Crack epidemic in the United States
[3] In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in Colombia, trafficked through The Bahamas.
[1] Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to "crack", a solid smokable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people.
[1] As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York, Miami, Houston, and in the Caribbean.
[4] The article said that freebase made its "strongest inroads" in the music industry of Los Angeles and at this time, in 1980, the similar crack form had just been starting (and in a few years would become predominant and also move to the East Coast and elsewhere).
Freebase was made by users who would combine cocaine with baking soda and water and then extract the base salt, "freeing it" with ammonia.
A less volatile but similar process was developed by dealers around 1980 where street cocaine is dissolved in a solution of water and baking soda and then dried out into "crack rocks".
[1] In some major cities, such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Houston and Detroit, one dose of crack could be obtained for as little as $2.50 (equivalent to $7 in 2023).
[8] In a study done by Roland Fryer, Steven Levitt, and Kevin Murphy, a crack index was calculated using information on cocaine-related arrests, deaths, and drug raids, along with low birth rates and media coverage in the United States.
During this period, the Black community also experienced a 20–100% increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.
Among his findings are that drug offenders make up only a small part of the prison population, and non-violent drug offenders an even smaller portion; that people convicted of violent crimes make up the majority of prisoners; that county and state justice systems account for the large majority of American prisoners and not the federal system that handles most drug cases; and, subsequently, "national" statistics tell a distorted story when differences in enforcement, conviction, and sentencing are widely disparate between states and counties.
[25] San Jose Mercury News journalist Gary Webb sparked national controversy with his 1996 Dark Alliance series which alleged that Nicaraguan dealers with Contra ties started and significantly fueled the 1980s crack epidemic.
The United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General rejected Webb's claim that there was a "systematic effort by the CIA to protect the drug trafficking activities of the Contras".
But we did not find that their activities were the cause of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, much less in the United States as a whole, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras.
