at Davis Law Review, 1991, Vol. 24, p. 655.

  9. Cited in Rick Curtis, ‘The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighbourhoods: Crime, Violence, Drugs and Youth in the 1990s’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 88, No. 4, 1988, p. 1243.

  10. Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, ‘An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2000, p. 755.

  11. Kurt Schmoke, ‘Forging a New Consensus in the War on Drugs: Is It Possible?’, Temple University Political and Civil Rights Law Review, Spring 2001, p. 354.

  12. Baltimore 1999: A Transition Report, Office of the Mayor of Baltimore, 1999.

  13. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

  14. The Jay Z lyric that Marc quotes is from the song ‘Can I Live?’.

  15. Some say that Pryor made the story up to explain the burns he received after pouring a bottle of rum over his head and setting himself alight after a night spent free-basing.

  16. For those chasing the ultimate high, the speedball may well be it. Whereas dopamine levels in the brain increase by about 380 per cent with cocaine, and 70 per cent with heroin, when injected together dopamine levels shoot up by 1,000 per cent. The data is from a study by Gerasimov and Dewey from 1999, cited in Agar, ‘The Story of Crack’, p. 15.

  17. Cited in Curtis, ‘The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighbourhoods’, p. 1249.

  18. Ainsley Hamid, ‘The Developmental Cycle of a Drug Epidemic: the Cocaine Smoking Epidemic of 1981–1991’, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, Oct–Dec 1992.

  19. The DEA says that before the crack epidemic, 75 per cent of crack users in New York City were typically white and middle class: ‘Drug Enforcement Agency 1973–2003: 25 Years of Excellence’, US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, p. 60.

  20. Ainsley Hamid, ‘From Ganja to Crack: Caribbean Participation in the Underground Economy in Brooklyn, 1976–1986. II, Establishment of the cocaine (and crack) economy’, International Journal of the Addictions, 1991, Vol. 26, No. 7, pp. 729–38.

  21. F. H. Gawin and E. H. Ellinwood Jr, ‘Cocaine and Other Stimulants: Actions, Abuse, and Treatment’, New England Journal of Medicine, 5 May 1988, pp. 1173–82.

  22. Available online at .

  23. ‘Drug Enforcement Agency 1973–2003’, p. 60, citing statistics from Department of Health and Human Services National Household Survey.

  24. According to police testimony in Congressional hearings in 1986; see Agar, ‘The Story of Crack’, p. 21.

  25. National Drug Intelligence Center, 2005.

  26. William Adler, Land of Opportunity: One Family’s Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack, (Atlantic Monthly Press), 1995, p. 220.

  27. Cited in Curtis, ‘The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighbourhoods’, p. 1272.

  28. See Bruce Johnson, Andrew Golub and Elaine Dunlap, ‘The Rise and Decline of Hard Drugs, Drug Markets and Violence in Inner-City New York’, in Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (eds), The Crime Drop in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 177.

  29. D. Hatsukami and M. Fischman, ‘Crack Cocaine and Cocaine Hydrochloride’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 20 November 1996, p. 1585.

  30. Reuter, MacCoun and Murphy, Money from Crime, p. xii.

  31. Faisal Islam, ‘Class A Capitalists’, Observer, 21 April 2002.

  32. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotráfico en Colombia, p.135.

  33. International Crisis Group, ‘Latin American Drugs I: Losing the Fight’, Latin America Report, No. 25, 14 March 2008, p. 28.

  34. International Crisis Group, ‘Colombia’s New Armed Groups’, Latin America Report, No. 20, 10 May 2007, p. 18.

  3. A Rush to Punish

  1. Howard S. Becker, ‘History, Culture and Subjective Experience: An Exploration of the Social Bases of Drug-Induced Experiences’, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 1967), pp. 163–76.

  2. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997), p. 225.

  3. Quote attributed to Bill Rhatican of the Ad Council in Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, p. 226.

  4. Cited in ibid., p. 226.

  5. Craig Reinarmann and Ceres Duskin, ‘Dominant Ideology and Drugs in the Media’, International Journal on Drug Policy, 3(1) (1992), pp. 6–15.

  6. Katherine Greider, ‘Crackpot Ideas’, Mother Jones, July/August 1995.

  7. Quoted in Carl Williams, ‘Consequences of the War on Drugs for Transit Countries: The Jamaican Experience’, Crime and Justice International, September/October 2007.

  8. Presidential address, 5 November 1989, cited in W. A. Niskanen, Economists and Drug Policy, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 36, 1992.

  9. Cited in ABC Special with Jon Storsel, 30 July 2002, my transcription.

  10. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, p. 200.

  11. Interviewed in ABC Special with Jon Storsel.

  12. Richard Dennis, ‘The Economics of Legalizing Drugs’, Atlantic Monthly, November 1990.

  13. Musto, ‘Opium, Cocaine and Marijuana in American History’, pp. 20–27.

  14. Harry Levine, ‘The Secret of Worldwide Drug Prohibition: the varieties and uses of drug prohibition’, Independent Review, Fall 2002.

  15. Philippe Bourgois, ‘Crack and the Political Economy of Social Suffering’, Addiction Research and Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2003.

  16. George Bridges and Sara S. Streen, ‘Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, 1998; cited in The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties, Justice Policy Institute Report 2007, p. 8.

  17. Harry Levine, ‘Are Cannabis Arrests Increasing in Europe?’, unpublished paper, August 2007.

  18. Ben Wallace-Wells, ‘How America Lost the War on Drugs’, Rolling Stone magazine, 13 December 2007.

  19. It went from $362 million to $769 million; see Drug Enforcement Agency 1973–2003: A Tradition of Excellence, US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, p. 59.

  20. P. Kraska and V. Kappeler, ‘Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units’, Social Problems, Vol. 44, No. 1 (February 1997), p. 10.

  21. Ibid.

  22. California, Connecticut, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Rhode Island have enacted statutes that prohibit ‘stopping a person based solely on race or ethnicity instead of an individualized suspicion arising from the person’s behavior’. See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Traffic Stop Data Collection (Washingt
on, DC: US Dept. of Justice, December 2001), p. 1.

  23. David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: New Press, 1999), p. 36.

  24. Ibid., p. 50.

  25. See Hearne, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War, a documentary produced by ACLU, Texas, in 2005.

  26. E. Blumenson and E. Nilsen, ‘Policing for Profit: The Drug War’s Hidden Economic Agenda’, University of Chicago Law Review, 65: 35–114 (Winter 1998), p. 5.

  27. Ibid., p. 4.

  28. ‘Assets Forfeiture Fund and Seized Asset Deposit Fund Annual Financial Statement Fiscal Year 2006’, Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, US Dept. of Justice (Audit Report 07–15, January 2007), p. 6.

  29. Blumenson and Nilsen, ‘Policing for Profit’, p. 10.

  30. Ibid., p. 8.

  31. Ibid., p. 9.

  32. Ibid., p. 2.

  33. Andrew Schneider and Mary Pat Flaherty, ‘Government Seizures Victimize Innocent’, Pittsburgh Press, 27 February 1991.

  34. Cole, No Equal Justice, pp. 23–4.

  35. ‘Urban League in Los Angeles Asts Police Chief Suspension’, The New York Times, 12 May 1982.

  36. Interviewed for ABC Special with Jon Storsel.

  37. These statistics are from ‘The Wire’s War on the Drug War’, an article written by the creative team behind the HBO TV series The Wire (Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon) and published in Time, 5 March 2008.

  38. Cockburn and St Clair, White Out: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, p. 78.

  39. Cracks in the System: Twenty Years of the Unjust Federal Crack Cocaine Law (Washington DC: American Civil Liberties Union, 2006).

  40. The first part of this excerpt is from an interview Daniel Rostenkowski gave to host Ira Glass on episode 143 of the radio programme This American Life, National Public Radio, 22 October 1999. The second part is from a speech Rostenkowski gave to lawyers shortly after his release, which Glass quotes from in the same radio programme.

  41. ‘Clinton’s Crack Cocaine Apology: Too Little Too Late?’, Huffington Post, 4 March 2008.

  42. ‘Judges Given Leeway in Crack Sentencing’, Associated Press, 1 December 2007.

  43. Schmoke, ‘Forging a New Consensus in the War on Drugs: Is It Possible?’, p. 356.

  44. Rosie Cowan, ‘Fourteen jailed as police smash global crack cocaine network’, Guardian, 28 February 2006.

  45. Michael Isikoff, ‘Penal Colonies for Drug Criminals’, Washington Post, 17 September 1990.

  46. Blumenson and Nilsen, ‘Policing for Profit’, p. 12.

  47. Johnson, Golub and Dunlap, ‘The Rise and Decline of Hard Drugs, Drug Markets and Violence in Inner-City New York’, in Blumstein and Wallman (eds), The Crime Drop in America, p. 184.

  48. Howard Campbell, ‘Drug Trafficking Stories: Everyday forms of Narco-Folklore on the US-Mexico Border’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 16, 2005, p. 327.

  49. ‘Clinton’s Crack Cocaine Apology’, Huffington Post.

  50. Johnson, Golub and Dunlap, ‘The Rise and Decline of Hard Drugs’, in Blumstein and Wallman (eds), The Crime Drop in America, p. 184.

  51. Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo, ‘The Past and Future of US Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years after the Stanford Prison Experiment’, American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 716.

  52. Marc Maurer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 1999), p. 185.

  53. Observatoire Géopolitique des Drogues, ‘The World Geopolitics of Drugs 1998/1999’ (Paris, France: OGD, April 2000), p. 133.

  54. According to Maia Szalavitz, a senior fellow at the media watchdog STATS who has written extensively about drug policy.

  55. National Research Council, Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2001), p. 1.

  56. Wallace-Wells, ‘How America Lost the War on Drugs’.

  57. Ryan S. King, ‘A Decade of Reform: Felony Disenfranchisement Policy in the United States’, Sentencing Project, 2006, p. 2. Also see Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, ‘Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States’, Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project, 1998, p. 8.

  58. According to Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Washington DC.

  59. AMA 2004 Workplace Testing Survey: Medical Testing, American Management Association, New York, 2004, p. 3.

  60. Edward M. Shepard and Thomas J. Clifton, ‘Drug Testing and Labor Productivity: Estimates Applying a Production Function Model’, Institute of Industrial Relations, Research Paper No. 18 (Syracuse, NY: LeMoyne University, 1998), p. 8.

  4. Cutting off the Lizard’s Tail

  1. James Fox, Trends in Juvenile Violence: A Report to the United States Attorney General on Current and Future Rates of Juvenile Offending (Washington DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996).

  2. ‘Clinton Unveils Flurry of Plans to Fight Crime’, Allpolitics, 1997; available at .

  3. Levitt and Venkatesh, ‘An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2000, pp. 755–89.

  4. Steven D. Levitt, ‘Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 163–90.

  5. Todd Clear, ‘The Problem with Addition by Subtraction: the Prison-Crime Relationship in Low Income Communities’, in Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (eds.), Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: New Press, 2003).

  6. This was part of a national trend away from cocaine use among the young in the late 1980s. The rate of lifetime cocaine use among high school seniors declined from 17 per cent in 1985 to 6 per cent in 1992. See Johnson, Golub and Dunlap, ‘The Rise and Decline of Hard Drugs, Drug Markets and Violence in Inner-City New York’, in Blumstein and Wallman (eds), The Crime Drop in America, p. 170.

  7. Cited in Curtis, ‘The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighbourhoods: Crime, Violence, Drugs and Youth in the 1990s’, p. 1258.

  8. Office of National Drug Control Policy, National Drug Control Strategy: Budget Summary (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1992), pp. 212–14. Office of National Drug Control Policy, The National Drug Control Strategy: 2000 Annual Report (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2000), p. 94, figure 4–1. L. Johnston, J. Bachman and P. O’Malley, Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use Overview of Key Findings 1999 (Washington, DC: NIDA, 2000), pp. 3–6, p. 48, Table 6.

  9. Interview conducted in 1996, cited in Curtis, ‘The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighbourhoods’, p. 1264.

  10. Cited in ibid., p. 1265.

  11. Cited in Curtis, ‘Crack, Cocaine and Heroin: Drug Eras in Williamsburg, Brooklyn 1960–2000’, p. 60.

  12. Rick Curtis, ‘The New York Miracle: Crime, Drugs and the Resurgence of Gangs in the 1990s’, unpublished.

  13. Interview conducted in 2001, cited in Rick Curtis, Travis Wendel and Barry Spunt, We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Washington DC: National Institute of Justice, 2002), p. 51.

  14. Interview conducted in 1997, cited in Curtis, Wendel and Spunt, op. cit.

  15. John Hagedorn, The Business of Drug Dealing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, 1998.

  16. Interview conducted in 1995, cited in Curtis, Wendel and Spunt, We Deliver, p. 51.

  17. Reuter, MacCoun and Murphy, Money from Crime: A Study of the Economics of Drug Selling in Washington, D.C.

  18. Peter Reuter and Michael Levi, ‘Money Laundering’, Crime and Justice, 2006, Vol. 34, pp. 289–375.

  19. Campbell, ‘Drug Trafficking Stories: Everyday Forms of Narco-Folklore on the US—Mexico Border’, p. 326.

  20. Hagedorn, The Business of Drug Dealing in Milwaukee.

  21. Cur
tis, Wendel and Spunt, We Deliver, p. 105.

  22. Levitt and Venkatesh, ‘An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances’, p. 781.

  23. Noah Mamber, ‘Harm Reductive Drug Legalization’, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Summer 2006, p. 628.

  24. Recounted by historian John C. Burnham in the Columbus Dispatch on 30 June 2006. Attendees at the program included Jerome Jaffe, Robert L. Du Pont, Dr Peter G. Bourne, Lee I. Dogoloff, Donald Ian Macdonald, Lee Brown and retired US Army General Barry R. McCaffrey. William Bennett and current drug tsar John Walters were among those absent.

  25. Beckley Foundation/Drugscope, Assessing Drug Policy Principles and Practice, Beckley Park, Oxford, 2004.

  26. R. Lupton, A. Wilson, T. May, H. Warburton and P. Turnbull, Drugs in Deprived Neighbourhoods, Home Office Research Study, 240, 2002.

  27. Office of National Drug Control Policy, Reducing Drug Abuse in America: An Overview of Demand Reduction Initiatives, Chapter II (Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, January 1999); available to view at .

  28. The number of Americans who used an illegal drug in the past year started falling from 16 per cent in 1986, but was back to 14.5 per cent by 2005; see Wallace-Wells, ‘How America Lost the War on Drugs’.

  29. Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson, ‘Crack’s Decline: some surprises across US cities’, National Institute of Justice Research in Brief, July 1997.

  30. Evan Wood, Patricia M. Spittal, Will Small, Thomas Kerr, Kathy Li, Robert S. Hogg, Mark W. Tyndall, Julio S. G. Montaner, Martin T. Schechter, ‘Displacement of Canada’s Largest Public Illicit Drug Market in Response to a Police Crackdown’, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 11 May 2004: 170 (10), p. 1554.

  31. Peter D. A. Cohen and Hendrien L. Kaal, The Irrelevance of Drug Policy: Patterns and Careers of Experienced Cannabis Use in the Populations of Amsterdam, San Francisco and Bremen (Centrum voor Drugsonderzoek: University of Amsterdam, 2001).

  32. Brecher et al. (eds), Licit and Illicit Drugs, p. 52.

  33. C. A. Youngers and E. Rosin, ‘The US “War on Drugs”: its Impact in Latin America and the Caribbean’, in Coletta Youngers and Eileen Rosin (eds), Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: The Impact of US Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp. 1–13.