Crack, Baby, Crack

The mythology of crack cocaine was strong. Everyone knew it, and it made perfect sense. That its active ingredient was no different than powdered cocaine somehow never seeped into the public consciousness. Guys who freebased became animals, killers. They magically got the strength of ten men, as cops would tell the story, and had to dealt with forcibly or there would be dead cops in the streets instead of dead crackheads.

And when women used it, they gave birth to crack babies, who would obviously suffer from disastrous complications, physical, intellectual and emotional, that would produce a generation of children incapable of a normal life. Who would care for them? What would we do with them? Not only was this beyond dispute to most people, because this was crack, the devil drug, but there was medical science to back this up. It was a looming catastrophe.

Except, as it turned out, none of this was true. Crack was just a different delivery system for coke, and crack babies ended up being like pretty much any other baby. Still, the panic caused by the myth informed our legal system, medical practice, education and sense of morality. And because we’re human, we’re doing it again, using the same myth to breed panic to dictate policy and execution.

News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized black women “addicts” by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.

That news media spread the lie is undeniable. With the best of intentions, it wrote the worst of stories. But this faux mea culpa in the New York Times isn’t about apologizing to the many people harmed by the panic they fueled, but using their failure to engage in critical thinking about crack to fuel their perpetuating a myth about what went wrong. Note the tricky wording on this one paragraph.

cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children

demonized black women “addicts”

children who were less than fully human

This is wholly revisionist history, based on the language and panic of the day as opposed to what was happening at the time. It’s not bad enough that they lied to you before, but they’re now going to use their lies to lie to you again.

The New York Times is running a series of editorials entitled “A Woman’s Rights,” and is using the crack baby panic to argue that black women were being demonized by “Slandering the Unborn,” giving rise to a “war against ‘crack mothers.'”

The idea of a mentally impaired “crack baby” resonated with long-held racist views about black Americans. It captured the imaginations of reporters, politicians, school officials and others who were historically conditioned to believe just about anything about the African-American poor.

This is almost exactly the opposite of what was, in reality, happening. Crack was deemed a blight on inner city communities. Crack babies were used as the innocent example of collateral damage, and this was the justification for the war on drugs that was devastating black communities. Among the loudest voices for increased policing, harsher sentencing, broader laws and the evisceration of constitutional rights were black politicians like Charlie Rangel.

Even the Times pseudo-apology shows the opposite of its current spin.

The Times amplified the “damaged generation” theory, too. This editorial page argued in 1989 that it would cost more than $700 million to prepare fewer than 20,000 children for school in the state of Florida alone — a figure that was clearly drawn from myth. The former executive editor Abe Rosenthal, in a column entitled “The Poisoned Babies,” urged the authorities to suspend the parental rights of crack-addicted women, a course of action that had already been shown to drive women away from treatment and provide substandard care for many children.

And the front-page article by Susan Chira never mentions race, and only mentions women because we were still stuck with biological reality back then.

In 1990, a front-page story in The Times warned that ‘‘inner-city schools, already strained by the collapse of families and the wounds of poverty, will face another onslaught this fall — the first big wave of children prenatally exposed to crack.”

The entirety of this concern was for the welfare of the children, not to libel them. And for the far more real damage happening in the street. In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides. In 2017, there were 290 murders. There was a demon, and it was crack. And vanquishing the demon meant that crack has to be punished at 100 times that of powdered cocaine, with a mandatory 121 months for 50 grams of diablito. The drug war had its target, but it wasn’t black women. It wasn’t black babies.

It was true that crack was the “poor-man’s coke,” the drug of choice in the inner city among blacks and Hispanics. Coke was expensive. Crack was cheap, sold in tiny vials and smoked for a cheap, quick high. It was supposed to be super-addictive, the myth being that try it once and you were hooked. And once hooked, all you wanted was more, and you would do anything to get it.

Was crack vilified because it was primarily the drug of the poor, minorities? Before crack, it was heroin that plagued the urban poor, but heroin made people lethargic, more likely to fall asleep than anything else. Crack woke them up, made them go out and expose themselves to the public. It also made addicts rip gold chains off old ladies and steal their pocketbooks to get money for more crack. Mostly, they did this close to home, and they chains ripped off black and Hispanic necks.

If that wasn’t enough to prove how we needed to stop crack at all costs, to rationalize exceptions to constitutional rights, then there were the poor babies and their poor addicted mothers, the real victims of these horrible drug dealers destroying the fabric of our nation, ruining the lives of minorities, who must be stopped at all costs. Crack babies were the wedge to lock up crack daddies. Now, they’re being used again, to show that it was all about demonizing black women. Except it wasn’t. It’s just the New York Times lying about it again.

Crack, Baby, Crack curated from Simple Justice