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Miami's vice
Crack cocaine is almost dead in many cities, but immigrants, suburbanites and teenagers have kept it alive in South Florida.
By Art Levine
[05/11/99]

Fixin' under Nixon
A new book examines Richard Nixon's progressive drug policies and the deevolution of the war on drugs.
By Lori Leibovich
[05/11/99]

Beijing journal
An American student watches the not-so-spontaneous uprising against NATO and the U.S.
By S.H.
[05/10/99]

Milosz: Peaceful coexistence is still possible in the Balkans
The Nobel Prize-winning poet, whose own country was devoured by its powerful neighbors, supports the NATO attacks -- and holds out hope for the future.
By Tamara Straus
[05/10/99]

Stop this war
Clinton and his leftist buddies in NATO are squandering our money and our military credibility in the Balkans.
By David Horowitz
[05/10/99]

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Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, agrees with Fox. "There are four major factors in the drop in crime," he says. "No. 1 has been getting guns out of the hands of kids, No. 2 has been the shrinking of the crack markets and their institutionalization. Third is the robustness of the economy. There are jobs for kids now who might otherwise be attracted to dealing." In last place, Blumstein says, is the criminal justice response, or as he puts it, "incapacitation related to the growth of incarceration."

Blumstein believes the connection between crack markets and the popularity of guns among youth drove the crime epidemic of the late '80s and early '90s. "All of the growth in homicide between 1985 and '91 was among young men with handguns," says Blumstein. "The homicide rate in that group doubled -- while it fell 20 percent among people over 30 ... Regular kids started getting guns and using them, partially for protection, partially because it was trendy. It diffused out from the nuclei of dealers and worked its way into the broader community." Just as beepers started out as icons of drug-dealing cool and spread to other teens, so did guns, with far worse results.

Why did the media get it so wrong? Why did nearly every single news organization overplay crack's threat and rise -- and underplay its fall? Why didn't reporters realize that a drug like crack was unlikely to ever spread far beyond its ghetto roots?

Sociologist Craig Reinarman, author of "Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice," notes that the crack scare was useful to politicians, police and the media. "At a minimum, the media accelerated its spread," he says. "When crack first appeared, it was after a good long gestation period of widespread use of freebase cocaine [crack is just another name for this drug, marketed ready-made]. Within a few months of crack's appearance in L.A., New York and Miami, there were hundreds of hours of network news coverage, and by the end of the first six months, there wasn't a 14-year-old in Iowa who didn't know what it was."

"There is no major corporation which could have afforded the coverage and exposure that crack got for free," he adds. You might say it was a very successful product launch. And the first network special devoted to it, CBS News' "48 Hours on Crack Street," got the best ratings of any news show in the previous five years.

Reinarman describes the crack mania as an old-fashioned "moral panic," of the sort that led to alcohol prohibition earlier in the century. In the years before alcohol was banned, reporters credulously accepted claims that prohibition could end poverty and domestic violence. Coverage focused on extreme examples of drunks who committed crimes and implied that this could happen to anyone who imbibed. Alcohol was also linked with scorned minorities -- mainly the Irish and Germans at the time, although the Women's Christian Temperance Union hailed sobriety as "the white life," and linked drunkenness with African-Americans as well. The media and prohibitionists eventually spoke almost as one.

When it came to crack, the media escalated the panic and propelled a political arms race, in which Democrats and Republicans fought to outdo each other as anti-drug crusaders. The result was sentences for dealers and users that are longer than for rapists and even killers.

In the end, crack did prove to be a long-term disaster for the inner city -- not because of unending violence, but because of the resulting criminalization of young black men. Now almost a third of black men are in prison or on parole, and many cities are coping with the political ramifications of having large numbers of black men ineligible to vote because of felony convictions. The war on crack may prove to be the true shame of the cities, especially for African-Americans -- much more devastating than crack itself.
salon.com | May 11, 1999

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