Oh, prop Sophie. Ye, Hey, what's the word, homie? You know I'm a big fall guy. I love pumpkin spice. I love walking through falling leaves. You know, the colors start to change. What do you say this fall? We all get together as buddies and we spend like seven or eight hours talking about the crack epidemic, the c I A Iran contra, the Gary Webb story that broke it all that then had him hounded into self destruction by the CIA and the New York Times. What do we just did that for the first entire week of October? Wouldn't that be a hoot? I feel like I feel like this would be a good time because it kind of matches all the stuff that kind of happens when we sit around the table anyway, talk about crack. What should we what should we call? What should we call this? Well, you know, the Germans have a holiday during this period in time, and I feel like if it's German, were allowed to co opt it, So why don't we call it cractober Fest. Listen, I'm waiting. You know what I'm saying October crack October because october Fest to me is it's a little too late a hose it for my Yes, yes there will there will be no leader housing, but there will be whatever CIA agents where. Honestly, probably like Patagonia vs. Khaki Slacks. Yeah, yeah, hell of a lot of those. Um Well, this is serving as a general introduction to the series. Prop you have done a blistering two parter on the Iran Contra scandal. I am covering the crack epidemic and the CIA and all sorts of good stuff and um but I think people are gonna be happy. I think you're all gonna have a good eight ish hours learning about everything there is to know about how the CIA actually because like that's like the thing everybody like says, joking, like jokingly says, like the CIA brought crack to the inner cities. Like there's an actual story there, and it's actually kind of worse than than than just like the quick summaries people give. It's worse than the street lower. It really is what you get into it. And I've really felt like, you know, we're always looking for ways to collapse, you know what I'm saying. There's obviously there's a lot of mutual friendship, symbiotic nous between our two uh podcast, but it was like, so there's that we share a Sophie. Uh, but I feel like finding that perfect then diagram that perfect you know meme of the two guys holding hands. What movie is that' from Rambo? Right, Commando? What movie is that from? That's from Predator? Actually it's from Predator. I knew it was one of him, but Arnold is from Commando, so it's understanding. Okay, so it's from Predator. Yeah, when they that perfect like where both our stories meet and it couldn't have met better than the crack epidemics he was having right now and how we even got there perfect perfect storm and uh so this so so so this is episode one of five because we're gonna be doing Cracktoberfest all week and you can listen to all five episodes either and they're available in the Hood, Politics, Speed, in the Behind the Bastards. We listened to them wherever you get your podcast. So I officially, uh apologize to all the other podcasts you listen to. You can go ahead and uh go to those fees now and tell them you can subscribe them. Just burn them off of your phone. In fact, throw that old phone away. Get a new phone, keep it pure, just yeah, exactly, all right, all right, here's what's mandatory, my minimums. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards per Wow. Wow, that was powerful, powerful, prop. So man, how are you doing? How are you doing? Buddy? Hey homie? You know what I'm saying. Trickling down quick and ther Reaganomics over here. You feel me? Beautiful now, prop this is our special week. We had it. We we did this introduction, the last one. I'm not sure which of these episodes will introduce it on, but you and I are tackling the crack epidemic, the c I A Iran contra, all of which are individual stories that are fucking wild, and all of which also kind of deserved to be told together because they they're interwoven. Just a bowl of gumbo of bastards man, Yeah, which I feel like it's like the perfect, uh perfect analogy, because everything in gumbo is great by itself. Yeah, then when you get together, it's still amazing. Yeah, that's what I think. When I think about the crack epidemic, I think, wow, that was great by itself. It's perfectly fine by itself without anything else around it. Yes, a plus um proper, Yeah, how do you? How do you? How do you feel about crack? Man? That doesn't seem like the right way to start this. Um let's let's yeah, it's what crack. It's so interesting how it went from like, uh, there was a time where it was like hip hop was. I feel like it's one of the proof proof of concept that if hit hip hop is given the right information, it does the right thing, Because it was it was the butt of a joke to be like you do crack, don't do crack. Crack it's what you know? Uh, and then the self destruction and we're all in the same game was about like, you know, you should do crack, you know, And then all so there was a moment where crack was terrible in in our in our culture, or the butt of every joke. And then the crack sellers became all the rappers, and then it was just it became the coolest thing to sell crack, right, And it was like, yeah, but I'm a crack dealer, Like oh wait, so it's cool again. Yeah, but you supposed to do crack, You're supposed to sell it. Yeah. I think maybe a place I might want to start here is. Do you recall the first time you learned Like, is that about like crack? The first time you remember the first time, Yeah, you're you had to talk about it with anyone. I do remember the time. I do remember all the after school specials. I remember all of the like you know, sort of the Dare program, all this stuff around crack. But I think really it was whether it was the movie Knew Jack Swing. I mean I Knew Jack Swing, New Jack City, uh um, but really it was like being in Los Angeles and like what is wrong with that guy? Like and just like seeing what a crackhead was and being like, yo, this is different, you know what I'm saying. So I mean as young as young of a child as I was, like a very young child during this time, like really really like baby, but just being like this is this is different? You know? Uh So I think my and then just somebody explaining all that's crack you you know, you smoke it like this or you shoot it up. You know what I'm saying. It's just people figuring out like what that was. I remember my first syringe. You're stepping over my first syringe, which isn't crack per se, but like a crack pipe, and just knowing what all that stuff was was like, Yo, this is bad a matter of fact, now that i'm talking, I know there's a lot, but now that I'm talking, my neighbor, dang, I haven't thought about this. And so we grew up, you know, in the part of town I was in my my neighbor you know. Um, like I said, I grew up in total neighborhood. So like my neighbor, they were you know, in the life hardcore or whatever, but they were just they were just some of the most loving like people whatever. Right, So anyway, they moved right and when they moved, um, for whatever reason, the next family that came in, I remember didn't turn the electricity on and like they never turned on any of the like utilities, and I just remember being like, oh, that's weird. And then the two little boys who were a little bit younger than me used to always come over, like right at dinner time, like you know what I'm saying, and just all the like, they always smelled a little bit like they weren't clean or whatever, and my parents would like my parents knew was going on. I don't know what's going on, but my parents knew was going on. They would let him in. They'd be like dang, okay, they feed them no more, you know. And then once they put it all together, it and then you know again people all hours at a night going in and out the house. And then finally I realized I lived next door to a crack house. It it was like it was this slow roll of like wait, what, like why do you why do they why do they have so many candles? It's like, oh, it's kind of camping. They cook with candles, you know, and just and then just realized power, yeah, like no, it's crack. Yeah, yeah, I mean, And obviously for me, it was a much more distant thing, right, it was a thing that like number one, crack was before anything else for me, like a euphemism, yeah, for like something is addictive or also someone is silly, like you're cracked out, Yeah exactly. And it was the adults talked about crack like it was a plague, like it was a disease that it hits certain areas, and the kids talked about crack like it was a euphemism. Right, it was like yeah, just kind of an explanative term that you could throw in. Oh yeah, yeah, like, yeah, you're smoking crack, bro. We're gonna talk today about the crack epidemic and how it happened and what happened as a result of it. All cocaine type drugs, all cocaine derived drugs, which include crack, good old fashioned blow, also tinctures of cocaine, which is how people used to take it back in the past, come from the leaves of the cocould tree um and the co could tree grows mostly in Columbia, Bolivia, and Peru on their own. Naturally, the leaves can be chewed generally with something like potash for a mild to moderate stimulating effect, with a little bit of euphoria thrown in for good measure. I've gotten to chew coca leaves in a couple of occasions and it's very nice. It's a really pleasant and it's also pretty hard to have be a problematic drug. You you should think about coca the way we think about pot or the way we think about like opium poppies, right um opium poppies on their own. Some people do have problems with that is a more serious drug, but it's nothing compared to what happens when you start making heroin or morphaga marijuana as it grows naturally almost impossible to hurt yourself with. Then now people start making it into shatter and stuff and they're blowing up trailer parks and burning their brains out and ship right. Um, you know, that's kind of the way to think about the way. And this is the way in which indigenous people used coca one of them for probably thousands of years. Right um. I know what we have evidence of coca used going back and as as long pretty much as long as there have been people in the area. It's it's it's it's got to be the most like naive thing to think that like, you know, these just plants that just grew outside, that somebody didn't chew it and go oh you know, and and and that that was just a normal part of life. And maybe the rolls of shamons and profits and they've probably been chewing wild plants forever. Yeah. It's the same thing with you know, the coffee which which comes from Ethiopia. The Romo people were kind of the first people using the coffee plant. A big part of what a major way it was used is for like hunters, right to keep you going during the hunt. That's probably a big part of how coca leaf was used early on. It's like, right, we're out in the we're out in the woods or the jungle or whatever for a couple of weeks. You know, this should will will keep us moving. Um. And also this is interesting. Most people don't know this coca leaf is an oral anesthetic. It numbs your mouth, so we One of the things that's always been kind of interesting is that in a lot of kind of Latin American areas you have early history of pretty advanced dental work being done in some areas, and maybe that had an impact on it, the fact that they had access to a really effective oral an aesthetic. Yeah, it's it's actually a really it's a fucking amazing plant. Obviously. Yeah, it gets a bad fucking wrap. Well, novacane from the coca leaf. That's where it comes from. Yeah, novacane and cocaine. But he didn't get the song reference. It's okay, okay, I didn't get the song reference. But I'm glad that you brought up no vocane because we get novocane from the coca leaf. See. Um, Yeah, it's just it's a baffling lye useful plant. Um, and it's the root of novocane and light a cane and crack cocaine. Um, they all come from the same thing, right, Um, what kind of Yeah, well it all sorts of canes. Yeah. Um. Europeans really figured out what was up with coca in eighteen fifty five. They'd noticed people in the areas they were colonizing using it for a while. Um, But it wasn't until eighteen fifty five that pure cocaine was extracted from the leaps for the first time. Again, you've got this bafflingly useful plant that's doing great stuff, and then some white people come in and are like, you know what we could do make a drug that makes people insufferable at parties out of this let's we're gonna ruin a lot of rabes. Like, yeah, now you already you nailed the joke already. There's a way that's exactly a Yeah, if you're going to snore a drug in a party, kids, kinta means a lot better anyway. Uh So, obviously, the fact that they're not co signed officially, Yeah, legally, no one is co signing there. So this is a huge moment in medical science. Obviously, like I joked about them ruining it, but actually a lot of really cool number one cocaine. There are some were some early medical uses for it. We get anesthetics like novacaine and lightacne. This is a big deal, and we don't talk again, this is something that people don't think about, but it was not We're we're we're at about like a hundred and fifty years or so of effective anesthetics being widespread available, right, that is not a thing in surgery prior to this. If you don't live in a place where there's a good natural oral anesthetic, um and there's a couple of cocaine, coca is not the only one. Also, um cava, which Hawaiian people I believe have been using, Polynesian people using for a long time, works really well for that purpose. But if you don't live somewhere with that plant and you need a tooth taken out, you're probably downing half a handle a liquor and then someone's ripping a bone out your skull, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, then you're then you're looking like a medieval movie, really real gnarly. Yeah. I was listening to a h I think what was that, uh, what kind of pot was that radio lapped the science one from w might see what anyway, they were talking about like figuring out molecules for new medicines and stuff. Right, so if you figure this thing out, um, you know, you're also looking at like side effects, so like the difference between like a poison, like a narcotic or a medicine, you know what I'm saying, or poison. And one of the researchers from China was like, well, they're just molecules, like you know, and that that bifurcation, the difference between like a good molecule and a bad molecule is like it's a very new and sort of Western way to look at this. It's like they all have strengths and weaknesses, you know what I'm saying, and ways to abuse and not abuse, you know. So even the way the way that you're talking about, you know, the coca leaf is like, yeah, I'm pretty sure somebody you know, in the ancient past like chew that thing. And then his buddy was like, hey, bro, you gotta chill man, you know what I'm saying, and uh, you know, and it was like, yeah, man, that was too far. You know what I'm saying, like there has to have been because again, I feel like the point you're making at this stage in the story is you can't stress enough. It's just a plant. It's just a plant. And and at some point some people figure out how to like supercharge it, right, And so at the same time as you get these early anesthetics, you start getting pure cocaine, right, usually sold as a tincture. So you just get a fucking dropper of cocaine water sheeese right, you can know you can shoot that stuff up. A lot of people injected it. I believe Sherlock Holmes injected cocaine. I think with heroin. Um, this is what guys like Freud are doing. Right. Most of them are not doing lines, you know, um they are. They are taking it as a pure like distilled tincture. You can pick this ship up at the at the drug store. Um. Now, this causes problems because cocaine is incredibly addictive, um, and also not great for your body, especially if you're taking it a lot of it every single day because the doctor told you it's good for you. That actually hurts you a lot. Right, You can choo coca leafs all day long, and it's you're probably not well, not all day long. When you can choot coca leaves on a regular basis and you're not dealing with too huge of a problem. You're doing cocaine every day. People are gonna notice because it's going to destroy you. Yeah, I think they're government. You're just gonna be like, hey man, you know, I mean just doing Yeah, you're gonna get really into White Snake and yeah, then your heart's going to explode. Hey, bro, so make an album. Hey man, we should make album. You want to make an album of night Let's cut we we we gotta bring back fucking prog rock. Man, that's what I want to fucking hear right? Yeah? Um so Europeans eighteen fifty five we get cocaine. Nineteen fourteen is when the US government decides, right, that's enough, that's enough cocaine being available. We gotta we gotta, we gotta lock this one up. So we get the Harrison act Um and and that makes it that's that restricts the sale of cocaine, right, It makes it a lot harder to get. People aren't buying it over the counter anymore. And then in nineteen twenty two, another law gets passed, which is one of the very first anti drug laws in the United States that effectively stops legal US extraction of cocaine. But of course the drug in various forms continued to flow into the United States from Latin America up through its land and sea borders. In the nineteen seventies, cocaine caught on big time as a drug for the rich and the upwardly mobile party set sometime in the late seventies, and obviously there's a lot of history in other countries, especially in Europe outside of the US. I'm focusing on the US here. Sometime in the late nineteen seventies are very early nineteen eighties. We don't exactly know when this happens because it's happening illegally, right, and there's no If we had the internet, then you would have a fucking Reddit post the day people figured out how to make fun and crest. But we don't know exactly when it happened. But sometime between the very end of the nineteen seventies and the start of the nineteen eighties, some drug chemists figure out that you can take powdered cocaine and you can dissolve it in water and then mix in baking powder and cook it down into rock like chunks. Now, this is easy to smoke, which makes it convenient. Right, it's easier to take, but it's also much purer than powder cocaine, right, which is often filler or more. Crack is around pure and it's significantly cheaper because of the way you're manufacturing the per exactly, the per dose cost is a lot less than it is with cocaine. So from kind of similar amounts of raw product, more people can get high, more often for less money. So here's where I fill in pop culture for you. Uh So, the the legend is that it was a dude in Oakland that figured it out. Oh yeah, that's that's the legend. Don't know that, but that's that's the legend. Right. And once uh you know, once it hit Callie with through like freeway Rick and and just some it starts to hit and it starts it's hits hard and ruins the crips and bloods. But that's but we'll get to that. Um. But I think what you're talking about, as far as how to make crack all of half of the slang that gets appropriated from hip hop into the Zeigeister comes out of black culture. Is actually it's crack slang. So like cooking in the kitchen, you know, chef, you know a chef spin, look at the flick of the wrist. All of that is about spinning. Crack over, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, it's all crack slang. You know. A huge piece of internet slang right now that Garrison and I say, probably more than is good for our health is based right, it's crack. The term it's it comes from free base right, like the origin and briefly the right wing tried to take it in what I mean like ideologically pure, and now it's just a general term for cool, yes, and will be being the bad, yeah, it will be being the base God like all these things, Like I think it's gonna happen as this is going, like I'm gonna keep pointing out rap lyrics to you to be or just slang and being like that's about crack. Yeah, it is great. And I really love that you point this out because from a from a from a cultural standpoint, crack is like on the level of the Simpsons in terms of how it's influenced the way people talk, yes, we're rappers. Where people called it rappers athletes, they call themselves chefs because they're cooking in the kitchen, which is where you make crack, right, right. So I want to quote from the New York Times here to kind of go over the economics of this new drug as it starts to hit the market. Quote, the ten dollar sale price made crack accessible to poor people who could never have come up with two hundred or more that affluent users paid for a gram of powder. Crack produced an intense but fleeting high that pushed many users to buy again and again until they ran out of money. And that is one of the things about crack is that like it hits harder and faster as generally the case when you free base something than railing it or insufflating, to use the scientist insufflation as the scientific term for snorting something um like. So, for example, if you're taking like a powdered hallucino generous psychedelic like a two C or something um, if you eat it in a pill, right, which is the way most people take that sort of drug, it could take an hour for you to come up. If you snort it, it comes up much faster and then insuff like if you're actually free basing something. And I don't think you can free base most of those drugs, although I don't know that anyone's tried, but free basing hits you faster, like for example, d m T, which is the drug you know that all of the tech gurus talk about the way in which they tend to take it in like the ceremonies that they're kind of co opting from indigenous Latin Americans as ayahuasca. You're drinking it as a t it takes a while to come up, you vomit a lot. But you can also basically you can basically free base d MT if you just take the straight crystals out and you turn it into a crystal and you smoke it in a crack pipe and it hits right the funk away, but it's much shorter, right. Yeah, most of my most of the people that I do know that either got hooked and got off that you could communicate with, you know what I'm saying, who figured out a way fought their way through to get off the stuff. That's what they say. They are like, there's honestly, there is nothing like that hit it is so fast and so intense, and that's why you get hooked immediately and you'll give up everything for it. Because he's like they like the Homies would explain to me. It's like, I'm glad, I'm off it now, but I'm telling you that high, that first high. You know what I'm saying. It's like you never really reached that other high, that high again, but that first high. They're like, you're there's there are no words for it. That's why it's so I mean you Also, I do want to focus on the economics here because another thing is that not only is the high so intense, but you achieve a it's achievable. So you're looking at if you've got if you're someone who uses cocaine, and you're looking at, well, it's gonna a night of coke is going to be two hundred bucks, right, We're probably not going to do that. Some people do get that addicted, but for most people it's like, okay, so I will occasionally buy two hundred bucks in cocaine for a night to party cracks tin bucks a hit, Yeah, I was gonna gets cheaper that, And that's how it is. That's how cheap it is at the start, it gets a hell of a lot cheaper. So that's something you're having a bad day, ship's rough, you're feeling bad, you know, any time for pocket dollars you can fucking call again, right, yeah, any Obviously this becomes a problem. Um. So obviously this of course leads to overdoses. Another problem is that it is actually kind of hard, unless you're being really ridiculous with cocaine, to overdose just by snorting it. With actual like quality cocaine, it's harder to do that than it is smoking free base, because you can burn a shipload of crack really fast, right, and it's difficult for you to tell what you're getting, and the cooking like, you know, the strength can vary and stuff, So people start accidentally consuming a lot more of the drug than they've been used to. Obviously. The other issue is that smoking freebase is so much harsher on the body than just inhaling powder. You know, it's not good for you obviously to sport cocaine, and there's issues like deviated septum and stuff that health issues you get from that, But you're not ruining your lungs when you're smoking. When you're when you're inhaling cocaine, right, it's not good for you, but you're not destroying your lungs in addition to fucking with your heart. Crack is it's it's it's all the worst parts of cigarettes and all of the worst parts of cocaine super charge. It ages you. Yeah, they're yeah like that that used to be like for for me, one of the biggest like deterrence one. N it wasn't none of him commercials, It wasn't a song. It was the site. Uh, someone you went to cool with that now looks like your grandparents and it and it was just and the fact that like and just that nothing else mattered, Like how are you You're just sitting like if you ever hopefully Robert, you've never walked into a crack house. Now. I don't know if that's true, but hopefully maybe it's some maybe somewhere in Prague knowing your ass. But like, uh, out here, like the site, it's it is probably the most heartbreaking site you can imagine because you're just like, I know these, I know y'all, like you, how did you become this? Yeah? So I think the point that we built to here is that crack is indeed a hell of address. Yes, And obviously people get better very quickly get better at making and I think you know, there's no proving where it came from. Oakland is a pretty good guess in terms of the first people to figure that the ship out that that that that makes would make total sense to me. Obviously, the Bay areas where innovation comes in, right resistance, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, um. But you know who else is constantly innovating? The sponsors of this podcast, well, yes, pharmaceutical companies A K. John Dealers, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, and in a much Also, the thing I don't want to be doing here is like demonizing and we'll talk more about this, is demonizing crack because it is addictive. It is a drug that has serious physical consequences. Yeah, there's nothing about crack cocaine that is worse than painkillers, than like than the ox is. Right, there's no a Yeah, and when we get to any sentences, there's a big difference. Yes, we can talk about why that's so problematic. Yeah, we'll be talking about that now. But first here's the crack of products for you. Ah, we're back. So there's a lot of misinformation in moral panic, and it is tough to kind of seriously talk about how fucking gnarly crack is for a lot of people, um and also not go to the moral panic shift that you get about it, which is which is what we're about to talk about now. Um So, I want to talk before we start talking about the crack epidemic and the moral panic it causes. I want to talk about the struggles that Black American families were going through as the nineteen seventies gave away to the swing in eighties. So from the post World War One era to the nineteen sixties, Black Americans migrated from rural parts of the United States to cities across the United States and unprecedented numbers. This is probably the most significant demographic shift that has ever occurred in the history of the United States. A huge fucking thing that happens. It's the Great Migration, and my family is one of them. Yeah right, yeah, yeah, and yeah. Um So, because there's all sorts of bullshit restrictions on where and which are, many of which are legally enforced, but a lot of which were just sort of like guys will show up outside of your house and funk with you and your family if you do this on where you can live as a black person in this period, a lot of the people who are doing this great migration are forced into crowded neighborhoods with underfunded serve obviously prop like elephant of the room, you know, all this, Like I'm not explaining let's see right right, this is a thing to go over because it's Yeah, it's history that for certain I didn't encounter in school and in anything more than the Vegas terms. Yeah, I don't want to feel like I'm not explaining your do you know? Do you know that this happened to you? Yes? I do know. Yeah, Like, are again to add some color to this, like you'll probably get to this also too. But like my family, you know, my father's side, how we got to California was was through Texas, and that was and and traditionally betwe in Texas and Oklahoma. Most families from there probably got there, uh because of the chance to become a cowboy, you know, where you could work for yourself, and that was you know, almost all of food on your neck. Yea of American cowboys were actually free slaves, you know. And then and then from there we all went to Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego because of these these housing projects, like the Watts Towers that that these housing vouchers that brought specifically Jason Petty's family to California, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, And that's like that's what happens to most too, to a huge chunk of people, and they get forced into these neighborhoods like Watts, right, and and there's other neighborhoods and their parts of the unit. Because this is this is happening a lot in southern California. This is also happening just to Shipload and the play SIT's primarily happening to is like the Eastern seas and chunks of the chunks of the urban Midwest, right, Great Lakes regions, stuff, Minneapolis. You know, this is when all of this is happening. And across the board, these black families are being forced into not just these crowded neighborhoods with underfunded services, but low paid, insecure industrial jobs. Often they're being brought in to deal with because unionized white workers are too expensive rights, so they're being brought in as as strike breakers and stuff. And this is and then as soon as that happens, right, you have so you have that being done by these capitalists, and then we get nafta. Right, so suddenly what jobs they had start to fall out from under right, um as manufacturing and ship moves across the border. Um. It's also worth noting that a ton of these of the particularly the black men working these industrial jobs, are doing so in dangerous like being exposed like deadly chemicals, like in horrific ways that would have been that were illegal, but it happened, you know. Um. So while all this is going on, white families are considering their you know, flight to suburban areas and at an that takes off to um and you know, these suburban houses that cost about as much as three good lunches due today, they start moving into an accumulating wealth. They go up hundreds of thousands of dollars in value by the time the owners reach retirement age. Now, when the civil rights movement wins its major victories, obviously a lot had gotten better for black families. But this has what one journal of social welfare paper paper i read called a quote perverse, unintended impact on the inner city. And I want to quote from that. Now, successful African Americans move their families to newly integrated communities, leaving an even higher concentration of poverty and the predominantly African American inner city. Based on an extensive literature review, Small and Newman two thousand one identified the increasing concentration of poverty during the nineteen seventies and into the nineteen eighties, particularly among African Americans, as primarily the result of three phenomena black middle class flight, continued residential discrimination, especially against less wealthy African Americans, and the departure of low skilled jobs from the Northeast and Midwest cities. And again, one of the reasons why this is so devastating is when the black families that make money leave these inner city neighborhoods because of the way the tax system is set up in the United States, all of the income they had that was going to schools in the inner cities leaves, right. It's a big part of it. So the nineteen seventies are a challenging decade for many people in the United States. Um, the economic stagna and this is across the board, right, this is why Jimmy Carter loses reelection. The economy ships, the fucking bed, there's gas lines, everything's fucked up. But obviously, where everyone is suffering, nobody suffers worse than Black people in the inner cities, that is the most hard the hardest hit region of the country. As a more globalized economy ships factory jobs off to foreign countries, advancing technology meant that what good working class jobs remained required computer literacy and other training that folks you'd grown up in economically disadvantaged schools didn't have access to write. Um. Everything just builds upon itself, So poverty and long term unemployment are associated with a variety of other negative things overcrowded housing, PTSD, team pregnancy, school dropout, violence, crime, and drug and alcohol abuse. As poverty worsens in the inner cities, all these things grow more common for black families. For a variety of reasons, Black kids since emancipation have been more likely than white kids to grow up in a one parent household. The rate of two parent households was stable among black families from emancipation up to the sixties. It was around seventy right, so about seventy Black kids grow up in two parent households. For white kids it's ninety percent, so it's lower for black families in up to the nineteen sixties, but still the vast majority of kids, right are growing up in two parent households. Once you hit the seventies, that or the sixth of the late sixties, really that number starts to drop like a fucking stone. By the mid nineteen hundreds, only a third of Black Aerican children lived in two parent households. Yeah like that that. I was unaware of how fucking sharp that drop it. But there's a there's, there's there's depending on how hotep you are, there's a lot of answers to that, right, But I do think that this this moment is so it's so pivotal and so underreported um in the sense that it's like so much of our culture now is came out of this moment. So this is this inner city as you're talking about, especially along the Eastern seaboard. This is the Bronx, the movie, the movie Warriors, Right, it's this, It's this moment. It's this overcrowding, underfunding, this city that you know, being a city of rubble, and that there was you know, broken down buildings everywhere. Because if you're a slum lord, it's cheaper to just destroy the building and get the insurance then try to you know, fix it or or or you know, be a responsible landlord. Just burn it down and just let the rubble happen. UH A big power outage in in UH in New York, which is what which actually happened, which is what the movie Warriors takes place in. But it's ultimately it is this moment that d J cool herk from from from Jamaica moves over, you know what I'm saying, and plugs his turntable into a power line and does the first park jam, which creates hip hop. You know what I'm saying. It was out of this time. This is what creates all this ship yo saying. It was this moment, and it was, but it's important to understand. It's like, oh yeah, it was cool. They were throwing parties in the park. Well they were living in rubble. Y understand I'm saying, because we were forced to with with no music programs in our schools. You know, I'm saying nothing, There was nothing provided that there's no as you talk about the rubble, it's not you. And I want to really hit on this because this ties directly back into crack. It's not just you know, shady landlords. It's not just that things are underfunded. It's that we talk about this center Robert Moses episodes, Black neighborhoods are bulldozed in a bunch literally bulldozed in a bunch of countries, sometimes with like the military essentially helping to do it in order to make way for ship like overpass um that effectively than walls those areas off from the rest of the cities. And what's important here, why I'm going over this, is that this is a thirty ish year you know, obviously it goes back further than that. But this specific process um, all of these things, these these massive drops and wealth, um, this this collapse of of you know, the rate of two parent households in the black community, all of these things are the result of thirty forty year long trends right where things happen very steadily over that period. They hit their height right as crack becomes a thing. And so all of them get blamed on crack, right because it's easy to say that, well is community. All these black people got hooked on crack, and that's why everything fell apart. Ship was falling apart due to specific policy decisions for decades, and it hit its height during the crack, and that that's critical to know, otherwise you're gonna wind up blaming crack for everything. It's not to blame for everything, yes, um, it's it just is not. Um. Obviously, it sure doesn't help, you know, like it does not reversity of these trends. But that that's like if it's like somebody has a heart attack while they're like during a fucking run, and then you hit him in the head when they finish it, and it's like, well, you know they were having problems before you hit him on the head. Yes, exactly. I don't know. That's a bad way to that's a stupid way to describe, but I don't know. Again somewhere, so yeah, during we're gonna be talking about crack today, obviously, and it plays a role in this. But again, this is this is going on for a long time. And I want to quote again from that paper I read from earlier. So policy may have inadvertently contributed to the decline in marriage. During the nineteen sixties, many states denied a f DC payments aid to families with dependent children. The single mothers suspected of living with a man. These types of eligibility requirements were struck down by the Supreme Court in nineteen sixty eight. However, even under the revised welfare policy, poor couples had an incentive to cohabit instead of mary in order to maintain welfare eligibility. And there's this is one of the thing because one of the things that Crack gets blamed for is the destruction of the of the black family, all of these black men who abandoned their families. Right, this is the this is the right wing lion on what happens. And no, in the nineteen sixties, twenty years before we've got Crack on the street. US states are denying aid to families to single mothers who are suspected of living with a man. And what usually happens before marriage is you cohabitate, right, Um, so suddenly you're penalized for that if you're not already married. See that's what by like, depending on how hots up you are, because that's in a lot of like the black like a lot of the black act of his circles is like that was a process of demasculating and devaluing the black man even further by being like, uh, well, if y'all need help, you can't handle daddy in the house, you know what I'm saying. So it's like, well, dang. And then what they talked about among our community is like what it might have done to our psyche. Not I don't think this is very fair, but their argument is what has done in our psyche to look at our women and be like, you chose to check over me, you know what I'm saying. And I think that's a that's a very that's a very man no sphere way to look at it. But that being said, the idea that like it do kind of feel like the government pitted us against each other Joe saying, I mean, and that that move right there, A strong case can be made it does a lot more damage than crass. Right. Yes, there's a really good documentary if people want to know more about this and like the kind of the human side of this, called the Pruitt I Go myth prove it. I Go was a government housing development in St. Louis Um during this kind of period of time, I think fifties sixties, and that documentary does a good job of explaining how the way in which benefits were handled, um led to the dissolution of a lot of families, and like kind of incentivized that. It's a very dark story, but that documentary I found, I felt did a really good job of it. Um So, obviously, the cause of all of these problems is complicated and goes on for a while. But where the credit comes, as far as the media is concerned and as far as US politicians are concerned, all of this is the fault of crack cocaine, which starts to enter US inner city communities in nineteen eighty one, primarily in southern California, although where it would take off the most and do the most damage is the huge dense cities of the Northeast, places like fucking Baltimore. Right. Um So, crack is immediately big business. A lot of it gets sold to people who live who live in this communities, but and this is often ignored, much, if not most, of the money comes from people who lived elsewhere outside of the inner city, often in more affluent areas, who would drive into inner city communities to buy crack. And what this actually is means there's a graph going around Twitter right now that shows where money moves within kind of a graph of an urban area, and it all comes from the inner city out to the suburbs, right, because where are the people who live who own the buildings that poor people in the inner city live out in the fucking suburbs, right. So one of the things that crack represents is money coming from affluent suburbs and entering the inner city. Right. Nothing else is doing There's no way, like really not other meaningful ways money is coming from outside into the inner city. So that's part of why this is a big deal. We've talked about how negative the impact is on people, but one of the things this means is that there's fucking money coming now. Um. So of course the fortunes to be made meant that a lot of money was on the table for people who were willing to be more violent than other people who wanted that money. So you do get a lot of as there always is when cash is on the table in those quantities, murders over matters of profit and to keep their operations safe from the police. Um. There are of course significant social costs due to the use of the drugs. There's people who neglect their kids and mistreat their partners and spend money that are needed for other things. But narcotics um and the static statistics on this are pretty bleak, and I don't want to stray away from those either, So I'm gonna quote from an analysis in Chicago Booth University. Quote the rise and crack use from nineteen eighty four and nineteen eighty nine is associated with a doubling of the number of murdered black males aged fourteen to seventeen, a thirty percent to increase for those aged eighteen to twenty four, and a ten percent increase for those twenty five and over. Thus, crack accounts for much of the observed variation in homicide rates over this time period. In addition, the proportion of black children in foster care more than doubled, Fetal death rates and weapons arrests of racks of blacks rose by more than and black babies low birth weights increased by five percent. Now, this is really bad. But what what's happening in the media as this massive murder search happens is crack is being associated as a drug that makes people murder, right, the drug that makes people lose their mind. That is not what It's not it's it's the money. Yes, it's normal economics. That happens everywhere else. It's really like what you're explaining, I think again, it's like if you just under just an understanding of economics in general, Like what we're doing is this is an influx of venture capital. You know why, Like what fund did. It's like you're gonna go to the bank and let them white boys tell you know. You know what I'm saying, You're gonna keep you have to keep, you know, dressing up and kind of shucking and jiving for these people to come invest in your things. Or it's like you go get it out the mud, you go get it, go get it on your own corner. You invest in your own So the thought was like, I mean, I mean, it's literally there. It's the narrative of every jay Z album, right, is like I invested in myself. How I did it is I sold crack, got out the game and invested in us. You know what I'm saying, it's it's it's nipsey hustle. It's like, so like you said, like you can have this media narrative of like, you know, all this is terrible. You did it on the backs of each other, which might be true, you know what I'm saying. But that being said, it's like, where else is there any other influx of capital that like that is self generated and that I don't owe. And it's like where I mean where you where you think where you think we got that from? We got it from the mafia, Like you you learn from the mafia. That's what they did, Joe said. So it's like, oh, well, that's okay, that's how you get it that way. You don't ask nobody else. You keep it in the family, you know what I mean. And it's it's, uh, this is I mean again, the point that we're making here is that crack there are specific things and and as we'll talk about like babies with low birth wings that's a that's a part of that. There are specific problems that are just due to the inherent like characteristics of crack. But the massive increase in murders and the proportion of kids who go into foster care and large part because they've lost parents. Um, that is do the thing that has entered the community that has caused that violence is fucking cash, right, That's what when we're the Crack epidemic is a fucking yeah, cash epidemic. It's a gold rush, right, yeah, exactly. Um, so this is all sucked up, but obviously one of probably even debatably, the thing that winds up being most toxic from all of this is the moral panic that follows article. And this is where the moral panic over crack starts. There is a nineteen article in the New England Journal of Medicine which goes viral among the media of the time, which is just starting to kind of transition into the twenty four hour news cycles that we've got now right, we're in the early stages of that with TV media. The author of this article is a guy named Dr Ira chasten Off, and he claimed, based on a couple of cases, that children of mothers who used crack were smaller, sicker, and less social than other infants. Now, to his credit, chat Off is like, hey, we only have a few people in the study. This is very small, It is imperfect. This is I'm doing this because I think there might be a problem in this small batch study means that we should do a larger study to determine if there is a serious population wide problem, right, which is how you do science. I don't think he's doing anything wrong here. But the problem and this is again and early we start seeing this stuff. We we we've all lived through this ship the last couple of years. Right with these you get these little studies about oh iver, mecton or whatever. There's this and then suddenly that gets blown up to a bunch of guys people taking fucking fish medicine or whatever, and there's people dying and stuff. Um, this is one of the first times that happens because nobody listens to chast and Off being like, so, this is a really tiny study and we need to do more research before we draw any conclusions. They lose their fucking babies. And by the the people losing their minds are the goddamn the mainstream media, the legacy media, and I'm gonna quote from the fucking New York Times here. As a medical writer, Harriet Washington wrote of this period in her book Medical Apartheid. Dr Chasnov's provisional research was swallowed whole, then regurgitated in a racialized form by newspaper, magazine and even medical accounts. Americans were told on the nightly news that crack exposure in the womb destroyed the unique brain functions that distinguished human beings from animals, an observation that no one had connected to the chemically identical powdered form of the drug that affluent whites were shoveling up their noses. The legal scholar Dorothy Roberts argues in her Reproductive history, Killing the Black Body, that by for focusing on maternal use of a drug associated with black people, the press promoted the notion that the monstrous crack smoking mother was typical of black women. Yeah, and uh, this is where the real herding starts. This is what actually, this is crack, gnarly drug. Lot of people get hurt because chemically what crack does. The money that comes in brings a lot of murder with it. The thing that's most devastating is right here. It comes as a result of this fucking moral path. The crack ain't the bastard of the story. No, No, it's curious. Um, yeah, it's it's adjacent to the bastard. And you know what's adjacent to behind the bastards? Politics, the wildhood politics deeply intertwined, especially this week, but also the products and services that support this podcast. So check this out and purchase things we have returned crack giveaway, all right, little Dave's pill reference. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Um so um. I want to continue that quote from the New York Times about kind of how how this all works. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts argues in her history Killing the Black Body that all this focus on the specific danger to black babies helped push a notion of the monstrous crack smoking weather in the media. Washington Post columnists Charles Croudhammer, famous for having never once been right, wrote a popular column in which he alleged that black women were spawning a bio underclass of impaired children whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth. Crowdhammer wrote, the dead babies maybe the lucky ones. Oh my god. Yeah, this guy still gets paid to right. Shit. Fucking Charles Crowdhammer again never been right in his entire life? Is it? Let me stupid? Um? Yeah? I I just again when you are when you write the words bio underclass, Yeah, come off, you should wonder Am I doing a phrenology? Have I just have I just started? Have I reinvented race science as a moral panic? Yeah? Baby, doesn't? Am I doing the thing that men in wigs did a hundred years ago, like, Um, yes you are Charles Crowd, yes man, so yeah, um I yeah. Anyway, Um, all this concern over unborn babies and crack fed nicely into the Christian extremist movement that had gotten Reagan elected again. We've talked about this in our episodes on Focus on the Family, on Philish Slaflely. Um, this all feeds into each other. Right, this is all happening at the same time. You've got the religious right is a thing and they have just now because they started out. The religious right gets initially involved because they're angry that schools have been integrated. Right that Bob Jones University has been forced to take in black people because it gets federal funding. Um, you can't segregate your schools. But that's not popular. So they turned to abortion as like the real thing to hit. Um. And right as they're really getting the anti abortion movement churning up, there's all this concern overr unborn babies and crack, which which really jels great. Um, And I'm gonna quote from the Times again here. News organizations embraced far fetched ideas like the one advanced by doctors who believed they could discern babies who had been exposed in the womb by the tone of their cries. In nineteen ninety, Time magazine argued that the case for limiting the rights of women and elevating the rights of fetuses was gaining strength based on the fact that maternity wards around the country were ringing quote with the high pitched cat cries of crack babies who may face lifelong handicaps as a result of their mother's drug use. Man, there's so much sinister, Like I'm mourn like the amount of this we internalized and kind of like weaponized against each other, and just hearing it now so many years later, it was like you motherfucker, you know what I'm saying, And and the reality of like, yeah, dog, like yo, this you shouldn't be doing crag. Why are you pregnant? Fam you know what I'm saying, and like and and just but just all of that sort of together, it's just it makes it even more sinister to be like, you know, we even actually, like even among our own community, peddled somebody, you know what I'm saying, and that that that kind of hurts also, you know, yeah, yeah, um and this, so, so, this and and this New York Times article I'm quoting from is a modern one where they are kind of taking themselves in the past to task for what they did. And the New York Times is a huge It's dope. It's also like, this isn't the only time that happens in New York Times. It seems like you guys, actually often because of these fucking opinion columnist assholes that you bring on start arguing for like terrible ship that has nightmarished consequences on the world, and then twenty years later the good journals will be like, oh, turns out we had a huge fault, like like we we were largely responsible, but this nightmare. The Times amplifies what gets called the damn generation theory. Their editorial page argues in nine nine that it's going to cost more than seven million dollars to prepare twenty thousand children in the state of Florida for school because of like how damaged they were from cracked. There's zero evidence of this. That's just a lie. That's just fucking nonsense. The former executive editor of The New York Times, a guy named Abe Rosenthal, writes a column titled The Poisoned Babies, where he asks authorities to suspend parental rights for women who are addicted to crack. Um, now, there's evidence as to what happens when you do that, and it causes women who are addicted to crack and pregnant not to seek medical treatment that allows them to provide adequate care for their babies, which is what does the harm more than the crack. It is not look controversial ground here. Obviously, not good to smoke crack while you are pregnant, not good to drink while you're pregnant. There's a number of things you ought not do while you're pregnant. Also, human beings for thousands of years and many cultures drank alcohol regularly with babies, and and and those babies came out and we're fine and learned things right. Um not, it's not good. There are health consequences associated to smoking crack in the womb. The d data suggests the real harm comes from driving these women away from treatment and adequate medical care, which is what causes problems for the baby more than anything. Yeah, yeah again, I mean not good to smoke crack with the baby. Worst to do what we did. I mean, it's the same, like it's such a just a like a parallel for even immigration issues. Like if I know, you know what I'm saying that you know of a very minor, completely treatable thing is if I would just go to the clinic, you know, go to the the county, you know, a hospital, it'll be fine. But if there are ice agents at there, I'm not gonna go, you know I'm saying. And even when even when the even during the whole like sort of crackdown you know under President Trump about federal you know, that mandatory reporting to like immigration from the police, why the police was like, I'm not doing that, and they're like, and it's not like I'm patting the police on the back, but I'm just just being logical here. And they were being logical. They're like, well, then no one's gonna report anything because why would I do. So then it's like, well, no, I'm not gonna tell I'm not gonna report nothing because if I do, you might deport me or think I should be deported, you know what I'm saying. So it's like that that that uh policy exacerbates the problem. Is what I'm saying, is like and in and in so many other areas of culture, it's the same thing. It's like, I'm not gonna shoot, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not telling y'all nothing, because if you do, that's gonna happen, and that and then that avoidance exacerbates the problem. I said that, right, But yeah, yeah, and that's that's where the issue comes from. It. In nineteen nine, the New York Times is coverage peaked in a front page story that warned of an onslaught that fall of the quote first big wave of children exposed to crack in the womb. The journalist who wrote that article now acknowledges it as both alarmist and unsubstantiated, which is again nice. But one of the things this does is that police, uh, police unions and whatnot and political figures start flipping out about crack babies like they're like like it's like it's an alien life form coming to the planet Earth to do us harm, and we have to ready our fucking guns to fight the invaders. Right. That is how they talk about this, And as the paper of record, it was the Times job to lead credence to these claims, so that police and political figures can how including Joseph Biden, by the way, can howl about super predators and justify harsh new mandatory minimum sentences to stop the raging danger of drug crime. As the panic reached its peak, Congress passed a bill that included the hundred to one rule. This made it mandatory to assign a ten year sentence to anyone caught with fifty grams of crack, which is about as much crack in terms of weight as you would get in a fun sized bag of chips. For comparison, someone caught with cocaine would need a full suitcase worth of high grade cocaine to qualify for the same penalty. So this is what quote unquote destroyed a generation to the extent that that actually happened. This is what does it And I'm going to read a quote from an AP right up here. An Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that between nineteen seventy five and two thousand nineteen, the US prison population jumped from two hundred forty five nine to one point four three million Americans. Among them, about one in five people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime. The racial disparities reveal the war is uneven toll. Following the passage of stiffer penalties for crack, cocaine, and other drugs, the black and car sor ration rate in America exploded from about six hundred per one hundred thousand people in nineteen seventy to eighteen hundred and eight thousand and two thousand to eight hundred and eight thousand, sorry the eighteen hundred and eight and two thousand. In the same time span, the rate for the Latino population grew from two hundred and eight per hundred thousand people to six hundred and fifteen. Well, the white incarceration rate grew from one hundred and three people per hundred thousand to two hundred and forty two. So yeah, you're looking at number one, the rate at the start of this of this process, the rate of incarceration for blacks in America is six times what it is for Americans, and then it triples. Yeah, it's so yeah, I think, like for the listeners sake, like let's let me go back to the hundred to one ratio in in that Like, so, what we're saying is one ounce of crack gets the same amount of jail time as a hundred pounds of cocaine. Like, so one ounce of crack same amount of jail time as a hundred So if you ask, so, if you so, just, I mean, come on, guys, put your thinking caps on. You've got a one ounce of crack versus a hundred ounces, Okay, which one of y'all you think is gonna distribute the stuff? Who you thinks the sales person? Do you know what I'm saying versus just the user? Like I you're telling me we get the same jail time? Do you know much money you have to have to have a hundred ounces of cocaine? Like yeah, So just like like hear how sinister and purposeful? This is like we're not making this ship up like this is it. It's not a conspiracy. These are laws. Part of the reason why because this is one of the things that's happening here is we've talked about in our Bill Cooper episodes, is that a lot of the black community and this some of this happens through hip hop, is embracing a set of conspiracy theories. And we'll talk about that more. But part of why they're doing it, because we talk there's some stuff in there. There's some especially the Bill Cooper stuff that gets adopted by hip hop that's not at all accurate. But part of why people would believe in conspiracies is that you could not seek to damage a community more than they then happens here, right, Like this, it's surgically targeted to hurt black communities, Black inner city communities. Like it's like it's like somebody dropped a bomb. Yeah. And when these laws are yeah, and you're saying, like, am I taking crazy? Feels I feel like we're being targeted, Like no, you're not. You're just not listen, you're five five, You just you don't have any fathers in your home, you know what? You just you're just like no. I feel like, well, no, you guys are just violent. Look, I mean, this is what's happening. You guys die more than us, isn't. You're in a jail more like yeah, but I'm trying to tell you family, like it just don't feel to say. And it's like it's like, well, there's got to be something going on here. Yeah. And it's worth noting too that this surge and arrests that we've just talked about, there is no increase in addiction treatment resources and these communities that follows the surgeon arrests. Zero I found an article in the Chicago Booth Review that analyzed a recent study measuring the impact of crack cocaine by University of Chicago professor Stephen Levitt and a bunch of other smart college guys and attempted to determine what actual harms could be laid at the feet of crack as opposed to things like the legal climate around it. They concluded, quote, the destructive effects of crack cocaine were because of the prohibition itself rather than the usage. If crack were legal, the authors argue, there would not have been as much violence. Levitt himself added, all the evidence suggests that the violence is closely tied to the fact that the suppliers of crack the gangs were killing each other because they could make huge profits. Suppliers were competing. It seems that the consumption effects of crack weren't that bad in comparison to the one and therefore, while the effective crack is not negligible, it is not as large as some of the doomsayers of claim damn it is not. The problem was not crack. If people if if all drugs had been legal, right, if we've never had a prohibition culture. In a nineteen eighty one an entrepreneur, some Mark Zuckerberg type right in Oakland had been like, I've invent to crack and you know has his Apple type announcement for crack cocaine. There's some lives that will be negatively effective, right, some some families will be harmed it. It's not good. Crack is Again I'm not a prohibitionist, but it's a gnarly drug. It's not good for you to do. But what you wouldn't have is any of this ship. You would have some specific people that have problems with it, and some like specific areas probably where it's more common than others, and there would be some gnarly ship as a result of that, But you don't have neighborhoods destroy I was gonna say that again. The laura around here is that like crack, there's there's there's the cribs before crack, and there's the crib after, you know, and the pre Like we talked about this in the in the when we first met in the Black Panther episode of Yeah, it's like they're just the children. PRIs for the children of the of the panthers, you know what I'm saying, and knuckling up, you know, fist fights, rolf rolf housing protecting their turf. It crack has brought the guns. Yeah and uh and yeah. So like you saying that like is a yeah, it's a big that that's that's so important to to understand that nuance and it's I have to I want to emphasize here like we had in this might be a good way to explain it. A bunch of because of the mix of this suddenly, this social justice movement inspired by the murder of George Floyd is is everywhere as huge. There's protests. There's also a lot of need as a result of the pandemic as a result of issues relating from the protests, and you get a bunch of different community organization in a bunch of different states raising huge amounts of money through crowdfunding, right, and there's a shiploaded drama that comes from that and a drop we're talking drama because a hundred grand came in suddenly, and so people who have never seen that much money in their lives had a plan for it. Originally, and then ship gets gnarly between people, because that's what happens when you introduce a bunch of money suddenly, right with crack, you're talking about suddenly groups like the Crips and the Bloods, who were very different organizations prior to crack looking at million dollars that you can put down in a few yes, right, like you can make that money fucking quimmediately. Yeah, of course, of course people get murdered, right, Um, Like, yeah, it's it's there's no other way for that to have gone. Now, what's most interesting about the crack epidemic to me is what stopped it. After nine the link between crack and adverse social outcomes for Black Americans disappears statistically. The only exception is the homicide rate for black men aged eighteen to twenty four, which remains is elevated because now a bunch of different groups, the Crypts and the Bloods and other groups like that, have gotten used to selling drugs for money and making that a very gnarly business, right, and so yeah, people keep murdering each other. Um, But the other stuff we've talked about, including like infant birth weight and stuff that goes away crack use in terms of overall quantity remained stable, so the number of people the amount of crack consumed does not decline after but the negative effects due to it on a societal basis among the black community stop. And what's interesting is that because this is because the there's no expansion in the number of people smoking crack, what researchers find is that people who had been smoking crack don't stop right, they continue to smoke um, but new users stop doing the drug. So the people who are already addicted stay addicted because it is crack cocaine and it's very addicted addictive. But after new people don't really start in insignificant population amounts. New people are not coming into the ranks of people using this drug. The reason that the overall amount consumed remains stable is that there's a breakthrough in crack manufacturing, which makes the price plummet, so users are able to afford more, and thus the total amount consumed is stable, but the amount of new people who are doing crack stops expanding. Levitt points out that the expansion of crack in the black community is halted not due to arrests or to fearmongering, but from social learning, Yes, what happens is the first generation of people who got addicted. It's bad. It's really bad for them. And yeah they're younger siblings, their cousins, their kids see this and are like, wow, it seems like I shouldn't do crack. I am because that's what I was explaining before. I am the product of that where I was like, oh, yeah, I don't know if we should do that. And like I said, like hip hop got together and was like what songs like self destruction and like making sure we made using hip hop. We I wasn't. I was five years old, but hip hop made using crack not cool in a lot of ways, you know what I mean. And that's yeah, um, that's that's what happens, right, And so you get you know, the suddenly the you know, the crack baby panic goes away because it was never really real. Um, and because the age of crack users goes steadily up. Right, the same amount of people are smoking, but they're they're not having kids anymore because they're older. As profitability drops on a per head basis, violent crime around crack fell as well. It simply was not worth killing for the dollar amount of crack that people were likely to have on them, Right, the same amount is worth ten dollars instead of two and fifty dollars. Well, maybe it's not worth throwing down here, you know. Um. And so in spite of everything the government had actually done, the problem got better in part because crack got cheaper and more available. Right. That is for the people who are like, if all of this stuff did and legal from the start, we wouldn't have had a problem. That's strong evidence, right then, like crack gets cheaper and the crack epidemic gets less bad. That's not the only thing. Again, a lot of this, as you said, is cultural. It's it's the it's the community taking agency. It's people talking to each other, it's people making wise decisions in their own self interest, and it's people trying to talk to their fellows to get them to stay away from this stuff that's pretty bad for you. Um. And it's one of those things. Everything gets better in spite of the government, which if Ronald Reagan was a guy who actually meant anything that he said, right, Because he's the guy who's like, I'm the scariest words in the English language, or I'm from the government, and I'm there to help. If you're actually believe in anything as a conservative, this is a perfect example of things. Right. Oh, the government just made this worse. Yeah, exactly, Like here's your proof. Yeah. Actually, the free and the free market did kind of solve this one credit where it's dude, this is a um. So. The crack epidemic is well past sight by, but it remained a common subject in the news and part of the repeated attempts by guys like Joseph Robinett Biden to expand the prison industrial complex. Black inner city communities were well in recovery by this point, but cracked was a fat crack. Sorry, was a fact of life now, as were the tens of thousands of young black men serving decades of time for possession. And it was into this climate in the August of nineteen ninety six that A and again ninety is right. When the crack Evanica is cooling off, things are starting to get better. The black community is starting to breathe a little bit right. Um August of nineteen ninety six, a young journalist named Gary Webb publishes a massive three part investigation under the title Dark Alliance, The story behind the crack explosion. Now his employer is the San Jose Mercury, which is a scrappy new upstart paper. They had only a fraction of the budget of the l A Times, which is like the fucking New York Times for southern California. Right, it's a big It is a national level outlet, even though it's called the l A Times. Um. But obviously you know, they've got only a little bit of the l A Times this budget, and they've got none of the cache. But what they do have is a working understanding of this thing that's probably going to be a big deal in the future called the Internet. Right, San Jose Mercury figures out that the Internet is where journalism can go viral, and there maybe you could argue the very first outlet whoever figures this out in a meaningful way, Matt Drudge, is kind of right around the same time and gets a lot of this. He's a piece of ship, but he has kind of along those lines. Um. But the San Jose Mercury publishes this whole investigation Dark Alliance simultaneously online and in print, which is again kind of the first time this has been done for a big investigation. This right, up from the Columbia Journalism Reviews, Peter Cornblue summarizes what happens. The long three part series covered the lives and connections of three career criminals. Freeway Ricky Ross perhaps l A is most renowned crack dealer in the nineteen eighties, Oscar Danilo Blanden rays a right wing Nicaraguan X pay treat described by one US Assistant district attorney as the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States. And Juan Norvin Norvin in some documents Menenzez Cantarero, a friend of the fallen dictator Anastasia Samosa, who allegedly brought Blandon into the drug business to support the contrast and supplied him for an uncertain amount of time with significant quantities of cocaine. The first installment of the series, headlined Crack Plagues Roots are in Nicaraguan War, opened with two dramatic statements and this is quoting from the original article. Now for the better part of a decade of San Francisco Bay Area drug ring so sold tons of cocaine to the crips and blood street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions and drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the Central Intelligence Agency. The second paragraph, which captured even more public attention, read, this drug network opened the first pipeline between Columbia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the crack capital of the world. There it is so. If you have ever heard, either in a conversation or most recently in a prominent TV show The Boys, the claim that the CIA introduced crack to the inner cities, this is the origin point. This is one percent where that comes from. You made it. It all comes out of this article, right, because this article is the first time that you have someone saying in a very condensed, clear form, the CIA brought crack to the inner city by in order to fund the contrast. Right, that is that is the way this is. Now, that's actually not what the article says, because the CIA is not bringing crack anywhere. What the CIA is doing is allowing Nicaragua drug dealers to bring cocaine into the United States so that they can sell it to fund to right wing paramilitary in Nicaragua. That cocaine is then being turned into crack, because that's happening at the same time. Um. But yeah, the claims Web made in his article are a bit different from the version of the story that spreads kind of viral. What he provides as evidence to support the assertion that quote a cocaine for weapons trade supported US policy and undermined Black America. Now, while the article did not show, the articles did not show any direct stated intention of the CIA to spark a crack epidemic, it did lay out how the agency supported cocaine smugglers in order to fund the contrast, We're gonna talk that in a minute. But the third article doesn't touch on the CIA at all. It covers what we've just talked about in terms of sentencing discrepancies between black and white people for cocaine trafficking and how that harms the community. Webb pointed out that Ross, who was black, received a life sentence without parole. Blandon, a Nicaraguan man, had smuggled cocaine, and whereas Ross had sold crack, and Blandon serves just two years and then gets a bunch of money from the FEDS to be an informant. Um. So the primary gotcha. The story had was that it connected the two right wing dealer not Nicaraguan's, to the f d in freedom fighters and showed that they somewhat inexplicably had escaped a prosecution for a weird number of crimes. And this is the point at which I think we're gonna have to bring things to a close for the day, because we've got we'll be talking about in part two, Nicaragua, the contras, all of this, how the actual crack and coke, well, the cocaine tread because again, this is if you want to it's one of those things where, like the the inaccurate version of the story is the CIA brought crack to the inner cities. The act perfectly accurate version is the CIA allowed uh cocaine to be trafficked in mass into southern California, which was then turned into crack and that's what caused the crack epidemic. And then the other accurate for all and then the stuff we talked about in my episodes. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things where if you don't understand it, you might just say the CIA smuggled crack into the inner city. If you really understand it, the summary is still the CIA brought crack in the inter city. It's just a little more detailed that. Yeah, there's a few more steps in between, but the CIA did this. Yeah, yeah, the CIA is a bit well. But also, I mean, and here's the thing. One of the things that I do think is frustrating, because we're gonna we're about to talk in part two all about the CIA and some other groups, is yeah, the CIA has got a lot of blame for this. But um, where I'm standing not more than the New York Times, Right, That's that's where I'm fucking standing here and not and not more than Congress when the people passing these laws. Right, Um, that's where I'm fucking standing. Um, it's what it looks like to make oh, y'all multiple bastards. Man. Yeah, well I don't love it, but you know what I mean, that's the crack epidemic. In brief, Um, prop you've got anything to plug here, maybe hood politics, the show that we're doing, yeah, this on partnership with this way, Yeah, this is this is definitely like a you know, a little a newbie thing where we're doing like, you know, a collaboration on this where uh, this story takes place in the context of the stories that we're talking about on the