The destructive potential of crack was soon apparent. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, hospital emergency rooms began reporting hundreds of crack-related deaths and secondary illness associated with crack addiction. Social services were swamped by children abandoned by their crack-addicted parents. Local police and federal drug enforcement officers packed local jails with inner-city crack users and dealers in an attempt to stem the spread of the drug and the crimes that went with it.

Most visible to Americans was televised coverage of the violence that accompanied the crack epidemic. Local street gangs recognized that they could make money by selling crack. To eliminate competition, gangs fought for control of crack trafficking and as a result neighborhoods began to resemble shooting ranges. Handguns became the standard weapons for enforcing control of trafficking in neighborhoods. High school and even junior high school students began dealing crack and carrying guns to school campuses. Gun battles among crack dealers, along with the frequent confrontations between the crack community and the police, created an unprecedented atmosphere of violence in many inner-city neighborhoods.

Crack houses soon appeared in East Coast slums as dealers and users found places to carry on their activities out of view of both the police and rival gangs. Although crack houses gave dealers and their customers the protection they sought, these structures contributed to an image of decay in America’s inner cities. Often lacking running water, electricity, or trash collection, crack houses were breeding grounds for disease. An addict who overdosed there was unlikely to receive help because no one else was responsible enough to summon police or medics for assistance.

In an attempt to maintain order for the majority of lawful citizens in the inner cities, some police departments adopted the strategy of arresting as many crack users and dealers as possible. When police identified crack houses, they arrested anyone they found there. Gang members known to traffic in crack were rounded up in mass arrests.

Focusing enforcement on crack houses and their occupants succeeded in eliminating some crack houses, but what the nation began to see was jails filled with disproportionately large numbers of African American and Hispanic youths. To the complexities of the crack epidemic was added the perception that the war on crack was actually racially motivated. Minority leaders in many communities complained that the police were intentionally targeting the small-time minority users and dealers while turning a blind eye toward the big-time traffickers, who were often white. Some community leaders who raised allegations of racism demanded investigations into police policies.

Crack Houses

One widely known outgrowth of crack use is the so-called crack house, where crack addicts congregate to buy and smoke crack or inject cocaine. Mariella, a longtime cocaine addict, describes the scene inside a crack house she frequents to Eugene Richards in Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.

They [cocaine users] get sick in there if they live in there. You see them laying around. They need water to mix up the drugs, the dope or the coke, and the crack, so especially if they’re homeless or hookers, they’ll get water from anywhere.

Yeah, I think it’s four bucks to shoot up. Other places are like a buck or two, just a dollar or two to get in, and you just gotta do your shit and get out. Yeah, it’s usually an abandoned building, but they take their squatters’ rights or whatever the hell you want to call it. You’re taking a big chance going in there, because you get ripped off, you get mugged. You can die.

Police departments accused of intentionally targeting minorities for arrest generally denied the charges. Law enforcement personnel argued that they were arresting more people of color for crack violations precisely because crack was more commonly used among minorities than among whites. To support this view, police cited studies such as the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), which found in 1997 that Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to use crack and that blacks were 133 percent more likely than whites to use crack.

Statistics such as the NHSDA study did little to quell accusations of racism. Many leaders in the black community sought greater leniency on the part of the police toward minority users while suggesting that arresting the crack kingpins would be a more effective way of curtailing the crack epidemic. These leaders further suggested that money spent on arresting users could be better spent preventing the drugs from reaching minority communities in the first place.

Regardless of the politics of how police departments handled the crack epidemic, health professionals, public school administrators, and social service providers quickly recognized that a crack culture was evolving in America’s inner cities, creating a complex web of interrelated crime and suffering.

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