Crack: The Epidemic That Wasn’t
By Kenneth Anderson, MA
President Ronald Reagan declared his war on drugs on October 14, 1982. Unlike Nixon’s drug war, which prioritized treatment over incarceration and gave us methadone clinics coast to coast, Reagan’s drug war was entirely a war of mass incarceration of the poor and minorities.
Crack is believed to have first appeared in the US in 1984; an article in the November 25, 1984, issue of the Los Angeles Times reported that cocaine “rocks” were being used in the ghettos and barrios. Crack was a way to make small doses of cocaine marketable and affordable to ghetto dwellers. A dose of crack typically sold for $5 to $10 and produced a harsh high that lasted ten minutes or so. If the same amount of cocaine were snorted instead of smoked, the effects would be barely perceptible because the mucous membrane is not very efficient in absorbing drugs. This is why powder cocaine users of the era typically spent $100 or more per purchase.
According to the book Crack in America, the moral panic over the demon drug crack ran from 1986 to 1992. On March 17, 1986, a Newsweek cover story reported that, according to “experts,” crack was instantaneously addicting and the most addictive drug known to man. A March 20, 1986, front page New York Times story told us that crack was spreading from the inner-city ghettos to nice white kids in the suburbs. More news stories and political speeches called crack an epidemic and a plague which was going to infect us all. Although powder cocaine had been glamorized by its associations with the rich and famous, crack was demonized due to its associations with poor and marginalized people and people of color.
The June 19, 1986, death of basketball star Len Bias was exploited to promote the crack scare, even though Bias had died of a heart attack related to snorting powder cocaine rather than smoking crack. Politicians and the media further inundated us with horror stories of crack babies who would be unable to think normally or feel normal emotions because their mothers had smoked crack while pregnant. However, the crack baby epidemic never materialized. A 2011 study of adolescents whose mothers had smoked crack while pregnant showed no significant differences in neurocognitive function between these adolescents and a control group.
On October 27, 1986, Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which introduced a 100 to one disparity in sentencing for crack compared to powder cocaine, e.g., a drug crime involving five grams of crack cocaine resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison, while crimes involving 500 grams of powder cocaine received the same sentence. As a result, the number of black people sent to federal prison skyrocketed from approximately 50 in 100,000 adults to approximately 250 in 100,000 adults. Ironically, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was nicknamed the Len Bias Law, even though it was powder cocaine which led to Bias’s death.
In 1987, the Partnership for a Drug Free America launch a set of 10 PSAs to warn of the dangers of crack. Each PSA features a different celebrity, ranging from Clint Eastwood to Pee-Wee Herman. Pee-Wee Herman told us:
This is crack. Rock cocaine. It isn’t glamorous or cool or kid stuff. It’s the most addictive kind of cocaine and it can kill you. What’s really bad is nobody knows how much it takes, so every time you use it you risk dying. It isn’t worth it. Look, everybody wants to be cool but doing it with crack isn’t just wrong. It could be dead wrong.
A later PSA from the Partnership for a Drug Free America shows us a pair of hands dressing up a teenager in his best clothes. The voiceover says, “When Warren turned 16, he smoked crack to celebrate. He wanted to start a new life. That’s exactly what he did.” The camera pulls back and we see that the hands belong not to Warren, but to an undertaker dressing his body on a morgue table. The 1991 movie New Jack City spent an hour and a half showing us how crack supposedly decimated New York City.
Chemically speaking, cocaine hydrochloride is a salt. Like other salts, cocaine hydrochloride is comprised of a base (in this case, an alkaloid known as cocaine base) which is ionically bonded to an acid (in this case, hydrochloric acid). The advantage of cocaine hydrochloride over the raw cocaine base is that cocaine hydrochloride is shelf stable and easily dissolved in water. Cocaine hydrochloride cannot be smoked, because the amount of heat required to vaporize it destroys the cocaine molecule. Cocaine base, on the other hand, can be vaporized and smoked in a process known as freebasing. Cocaine base becomes volatile at a temperature of about 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
Freebase cocaine is made by adding a base such as ammonia to cocaine hydrochloride; this causes the hydrochloric acid to bind to the ammonia and leave the cocaine base behind as a free base. The freebase cocaine is then purified using benzene or ether, both of which are highly flammable. Preparing freebase cocaine can be quite dangerous; notably, comedian Richard Pryor was burned so badly in a June 9, 1980, fire reputedly caused by freebasing that he nearly died. Although Pryor later claimed that the fire was caused by overproof rum and not freebase, it is not possible that rum could have caused such an intense fire.
Crack is also a form of freebase cocaine, but it is much simpler and safer to prepare crack. Crack is made by heating cocaine hydrochloride with baking soda in water; baking soda is a base which combines with the hydrochloric acid leaving base cocaine behind. While freebase is pure cocaine base, crack has a lot of impurities; there tends to be a lot of baking soda left in it.
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was enacted on December 17, 1914, and went into effect on March 1, 1915. The Harrison Act effectively criminalized non-medical use of opiates and cocaine and drove it underground. Although non-medical opiate use continued underground in a reduced population, non-medical cocaine use in the US largely disappeared from the 1930s to the 1970s. This is because amphetamines could be bought over the counter legally and cheaply until 1965 and had essentially the same effect as the expensive and illegal cocaine. Amphetamines were even sold at gas stations to long-haul truckers, inspiring the country music lyric ” I’m takin’ little white pills and my eyes are open wide… Six days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight.”
Over-the-counter sales of amphetamine were banned in 1965, and as a result, cocaine made a roaring comeback in the 1970s. In the 70s, cocaine was the drug of the rich and famous and associated with movie stars and rock stars as well as Wall Street brokers. And the coolest of the cool and hippest of the hip were into freebasing, not just snorting. Scientific American went so far as to run a 1982 article stating that snorting cocaine was no more addictive than eating potato chips, although it did warn against freebasing.
Cocaine addiction is quite distinct from opioid addiction in several ways. Cocaine addiction tends to be periodic whereas opioid addiction is steady state. People addicted to cocaine will typically binge until they run out, then not use for a period until they obtain a new supply. This is because cocaine, through its reinforcing properties, creates a desire to use more cocaine, but not a physical dependence. People addicted to opioids, on the other hand, will use daily to stave off withdrawal symptoms; people addicted to heroin typically shoot up several times a day.
As William S. Burroughs wrote In Naked Lunch:
We are getting some C [cocaine] or RX [in Mexico] at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot . . . you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can’t score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it. This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need.
There are several different pharmacological factors which determine how addictive a drug is, including how reinforcing it is, what sort of withdrawal symptoms it produces, how easy it is to initiate the addiction, and how hard it is to quit. There are also sociological factors such as how socially acceptable the use of the substance is. Since alcohol and tobacco are legal, social acceptability helps explain why the half-life of an addiction to nicotine is 26 years and an addiction to alcohol is 14 years, whereas the half-life of an addiction to cannabis is only six years and an addiction to cocaine is only five years.
The most reinforcing drugs are cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine. Smoked or injected cocaine is more reinforcing than snorted cocaine. The more rapidly the concentration of a drug rises in the brain, the more reinforcing it is. The rate at which the concentration rises is more important than the total concentration of the drug in the brain. This is because the brain has numerous mechanisms to counter the effects of drugs and return to homeostasis. However, when the concentration rises too quickly, these mechanisms are overpowered, and the drug has its full effect on the brain. When cocaine is smoked, the time elapsed between smoking and the subjective high is 6 to 10 seconds. When cocaine is injected, the time elapsed between injecting and the subjective high is 10 to 20 seconds. When cocaine is snorted, the time elapsed between snorting and the subjective high is three to five minutes. When cocaine is swallowed, the time elapsed between swallowing and the subjective high is 20 to 60 minutes and most of the drug is destroyed in the digestive tract, which is why cocaine pills are not a thing, although there used to be cocaine in Coca Cola back when cocaine was very cheap.
Of course there is nothing new about injecting cocaine, this harks back to the days of Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud. But smoking cocaine first appeared with freebasing in the 1970s. And there are many more people who are willing to smoke a drug than inject it. The crack high is quite short-lived, lasting only about ten minutes, compared to the high from snorted cocaine, which lasts 30 to 60 minutes. Although smoked or injected cocaine is a bit more reinforcing than snorted cocaine, it is hardly instantaneously addictive. Moreover, many people find that the crack high is far too harsh, and after trying it once, never wish to try it again.
As mentioned above, the crack scare ran from 1986 to 1992 and was especially virulent during the election years of 1986 and 1988. Democrats competed with Republicans to see who could demonize crack the most. Then, the crack scared died down in 1992. Although “crackhead” continues to be used as a derogatory term, we have not heard stories of a crack plague invading our neighborhoods in decades. Yet, the current prevalence of crack use is the same today as it was at the height of the crack scare. This can be seen in Figure 1, which shows the number of people who ever used crack, who used crack in the past year, and who used crack in the past month, from 1988 to 2024. These data come from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (later known as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health); 1988 was the first year the survey included information on crack (no survey was conducted in 1989). Figure 2 shows the same data as percentages rather than numbers. Figure 3 compares the number of cocaine users (includes crack) with the number of crack users, and Figure 4 shows the percentages. Past month use of crack hovers right around 0.2% of the population over age 12 from 1988 to present. Since roughly the same small percentage of people in the US use crack today as used it at the height of the crack scare, it can hardly be said that there was ever a crack epidemic.
