Crack in the rearview mirror: deconstructing drug war mythology.

• Date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Reinarman, Craig,Levine, Harry G.
• Published date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Reinarman, Craig

The abuse of tea has taken on the characteristics of a plague. It is not only confined to men, but has even spread to women and children. The situation is becoming very dangerous. Tea abuse ... takes the form of an imperious and irresistible craving.

--a Tunisian physician in the 1930s, commenting on the effects of tea when it first arrived in his country. Cited in The Economist (August 8, 2002).

IN THE LATE 1970s, CRACK FIRST CAME ON THE SCENE IN THE FORM OF COCAINE freebasing. Many of its users were stockbrokers and investment bankers, rock stars, Hollywood types, and a few pro athletes. Some of them began to get into trouble with this form of cocaine use, showing up in hospital emergency rooms and police stations. Congress passed new laws to extend health insurance coverage to include drug treatment. The treatment industry expanded the number of beds available.

In the mid-1980s, crack use spread into America's inner cities among impoverished African Americans and Latinos. Some of them began to get into trouble with this form of cocaine use, showing up in hospital emergency rooms and police stations. Congress passed new laws to extend the length of criminal sentences for crack offenses. The prison industry expanded the number of cells available.

The new laws against crack helped to drive the most massive wave of imprisonment in the history of the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995: Table 1.5). The number of persons incarcerated increased each year from 1986 through 2000, helping to triple the prison population and giving the U.S. the highest rate of incarceration of any modern democracy. The number of drug offenders in prison grew eightfold, from about 50,000 in the early Reagan years to about 400,000 at the start of the second Bush administration. This bulging prison population was disproportionately comprised of poor people of color, most of whom had not committed violent crimes (Irwin and Austin, 1994; Parenti, 1999; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001).

Politicians typically justified their harsh crack-era laws in terms of the need to deter people from using and selling crack. But in the context of persistently high unemployment and crushing poverty in the inner cities, imprisoning large numbers of people had the paradoxical effect of increasing the total number of youth involved in the illicit drug economy. One person's arrest was another's job opportunity. Meanwhile, even after years of unprecedented imprisonment, hard-core drug abuse, overdose deaths, and the spread of AIDS drag on unabated (Treaster, 1992; SAMHSA, 2001).

A reasonable person might infer from the above facts that politicians, the media, and the drug-control complex conspired to repress the so-called urban underclass. Many people in the African American and Latino communities have found it difficult to avoid this conclusion. No one who honestly ponders the state of race relations or the level and pattern of economic inequality in the U.S. can doubt that it is at least plausible. Indeed, even after the prevalence of crack use had declined sharply in the early 1990s (Johnston et al., 2003: Table 5.2), the number of drug arrests of impoverished inner-city youth continued to rise--fewer and fewer for crack, more and more for marijuana (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001). At the very least, it is now clear that the laws rushed through Congress during the crack scare of the late 1980s had political purposes and racist consequences (see Beckett, 1997).

Our critique of the crack scare draws upon a tradition begun by Alfred Lindesmith and Howard Becker. Lindesmith (1947, 1965) studied opiate addicts ethnographically. His deeply sociological account of the process of addiction took the addict's point of view and called attention to unhelpful role played by criminalization. Such heresies put him on the enemies list of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, with whom he battled for many years. Becker's seminal book, Outsiders (1963), outlined what came to be called "labeling theory," a framework that helped pave the way for social constructionist approaches to deviance and social problems and for critical criminology. Becker demonstrated that "deviance" is not an intrinsic property of behaviors or persons, but rather a label affixed to them by social control agents. One of Becker's key illustrations was the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the first federal law to criminalize marijuana use. He showed how a "moral entrepreneur"--Harry Anslinger, a Prohibition agent appointed to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics--employed media manipulation, stereotyping, and scapegoating to arouse public fear and get Congress to pass the law he wanted.

Now that the passage of time has given us some distance on the fears and passions that animated the crack scare, what can we learn by looking at it in the rearview mirror? Perhaps the now well-documented excesses and failures of the war on drugs that crack spawned have given us an opportunity to consider ideas that were once too heretical to hear. Perhaps we can seize this opening to move toward more effective and more humane drug policies. If so, a good place to begin is with the deconstruction of the five core myths about crack that helped to shape a public discourse in which a war against some of our own citizens and mass imprisonment of the poor became "thinkable" public policy.

Myth #1: Crack Is a Different Drug Than Cocaine

From the beginning of the crack scare in early 1986, politicians and the media round it useful to speak of crack as if it were an entirely new substance with unprecedented powers. This was false. Crack was only a new form of a very old substance. Crack is cocaine that has been cooked down to a smokeable base form, but its active ingredient is entirely cocaine, a drug in use in the U.S. for over a century.

Crack was new, however, in two ways. First, it was a relatively new mode of ingesting cocaine. It was not entirely new, for a small fraction of extreme cocaine users had been smoking cocaine base, a practice they called "freebasing," for several years before the word "crack" was coined to describe the same drug, used in the same way, but by different people (Siegel, R., 1982; Inciardi, 1987). Freebasing, however, did hot tire the imaginations of politicians and the media and so remained little known. Whether called crack or freebase, smoking cocaine does, by all accounts, yield a more intense "rush." Just as humans can get more drunk much faster by downing shots of vodka than by sipping wine, so can we get a more intense "rush" by smoking crack cocaine than by snorting powder cocaine. When smoked, cocaine enters the lungs and thus the bloodstream and the brain very quickly and nearly all at once, much like when it is injected. But when snorted, cocaine is absorbed slowly through the nasal membranes, with smaller amounts reaching the bloodstream and the brain a little at a time.

Crack was also new in a second and perhaps more important sense. Unlike powder cocaine, which was typically sold in half-gram or one-gram units for $50 to $100 in the mid- 1980s, crack was sold in small "rocks" for $5 to $10. Whereas powder cocaine tended to be used in private settings among more affluent people, crack was sold by and to a whole new class of people on inner-city street corners. In short, crack was a marketing innovation, not a new drug.

The claim that crack was a new, deeply dangerous drug allowed the media to write dramatic stories about it and politicians to scapegoat and pass punitive new laws against it. But this claim was not based so much on the increased intensity of this mode of cocaine ingestion as on its new market niche among the "dangerous class" of impoverished black and brown people (sec Becker, 1963, on how anti-Mexican prejudice was similarly employed in the crusade against marijuana, and Duster, 1970, on how a shift in the user base of opiates from whites to blacks helped to precipitate the shift from a medical or public health approach to criminalization). If the crack scare really had been about a new and extreme high, then freebasing and injecting cocaine would have been made subject to similarly extreme punishments long before anyone had ever heard of crack.

Myth #2: Crack Is Instantly and Inevitably Addicting

In the spring of 1986, Newsweek helped to kick off the crack scare with a cover story entitled "Kids and Cocaine." It quoted an addiction treatment entrepreneur who claimed that crack caused "instantaneous addiction" and was "the most addictive drug known to man" (Match 17, 1986: 58-59). The journalists who wrote this story betrayed no sense of skepticism about the first claim, which was brand new, or the second claim, which was quite old. Throughout the 19th century, Temperance crusaders claimed that anyone who touched "demon drink"--then the "most addicting substance known to man"--would succumb (Levine, 1978; 1984). That was never true, of course; most people, then as now, drank in moderation. But even after alcohol Prohibition was discredited and repealed, self-interested "moral entrepreneurs" (Becker, 1963) continued to make the same sort of misleading claims about opiates, cocaine, and even marijuana. But in spring 1986, Newsweek (June 15: 15) wrote as if none of this had ever occurred before, going so far as to claim that crack was the biggest story since Vietnam and Watergate.

Unfortunately, Newsweek was not alone in its historical amnesia. Virtually all major magazines, newspapers, and TV networks repeated the same wild, unsubstantiated claims about instantaneous addiction dozens of times from 1986 to 1992, although they reached a particularly feverish pitch during the election seasons of 1986 and 1988 (Reinarman and Levine, 1989; 1997; Reeves and Campbell, 1994). In 1988, the New York Times published a three-part, front-page series called "The Crack Plague" (June 24, 1988: Al). The word "plague" was routinely used by the media, with Newsweek...