The Crack Epidemic

Ebele Anueyiagu

War on Drugs

Richard Nixon● In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a ‘War on Drugs’

● “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse, in order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”

● This is the only time in the history of the war on drugs that the majority of the funding went towards treatment, rather than law enforcement.

● Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and drug treatment efforts.

● In 1973 the Drug Enforcement Agency(DEA) was created.

John Ehrlichman● Was President Nixon’s chief

domestic advisor when Nixon declared the ‘war on drugs’.

● In 1994 journalist Dan Baum interviewed Ehrlichman for April’s cover story of Harper’s Magazine, in which he admitted that Nixon’s drug war was created to target black people.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a

man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in

1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to

associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those

communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about

the drugs? Of course we did.”

Ehrlichman’s Harper’s Magazine Quote

Ronald Reagan

● President Reagan greatly expanded the reach of the drug war and his focus on criminal punishment over treatment led to a massive increase in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997.

● On October 14, 1982 Reagan declared “a war drugs,” doubling-down on an initiative that was started by Richard Nixon. Reagan declared that illicit drugs were a direct threat to U.S. national security and through a series of legislation made a hard right turn away from a public health approach to drug use.

‘Just Say No’● Nancy Reagan launched the ‘Just Say No’ campaign during

the early 1980s, which encouraged children to reject experimenting with drugs by simply just saying ‘no’.

● Nancy traveled around the country endorsing the campaign, visiting drug rehab centers, elementary schools, talk shows, and even appeared on the popular television show Diff’rent Strokes.

● Surveys suggest the campaign may have led to a spike in public concern over the country’s drug problem. In 1985, the proportion of Americans who saw drug abuse as the nation’s “number one problem,” was between 2% and 6%. In 1989, that number jumped to 64%.

1980s Just Say No Campaign

Crack vs Cocaine● Crack is the most potent form of cocaine,

which makes it more risky than normal cocaine.

● Crack is generally 75%-100% pure making it the riskiest form of cocaine also.

● Crack is highly more addictive than normal cocaine because it is smoked rather than snorted.

Pee Wee Herman PSA

Whitney Houston’s Diane Sawyer Interview (2002)

● Reagan-era drug policies unfairly targeted minorities. Part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act included a heftier penalty, known as the “100-to-1 sentencing ratio,” for the same amount of crack cocaine (typically used by blacks) as powdered cocaine (typically used by whites). EX: a minimum penalty of five years was given for 5 grams of crack cocaine or 500 grams of powdered cocaine.

● Minority communities were more heavily policed and targeted, leading to an unequal rate of criminalization. But the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), which was passed by Congress in 2010, reduced the inconsistency between crack and powder cocaine offenses from 100:1 to 18:1.

● According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 2.3 million people are currently being held in the American criminal justice system. Nearly half a million people are locked up because of a drug offense.

Effect on Today’s Opioid Crisis

● Heroin addicts are treated more delicately than crack addicts were because the opioid crisis is impacting white suburbanites and rural areas.

● The sympathy shown to addicts suffering from heroin addiction wasn’t given to crack addicts.

● If the crack epidemic had been treated as a national crisis rather than a neighborhood vice, we would have a better understanding today of how drugs spread through populations.

Sourceshttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nixon-drug-war-racist_us_56f16a0ae4b03a640a6bbda1

https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/cron/

https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/crack-is-wack-playground/monuments/1801

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miah2ZrAsLA

https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs

http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/brief-history-drug-war