On the government's role in allowing cocaine into the country in the 1980s With all that we know about crack, with all the compassion that we have now for addicts, we still haven't moved far enough to eliminate that disparity entirely." "That was reduced to 18-to-1 around 2010.
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"It was originally 100-to-1, meaning that you got essentially 100 times the amount of time for crack than you would for the same substance in powder form," he says. The resulting substance provided a cheap, smokable way for people to get high quickly.Ĭrack spread "like wildfire" across America, Ramsey says, but it tended to hit Black neighborhoods particularly hard: "What it means to be Black in this society is to be hit first and worst."Īs the epidemic took hold, the media presented apocalyptic views of Black neighborhoods transformed by the drug, and warned of a coming wave of "crack babies." Meanwhile, instead of treating the issue as a public health emergency, politicians instituted sentencing guidelines that punished users of crack more harshly than users of powdered cocaine. Berkeley who devised a recipe for freebasing cocaine using water and baking soda.
Ramsey traces the advent of crack to a group of chemistry students at U.C. And the crack epidemic seemed like that missing link." fill in what felt like a gap in between the civil rights movement that we hear so much about and where we are today. "So I had this real kind of deep yearning to. "Being a Black man who was born in 1987, the crack epidemic predates me I've never existed in a world where crack didn't exist," he says. For Ramsey, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the story is personal. In his new book, When Crack Was King: A People's History of A Misunderstood Era, Ramsey examines the crack epidemic of the 1980s and early '90s from the points of view of four people who lived through it - and considers the lasting harm inflicted on the Black community by the government's response. "His office made a decision that they wanted to give a big address on drugs and they wanted to use crack cocaine as a prop." Bush really wanted to start his administration with a bang and being tough on crime and was a big part of that," Ramsey says. Ramsey describes Bush's press conference as a form of propaganda designed to create a panic about the crack epidemic and to "demonize drug dealers and also addicts." Looking back now, author and journalist Donovan X. Bush appeared on live television to discuss what he called the nation's "gravest domestic threat." Sitting at his desk in the oval office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that had been seized in a park across from the White House, saying: "It's as innocent looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones."
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