Crack is a smokable form of [[cocaine]] created by converting cocaine hydrochloride powder back into its freebase form.[^1] The invention of crack transformed cocaine from an expensive luxury drug into a mass-market commodity that devastated [[South Central Los Angeles]] and other American inner cities in the 1980s. ### Origins of Cocaine Smoking The practice of smoking cocaine originated independently in [[South America|South America]] and the [[United States]].[^1] In [[Peru]] and [[Bolivia]], users began smoking coca paste (pasta basica de cocaina, also known as base or basuco) the intermediate product created during cocaine processing) in the mid-1970s. Peruvian police psychiatrist Raul Jeri documented a cocaine "epidemic" that swept through [[Lima]]'s fashionable neighborhoods in 1974 and spread to other major Peruvian cities and then to [[Ecuador]] and Bolivia. ### Freebasing in the United States In the United States, Dr. Ronald K. Siegel of [[UCLA]] traced the discovery of freebasing to the [[San Francisco]] Bay Area in January 1974, around the same time coca paste smoking was becoming popular in Peru.[^1] California cocaine traffickers who traveled to Peru and [[Colombia]] "heard of the people down there smoking base." The Americans "mispronounced it, mistranslated the Spanish, and thought it was cocaine base." They looked up cocaine base in the Merck Manual and developed a chemical process to remove the hydrochloride salt from cocaine powder, "thus freeing the cocaine base. Hence the expression 'freebasing.'" By 1977, freebase kits were commercially available, with ads in the underground press and drug magazines.[^1] But since cocaine powder was so expensive ($2,500 an ounce and up), freebasing was initially practiced only by wealthy drug dealers and celebrities. Dr. Sidney Cohen wrote in 1980 that freebase was "the most expensive of all mood changers when price is measured against euphoria time. Affluent are the only ones who can afford it." Comedian Richard Pryor set himself on fire on June 9, 1980, while freebasing cocaine at his home in Northridge, outside L.A., suffering third-degree burns from the waist up. The media coverage of Pryor's accident made freebase widely known but also "reminiscent of the pre-Harrison Act yellow journalism," as one expert wrote in 1982. Drug researcher Steven Belenko wrote in 1993 that "the relatively high cost and difficulty of producing cocaine free-base made it less accessible to most cocaine users. An estimated 10% of cocaine users in the late 1970s also used free-base cocaine."[^1] In the low-income neighborhoods of South Central L.A., cocaine was virtually nonexistent in any form. According to a Rand Institute study, an ounce of cocaine powder in L.A. was selling for $4,844 in 1979 (other sources placed it at roughly $2,500). Between 1979 and 1982, ounce prices fell from $4,844 to $4,011; gram prices fell from $321 to $259; kilo prices dropped from around $75,000 to around $60,000. For the average buyer, cocaine remained extremely expensive. The pre-crack king of black L.A., [[Tootie Reese|Thomas "Tootie" Reese]], admitted during a taped conversation that most of his customers purchased only five or ten ounces, and he had only five kilo-size customers - amounts dwarfed by what later dealers would move.[^3] ### Medical Warnings Ignored [[Robert Byck|Dr. Robert Byck]], a Yale psychiatry and pharmacology professor who had collected and edited Sigmund Freud's cocaine papers, warned Congress in July 1979 that cocaine smoking "can represent the same threat that the speed epidemics of the 1960's represented in their time."[^1] He testified: "We do not yet have an epidemic of freebase or coca paste smoking in the United States. The possibility is strong that this might occur." Congress ignored the warning. No government action was taken to research or publicize the dangers. ### Crack and the Drug Explosion The transformation from freebase to [[Crack Cocaine|crack]] (a cheaper, mass-producible version of smokable cocaine) coincided with the flood of inexpensive cocaine entering the United States through the [[Contras|Contra]] drug network.[^1] [[Danilo Blandon|Danilo Blandón]] began selling wholesale quantities to [[Ricky Ross|"Freeway" Ricky Ross]] in [[Los Angeles]] around 1981-82, providing the city's street gangs with their first direct connection to the Colombian cocaine cartels and enabling the explosion of crack in South Central L.A.. By late 1982, two interrelated factors drove the explosion of crack in Los Angeles: Dr. Raul Jeri's much-ridiculed "epidemic" of cocaine smoking had finally arrived in the city, and a street-smart ghetto teenager who would come to be known as Freeway Rick emerged as the primary distributor.[^2] ### Pharmacology Smoking cocaine delivered an instantaneous high far more intense than snorting powder.[^1] Cocaine vapor hit the vast surface area of the lungs immediately, delivering plasma cocaine levels far higher than those achieved through nasal ingestion. David Paly, a Yale medical student who studied cocaine smokers in Lima, found blood plasma levels in the thousands of nanograms per milliliter (compared to roughly 100 for typical nasal ingestion) levels that lab director Peter Jatlow described as "the highest plasma levels of cocaine that he'd ever seen in someone who wasn't dead." ### First National Press Coverage On November 25, 1984, the first story about crack to appear in the national press was published by the Los Angeles Times, written by police beat reporter [[Andy Furillo]]. Headlined "South Central Cocaine Sales Explode into $25 Rocks," Furillo's story quoted police saying hundreds, perhaps thousands of young men, most of them gang members, were getting rich off cocaine trafficking in L.A.'s black community. He described several hundred rock houses operating in South Central and accurately predicted crack could "destroy South Central Los Angeles for years to come." The Times buried the story inside the paper.[^5] Furillo's story prompted the [[LAPD]] to launch raids on rock houses; a diversionary explosion during a December 13 raid killed a bystander. The story also triggered the first scientific study of the crack market by USC sociologists [[Malcolm Klein]] and Cheryl Maxson, and caught the attention of the Washington Post's L.A. bureau chief Jay Matthews, who wrote a December 1984 follow-up describing rock cocaine as "a marketing breakthrough that furnishes this middle-class drug to the city's poorest neighborhoods." The Post quoted [[DEA]] intelligence supervisor Bobby Sheppard saying he "saw no sign of rock cocaine spreading to the rest of the country, 'but I've got to believe that if it isn't there yet, it probably will be in the future.'" The story strangely compared crack to the clove cigarette fad of white teenagers.[^5] Robert Stutman, head of the DEA's New York office, testified in 1986 that crack first came to the attention of the New York field office in fall 1985, with the first significant seizure on October 25, 1985. NYPD commissioner Benjamin Ward stated that in January 1985, fewer than fifteen of all cocaine arrests citywide were for crack.[^5] ### Scientific Studies of the Crack Market Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson's 1985 USC study documented that "throughout the Black residential areas of Los Angeles County, there has been a recent, dramatic increase in cocaine dealing. . .in large part from the proliferation of cocaine 'rocks' and fortified 'rock houses' which, with certain refinements, constitute a new technology and organization for cocaine distribution." They estimated between one hundred and one thousand rock houses operating in South Central at any time. Some were being franchised. The study noted an "increasing trend in the distribution system is the use of street gang members in various dealing roles."[^5] The sociologists observed that crack was "at least currently seems to be ethnically specific. Cocaine is found widely in the Black community in Los Angeles, but is almost totally absent from the Hispanic areas." Ricky Ross explained: "There was no market until we created it. We started in our neighborhood and we stayed in our neighborhood." The study predicted with accuracy that the distribution system was "custom-made for other Black gang centers" and "could easily explode across the nation."[^5] ### National Spread via Street Gangs As the South Central market saturated, [[Crips]] and later Bloods gang members began traveling to other cities, establishing new crack markets using their L.A. connections. UC-Berkeley sociologist Jerome Skolnick wrote in 1988: "In fact, it appears difficult to overstate the penetration of Blood and Crip members into other states." The U.S. General Accounting Office reported in 1989 that members of the Crips and Bloods had been identified selling crack in Washington, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Maryland and elsewhere. A Washington, D.C., crack ring alone was distributing 440 pounds weekly.[^5] The GAO concluded: "In the early 1980s the gangs began selling crack cocaine. Within a matter of years, the lucrative crack market changed the black gangs from traditional neighborhood street gangs to extremely violent criminal groups operating from coast to coast." A 1992 commission examining the causes of the Los Angeles riots named crack as a contributing factor in the destruction of struggling inner-city neighborhoods.[^5] ### The 1986 Media Panic In May 1986, three years after crack exploded in South Central L.A., the national media finally noticed. NBC News, People magazine, and the Associated Press trumpeted the news within weeks of each other. The deaths of college basketball star Len Bias and pro football player Don Rogers in June 1986 converted crack into a national crisis. Before year's end, Time and Newsweek ran five cover stories apiece; Newsweek called it the biggest story since Vietnam and Watergate. [[Robert Stutman]], head of the DEA's New York office, later admitted he deliberately engineered the panic to pressure Washington.[^6] The coverage followed "a typical pattern in which exaggerated claims were supported by carefully selected cases and fueled with evocative words such as 'epidemic,'" drug researchers Andrew Golub and Donna Hartman found. The press assumed crack was new because editors had not previously reported on it. In reality, crack had been ravaging South Central since 1983, and Jamaican posses and Dominican gangs had been expanding east coast markets for eighteen months. Robert Byck, Yale University's top cocaine expert, had warned Congress about the coming epidemic in 1979 and been ignored.[^6] Congress passed the 100-to-1 sentencing ratio without hearings, requiring $50,000 worth of powder cocaine to trigger the same five-year mandatory sentence as $750 worth of crack. Byck called it "absolutely senseless," noting the number "50" came from his testimony about crack's relative addictiveness and "got doubled by people who wanted to get tough." Drug expert Steven Belenko observed the anti-crack crusade "occurred in the presence of a real vacuum of knowledge about the drug." The DEA's own August 1986 review found crack was "a secondary rather than primary problem in most areas"—findings that went virtually unreported. Crack hysteria declined only when the [[Iran-Contra Affair]] displaced it from the news.[^6] ### Footnotes [^1]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 1: "A Pretty secret kind of thing" [^2]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 6: "They were doing their patriotic duty" [^3]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 7: "Something happened to Ivan" [^4]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 8: "A million hits is not enough" [^5]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 10: "Teach a man a craft and he's liable to practice it" [^6]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 15: "This thing is a tidal wave"