July 20, 2019 • 47 mins
Back in the mid-1980s a new and extremely potent drug hit the scene: crack cocaine. In short order, America was in the grip of both a sweeping addiction and a state of hysteria over use of the drug and the social consequences of crack, like crack babies. Let's take a look back at the receding wave of the crack epidemic and its lasting legacy on America in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, It's me Josh and for this week's s
Y s K Selects, I've chosen our episode how Crack Works,
and Boyle Boy does the title ever say at all?
Because we really really explain how crack works. So enjoy
How Crack Works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a
(00:23):
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w
Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there, and uh, this is Stuff
you should Know. Jerry just waved like she's waving at
(00:43):
the audience of the anger. She's waving to the world.
It's a little weird. She may be on home Bloom. Uh, Josh,
you know what's whack? Uh? Zach Attack from Saved by
the Bell. I don't even know what it is. You
don't know it's Saved by the Bell? Is what's wrong
with No? I know that I know what that show is,
(01:04):
but I've never heard of the Zach Attack. It's just
Zack being zack. Gotcha? That is whack? Yeah, well, never mind.
I thought Crack was whack, but the Zach Attack is
truly whack. No, I disagree. I was gonna say no,
it's not right because that's actually a pretty good show.
But okay, yes, you crack his whack this. We're like
imminent up in here. We're what we're like eminem up
(01:25):
in here. Yeah, I guess so refer to R hip
Hop episode now. No, I'm just saying people that they're
confused about why we sound so stilted and square, just
go listen to hip hop and that explains everything. People
like that one. Surprisingly, Yeah, it's a good one. Man.
We got a good email from a or a Facebook
(01:46):
post from a graffiti artist. Oh yeah, yeah, good stuff.
I can't remember his tag, but it was like really nice.
But he was complimenting us or he was just saying hey, No,
he's like, hey, I'm a graffiti artist and here's my
my work. And I was very impressed. And he is
not on crack no, because he's not whack right exactly,
So Chuck, I have a little, uh a little intro
(02:10):
just if you'll bear with me. And the year was okay,
I was fourteen, Okay, what is it? It's one year
p b G very early on um cocaine, which is
a drug that had been sweeping the nation for about
(02:32):
ten years by then. Yeah, uh, was up to a
hundred and fifty dollars a graham. That's thanks to the
demand um and the available income of its well healed
yuppie users who were willing to spend that kind of
money on it. Sure, it's very much an expensive, white,
(02:55):
upwardly mobile person's drug. Cocaine was wall st Yeah, and
there were at the time articles that kind of said,
cocaine's probably not that addictive. We shouldn't worry that much
about cocaine. It's not a very big deal. It was mostly,
(03:15):
like I said, a white drug. That same year, a
new drug hit the scene. It was cheap, five to
ten bucks pop. It gave you a very quick, very
intense high, short lived, and it swept through lower income
(03:36):
African American areas of the United States, and all of
a sudden we had a problem, an epidemic. Yes, because
it was cocaine in a different form. Yeah, the country
went crazy for it. And not only was it cocaine
in a different form, it was cocaine being used by
a different demographic that as we'll see, America has always
(03:58):
been threatened by and always made legislation to damp and
drug use among Yeah, it's pretty interesting when you dig
into this stuff, and so in when people started to
get worried, Nancy Reagan became concerned. And when Nancy Reagan
became concerned, as as usual, she started to lie. And
(04:21):
we will we will get into what allegedly might have
happened and why crack might have been introduced in this
country because some people think it was the U. S.
Government straight up. C I A, yeah, that's a really
um good point. So what you're referring to is um
Gary Webb's Dark Alliance article, right, yeah, series of articles
(04:42):
in our book from I believe. Gary Webb was an
investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News, and um,
they had a front page story where he basically figured
out the connection between the CIA and the crack epidem
that started in I think in Los Angeles south central.
(05:04):
There was a dude named Freeway Ricky Ross who's still
around I think, yeah, Um, And he was the largest
cocaine distributor UH African American cocaine distributor in l A.
He was big time, and all of a sudden, out
of nowhere, he had a new product called crack, and
it became very popular, very quickly. Um, and Gary webb
(05:28):
In traced the origin of this epidemic back to through
Ricky Ross, back to some Nicaraguan freedom fighting guerrillas that
were backed and trained and possibly commanded by the CIA.
We're getting into this, so we just go ahead and
(05:49):
dive in. Dive in. Yeah, do you want to? Yeah?
Why not? Okay? Um, all right, here's the deal. In Nicaragua,
Central American country. Um, in the nineteen thirties, a man
name Anastasio uh Samosa took power, and then about forty
years later, in nineteen seventy nine, the people revolted, um
(06:10):
overthrew him, and they were called the Sandinistas. Yes, so
you know the whole Contra Sandinista war in Nicaragua that
raged in the seventies and eighties, that's what we're talking about. Yes,
and the Sandinistas. Um, we're a communist and that didn't
fly so well with the US who had long uh
(06:30):
cherished Nicaragua for their farmland and like to have a
toe in their pond, so to speak. And so communism
there didn't fly. And so they said, you know what,
I think maybe we should fund the contrast, maybe give
them a little bit of financial assistance. Yeah, and the
contrasts weren't just one group. They were it was like
an umbrella term for any democratic or UM an anti
(06:52):
communist group that was trying to paramilitarily overthrow the socialist
leadership in Nicaragua. That's right. So we decided to help
fund their civil war. And UM. The problem was that
there wasn't a lot of dough like that we could say, like, hey,
let's use this money to do this, because it was
a secret war. There was no congressional approval. It was
(07:14):
a proxy war with the Soviet Union at the time.
So some allege that this is when UM, the Reagan
administration and the CIA got together to literally introduce cocaine
dealers in cocaine UH to South Central and crack cocaine
to spread throughout the ghettos, to raise money and use
(07:36):
that money to fund the contrast. Right, So here's the thing,
like that was never proven and Gary Webb never ever
said he did not. He didn't say that the government
directly introduced it on purpose or with the aim of
creating an epidemic in the ghetto. He found connections between
the CIA and drug lords, specifically Ricky Ross on one end,
(08:01):
and then the CIA backed impossibly commanded. UM, the Nicaraguan
Democratic Force. Yes, the this Contra force. UM. So their
their business, their group was funded entirely from cocaine sales
(08:22):
and trafficking. And they all went to this guy, Ricky Ross.
And there's no way that the CIA didn't know about this. Yeah,
and there were at the time. Well we'll get back
to Webb in a second. But UM, in the eighties
there was you know, when the whole Iran Contra thing
broke out, there was the Carry Committee who did some investigating.
(08:43):
The Carry Committee report, UH from John Carey. Obviously, UM
found that quote the Contra drug links included payments to
drug traffickers by the U. S. State Department funds authorized
by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the con tris UH.
And then later on there was an internal CIA investigation
(09:03):
in the nineties where they found that there is no
evidence that UM, the CIA actually brought drugs into the
United States. UM. However, and these are these are aal quotes. However,
during the Contra era, the CIA worked with a variety
of people to support the Contrat program. And let me
be frank, there are instances where the CIA did not
(09:26):
in an expeditious or consistent fashion cut off relationships with
individuals supporting the CONTRAT program who are alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity. So basically, the internal investigation said, well,
there might have been some people we were dealing with
that we're doing this, and as it turns out, we
didn't really do much about it. Right, So, as far
(09:49):
as you can go without hyperbole, and it's still pretty shocking. Sure,
the CIA backed, trained, and possibly commanded UM at least
one Perilla group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force and the Nicaraguan
Democratic Force the f d n UM sold cocaine to
(10:12):
Freeway Ricky Ross. Freeway Ricky Ross is where the crack
epidemic originated. And so just to finish up with web
though Um after he wrote this Dark Alliance series, he
was shunned by mainstream press in the United States. Sadly,
all three of the major newspapers, UM, you know, the
(10:32):
l A Times, New York Times, and I guess was
that Washington Post Post came out and they were not
only shunned, they like tried to discredit him. Oh yeah,
they wrote articles they put UM seventeen reporters in twenty
words to a three day rebuttal of Dark Alliance that
was the The l A Times. Yeah. Rather than pick
up the story, they tried to de demolish it, and
(10:55):
Webb New York Times um suggested he was a reckless
reporter prone to getting his facts wrong. He already had
wanted pull a surprise at this point, I think for
something else, and um The Mercury News defended it for
a little while and then backed off and apologized. He
ended up quitting and committed a very weird suicide in
(11:19):
which he shot himself in the head twice. Uh, who knows. Obviously,
if you get on the internet, there are tons of
outlets that say, well, obviously it's not a suicide. It
was a murder. Um, so who knows about that? Other
other people have said, no, it does look kinky, but
the first shot wasn't fatal and he was able to
(11:40):
do it twice. Who knows, draw your own conclusions. Some
raw nerve right there. But he claimed that there were
people like you know, he saw what he thought were
c i A. People like climbing up his fire escape
and stuff the previous days. And who knows. All I'm
saying is they're making a movie about it with Jeremy
Renner this summer is it right? Great good? I'm glad
(12:03):
he I ran across him when I wrote an article
on America's Army Jeremy Renner. Yeah, he wrote an expose
America's Army is this. Uh, it's a video game and
it's basically like a training game for the army where
you can play this free game. Um, but you sign
up to be contacted. If you're any good at it,
(12:25):
the Army contacts you. And he did this. It's like
a recruiting tool through video games. But the Army categorically
denied that's what it was. But that's obviously what it was.
And Gary Gary Webb, one of his last expose a
was on that, and you know, we should mention that
today all three of those major news outlets all say, boy,
we kind of got that one wrong. Yeah, um, we
(12:47):
shouldn't have done that. Maybe we shouldn't have driven Gary
Webb to his possible suicide. So Gary Webb did all
(13:11):
this investigation, did all this leg We're canning connect to
the dots pretty well, but there's still this maddening question
of tantalizing question who invented crack it came out of nowhere,
and so to kind of answer that which we can't, UM,
you have to look at how crack is made, and
look at how crack is made. You have to go
(13:32):
back a lot further than the nine eighties. You have
to go back to the eighteen eighties, and actually a
little further before then, when cocaine first was introduced to
the United States after it was isolated the alkaloid was
isolated from the coca plant in the mid nineteenth century. Yeah,
and that's when it was isolated in I mean for centuries.
(13:52):
People in South America were wise to the fact that
if you chew on this plant, it'll give you some
go juice you can work more. Yeah, and people still
chew the heck out of it. Yeah, So it was
it was no secret to the South Americans. But like
you said, it was the mid eighteen eighties when it
was actually isolated and UM became a narcotic, an abused
(14:15):
narcotic drug. Right. But first UM you could buy it
all over the place. You could order it through catalogs.
UM you can doctors could prescribe it. Sigmund Freud was
an ardent prescriber of it UM and it was a
very popular drug found in tonics. Coca cola for real,
(14:37):
that's not a myth. Um and cocaine was everybody loved
it for a while, yeah until well not until they
still loved it and still do today, I imagine. But
in nineteen fourteen it was made illegal with the Harrison
Narcotics Tax Act and UM, right, which do you remember
I said earlier that like everything like this, crack has
(15:01):
a real history of um. It shows the history of
racism in regards to drug laws. So the Harrison Narcotic
Act UM outlawed opiates and cocaine for the first time
in the United States, and it was based on concerns
like Chinaman were luring white women there were to their
(15:23):
to their dens of iniquity and open Chinatown through opium
and uh, Southern blacks were sniffing cocaine and it gave
them superhuman strength and they were raping white women as
a result. So those two things were passed, and we
have federal legislation from as a result of those kind
(15:44):
of fears. And if you kind of if you keep
that in the back of your mind and then pay
attention to the drug policy that comes out later on
from crack. You'll it's been going on since then and
it continues to today. Are you saying a pattern emerges?
A pattern emerges? So, uh, cocaine is um. Cocaine powder
is You have to actually manufacture it it. You don't
(16:06):
find a cocoa plant and like not shake it and
shake it and white powder falls out. It makes like
a tinkling sound in It is made by dissolving the paste,
the cocoa paste um in a mixture of hydrochloric acid
and water. Then you had some potassium salt separate out
the bad junk, maybe had a little ammonia, and then
the powder is separated out and you've got cocaine powder,
(16:30):
cocaine and from there you can sniff it. You can
add a little water to it and inject it. Yeah,
or you can make something called free base. Yeah. I
never quite understood what free base was. I thought it was.
I thought free basing was a thing. It is, yeah,
but free base is also and it's a noun anniverb Okay,
so maybe I do free base free base. Oh you see,
(16:52):
I've been doing it wrong. You've verb the noun. Okay,
so you've been doing it just just stuff doesn't work.
I don't know what everybody so excited about. Um. So
with free base, you take cocaine and you add something
highly flammable, say ether um, and you after you dissolved
(17:15):
the the cocaine in ammonia, you add ether to it
and then you smoke it. But you're smoking something that
has like a highly flammable solution involved. All that to
Richard Pryer, Yes, when he was filming Busting Loose, he
caught himself on fire. He was smoking free base and
drinking one one proof rome one night and I think
(17:37):
he was doing it in his garage to which so
it was unventilated and he caught fire. Yeah, but you
know what, there's also reports that he set himself on
fire on purpose, that he poured the stuff all over
his head and let him match. Oh we went a
little little cocko self immolation. Um. I think that may
be the right story. Now. I just saw a documentary
on him, and I think that's what they say. I'm
(17:59):
so glad you just corrected me mid podcasts. Do you
have any emails you prevented? Well, I mean that was
the long stories that he free based, and I think
he even came out later and said like, yeah, I
was free basing, but I also purposely set myself on
fire in the ravages of a free basing binge. Okay,
so free basing it was a thing at least as
(18:20):
early as but it was it was difficult to do
multi step process and you needed something like ether. Ether
is not the easiest thing to get your hands on
and dangerous obviously. Sure, um, but there was a way
to smoke cocaine, and free base was the way to
do it. But that never really got a big foothold
(18:40):
in any demographic in the country. It was just kind
of a thing that some people like Richard Pryor did
looking for a more intense high. I guess then all
of a sudden, mysteriously, out of nowhere, there is crack cocaine. Yeah,
crack is also manufactured um, but it doesn't require something
like either or anything flammable. Um. You dissolve it in
(19:02):
a mixture of water and either baking soda, sodium bicarbonate,
UM or ammonia, and you boil it up, separate it
out into the solid, cool it down, and then break
it up and you've got your little whiteish or tan
crack rocks. And if you buy it on the street.
Supposedly they range in size from point one to point
(19:22):
five grams um and they contain the d e A
says between seventy pure cocaine. So it's quite a rush
for you, sure, um, because it's so easy to make
crack from cocaine. Um. Like, nobody imports cracked across the
(19:44):
border into the US. It's all coke that comes into
the US and then Wesley Snipes converts it into crack
uh in a factory operated and run by naked people
because he doesn't trust them. What was that new Jack City? Oh? Man,
I was like blade, Yeah, man, I forgot all about
(20:07):
the Jack City. That was great. And they call it
crack because it makes a crackling sound. That's the baking
soda when you put the fire on it, and speaking
you put the fire on it. That's how you do it. Um,
you have a little I mean, there's different kinds of pipes,
but the most often crack pipe you will see is
the little straight shooter, a little glass tube. Yep, find
(20:27):
him on my dog walks in my neighborhood. Do you
really still yeah, crack is still around. It's not like
it went anywhere. Um, he thought oh, they got that
problem all under control. It's lift uh. So you you
you know, you have the crack in one end and
then a filter of some kind like a steel wool
or something in the other. You heat it up with
your lighter, yeah, under like on the outside of the
(20:49):
glass tube, or you can yeah, I guess hit it
with the flame. But I think if you light it
under the glass tube, that's generally the way to do it.
I think, Yeah, it vaporizes it, that's right, and you
smoke it and and um, pretty much immediately, Uh, you're
going to feel the effects. It's it's an immediate rush
that lasts only about ten or fifteen minutes. And that's
something that I didn't used to know. I learned it
(21:11):
a few years ago, but I had no idea. I
thought a crack, Hi, I was like, you know, a
couple of hours or something. No. I think it's one
of the shortest ties on the market, which is I
guess why it's so addictive and dangerous rampant, because you
come down and you're like, I'd like to do that
again exactly minutes. It's a short high, but it's also
(21:31):
an extremely intense high too, So um. Yeah, the the
the it's addictiveness or potential for addictiveness is really high. Yeah,
and so I know this article summarized very nicely for
you exactly how it reacts with the brain, and so
why don't you go ahead and just lay it on people? Alright.
It has to do with dopamine, as we know. Yeah, dopamine.
(21:53):
It's like your pleasure center. It's it's the the basis
of the reward system that we have, which is how
we learn to eat and how we learn to have sex,
to reproduce. Like we we feel good when we do
certain things, we want to do it again, and the
basis of that is dopamine. So in the brain, the
way it functions normally is UH neuron will release dopamine
(22:15):
and it will travel to a neighboring neuron, causing it
to fire and release a pleasurable sensation. And then that
dopamine UH molecule travels back to the original neuron via
a transporter and is reabsorbed. So it does its little
thing and then goes back home and it's good. Right,
(22:35):
There's a certain finite amount of pleasure humans are designed
to experience naturally, because when we say reabsorbed, we said
it said that a lot. I don't think people understand
that means basically, it turns that off again. Right, It
does its thing and it's done. It doesn't do its
thing and do its thing and do its thing and
do its thing. It does its thing once and goes
back to the original neuron exactly, sits on the couch
(22:58):
and its little neuron waits to be released again. Let
me know when you have sex again or eat something
or some pizza. UM. So with with crack or other
drugs that UM target the dopamine system, UM, they interrupt
the process. Crack specifically interrupts the process of reuptake or reabsorption.
(23:20):
So you're you're smoking the crack, right, and it triggers
this dopamine release flood. But crack attaches to the transporter
which keeps the UH, the dopamine from being reabsorbed, which
means it's just floating around in the synapse, the area
between two neurons, like hitting that one neuron again and
(23:42):
again and again. And it does it all throughout the
brain or all throughout the ventral tegmental area. And you
have this long or well not long, but you have
this very intense pleasurable sensation. Right, So basically the re uptake,
they just shut that down, so you're out there on
your own and then just floating around. Yes, your brain
(24:03):
is a big pleasure center. And then after I guess
five to fifteen minutes, like the crack wears off in
the dopamine is taken up once more. That's right, and
the high is over and your are left going I
want to do that again, exactly. I guess we should
talk about some of the effects of crack use. Um. Obviously,
(24:24):
just like with cocaine any kind of stimulant like that
or in phetamine, you're gonna be at risk for heart attack. Yeah,
sometimes on the spot and because you smoke it too,
Like it has real, um, real potential for problems with
your respiratory system and your cardio pulmonary system in general. Yeah,
stroke is also a risk. Um. It's gonna make you
(24:45):
very energize at first. You might although your senses may
be heightened temporarily, your heart rate is gonna shoot through
the roof, your pupils are gonna dilate, your temperature is
gonna rise. Um, you're gonna be pretty anxious or irritable
as you start to come down, and then you could
be really aggressive and you could you know, be more
(25:06):
prone to start a fight with a cop yeel like
you have superhuman strength or say some crazy stuff to
a passer by on the sidewalk because you have and
you have went to a gunk on the corners of
your mouth. That's true. Uh. If you have it with alcohol,
that's not a good combination because that produces a chemical
called uh coca ethylene. Yeah, lifts up like this is
(25:28):
a thing. It's like toxic is I'll get out. Well,
it's the crack or cocaine and alcohol um produce a
third drug, basically a hybrid drug that's more than the
sum of its parts. And um it creates a longer
lasting intense or high from crack. Um. But it's also
(25:50):
really toxic to the liver, really bad for you. Yeah,
as if alcohol itself wasn't. Yeah, And it's not like
you have to do anything to it or to to
get this the like you just drink and smoke crack
and your body does the rest. Your your metabolism breaks
the stuff down and creates this coca ethylene and it's
like alcohol on cocaine. So, as we said, it's super addictive. Um.
(26:17):
And of course all this stuff whenever you hear about
drugs being addictive, it's all dependent on the person. Of course.
One person might smoke crack and never want to do
it again. One person might be hooked immediately. Uh. It
all depends on your your susceptibility to addiction, which varies
greatly for sure. Um. I remember learning when I was
(26:38):
a kid that you smoke crack once and you're addictive
for life. Yeah. I heard that about heroin too. Um. Yeah.
The but there is a very high potential for abuse
with crack because it's long, it's short, short term, short high,
but an intense high. Yeah. And what we don't want
to say, like crack it's not addictive, but we don't
(26:58):
want to spread the uh misinformation once you're hooked, Yeah,
which was really big in the eighties and the in
the Nancy Reagan War on Drug era, Like a lot
of misinformation was put out there just to scare people. Um. Yeah.
So um, we're talking about it being addictive. It's addictive
and because of the effect that it has on dopamine,
(27:22):
but it's also deletrious to your health because of the
effect that it has on your dopamine reward system. Well, yeah,
because uh, and I know we've covered this in other drugs.
If you do enough drugs like this, um, it rewires
your brain to the point where it just isn't working
the same any longer you atually needed. Your brain has
like something some sort of sensor in there that's like, Okay,
(27:45):
there's way too much dopamine going on. This person should
not be feeling this much pleasure. So I'm going to
just stop producing as much dopamine naturally don't need it.
I'm going to destroy the dopamine that's floating around in
the synapsism, going to reduce the level so that when
you now, when you stop smoking crack, the the let
down is way worse because you don't have as much
(28:07):
natural dopamine as you did before you started smoking crack.
And um, so you're craving. Your desire for crack to
get back up is much more intense, much higher. Yeah.
And here's the thing with crack, which is a little weird. Um,
many times you need to smoke more and more of
it because of what you were just talking about, because
(28:29):
you need to get that high. But sometimes it will
actually make you more sensitive to it. And you will
get super high off crack even as an addict, super
quick and you could super die instantly. Um, which I'm
not sure if they've reconciled how it can do both
of those things depending on who you are. Well, I
(28:51):
think it's the same thing. It's like, you know, some
people get addicted to it immediately and other people take longer. No,
but I'm just talking about how it affects you. But
I guess is the same with alcohol, because some hardcore
alcoholics take a long time to get drunk and some
get drunk like really quickly. Right, yeah, so it gets
this the same deal. I guess I'd probably have to
do with metabolism, passons metabolism, right, I guess so. So Um,
(29:15):
once you, once you are fully addicted, if you stop
smoking crack, which by the way, I think I speak
for Chuck too, and I say we highly recommend it
if you smoke crack, to stop smoking crack. Yeah, and
if you haven't started yet, then just keep that up. Yes,
do not start smoking crack, no reason to um if
you have all if it's if you listen to this
(29:37):
podcast after you became addicted to crack. Um, if you
withdraw from crack. You're going to experience a pretty big
calm down in general. Yeah, severe depression, anxiety, cravings. You're
gonna be not fun to be around. You're gonna be
really irritable and anxious UM and exhausted yet like agitated
(29:58):
all at the same time. Yeah. The good news is
that your brain will eventually restructure itself to return its
dopamine levels back to normal or somewhere near normal. UM,
So you won't be depressed or withdrawn or anxious or
irritated irritable for the rest of your life. It's just
while you're undergoing withdrawals. That's what it's going to be like.
(30:20):
And it won't be pretty. It won't be pretty now.
And there's no UM medication designed to specifically treat crack UM,
and most therapies are pretty standard rehab therapy, like cognitive
behavioral therapy, which teaches you how to UM, how to
basically go through life resisting the temptation of smoking crack,
(30:45):
how to disassociate maybe UM triggers like places you go
just from that lifestyle. Yeah, just to decouple your mentality
from being addicted. It's just standard. You have treatment pretty
much and we covered that like extensively in addiction. And
there's another type of treatment that I hadn't heard of,
(31:07):
UM called contingency management. Had you heard of that? No?
I hadn't. Actually, it's apparently fairly popular for crack treatment.
Well what is it. Well, basically, it's, um, you are
rewarded for not smoking crack, which I'm sure goes over
really well with Republicans. Where's my reward exactly? I haven't
smoked crack ever, Well, you haven't been addicted. You have
(31:29):
to be addicted, so um, the uh, you're given like
a voucher or something. You make it like thirty days
you get a free movie ticket or something, or like
you're given stuff to um Yeah, incentive not doing crack.
And I'm sure stuff that is healthy, good for you
distracts you from thinking about crack. That kind of thing.
(31:49):
I hadn't heard of that before this article. Give someone
a movie ticket. You know you did good today by
not smoking crack. Here's a movie ticket, right. Uh. Always
like the street terms, we should go over those real quick,
because street terms, I think you're probably just made up
by the media. Yeah, you know, I always feel like
(32:09):
they probably just call it crack or rock or they
call it bassa or French fries or real tops or
glow glow that's like, um, wasn't that the drug? And
strangers with candy was jerry like rubbed down or gums
and they call it like glow. Probably that great um
rock sand that's my favorite, hot cakes, c d s.
(32:33):
Where is that? Candy? Sugar yam, jelly beans? I guess
they kind of makes sense. Jelly beans and French fries
makes sense. French fries does, yeah, because I mean doesn't
it look kind of like little pieces of French fries? Um, Yeah,
it's it's more. It makes more sense than bossa. Well
that's or real tops or here's one. There's no way
(32:57):
that anyone in the history of humanity has ever called
crack this electric kool aid. Yeah, they got the wrong
drug there. Yeah, that would be acid from the famous
book Like what is that? I don't know. I think
those are newspaper writers who've never been on the streets
the kids today around the electric coolie. So one thing
(33:36):
that we talked about about crack is the weird sentencing
um laws dating back to nineteen and up until two
thousand and ten, when we passed the Fair Sentencing Act.
If you were caught with one gram of crack cocaine,
you would get as much time as someone caught with
(33:57):
one grams of cocaine. Outer. Yes, and let's go back
over this. In a graham of cocaine, powdered cocaine cost
a hundred dollars, a hundred and fifty dollars, and it
was extraordinarily favored predominantly by white people. Crack comes along
five to ten bucks, cheap, intense, high um, and it
(34:19):
becomes favored by African Americans statistically speaking. Yeah, so some
might allege that the US government actually had a hand
in introducing crack to the ghettos and then made stiffer
sentencing once people were addicted to crack to put And
I'm not saying crack users are like awesome people and
(34:41):
people should do this, but it's a non violent crime,
and they were being put in prison for the same
amount of time as white counterparts who may be raped
and murdered people a hundred to one ratio to get
caught with a hundred times the powdered cocaine, to get
the same sentence as somebody caught with a hundredth of
(35:01):
that amount of crack and it's not like that anymore.
They were all well hold on when there was one
other thing too, There were mandatory minimum sentences that were
extraordinarily harsh. Just getting caught with a little bit of
crack on you, any amount of crack. I believe you
got five years automatically five years. That was the mandatory
minimum for possession. Five years in prison for nothing else.
(35:22):
Like you could just be walking down the street and
get caught with crack and never have committed another crime
in your entire life, and you would get five years
in prison for that. And that was from the Anti
Drug Abuse Act, of which screams Nancy Reagan, um. And
it was that was a big deal. It was the
(35:43):
law of the land until two thousand. Yeah, and uh
finally Congress past the Fair Sentencing Act, which reverted the
ratio to one to eighteen instead of UH one to
a hundred by weight, and I got rid of that
mandatory minimum. And now Attorney General Eric Holder is actually
trying to get some retroactivity in these sentences and not
(36:05):
trying to they are actually releasing some people from prison. Um.
I remember we talked about that in the Presidential Partner episode,
Like that was something that a lot of people were
calling for was blanket pardoned non violent crack users who
had been busted under this these mandatory minimums. Here's an
idea rehab somebody. But even still, there's still a skew
(36:28):
in the ratio between crack and cocaine. Um. Uh, probably arrests, no,
not not just that, the the sentences. I guess it's
still an eighteen to one ratio. It used to be
a hundred one, but it's still eighteen to one, And
people are like, why not just make it one to
want it's both it's cocaine and it's cocaine exactly, like,
what's the problem here. So, yeah, there's been a long
(36:51):
history of UM, I guess racism just put plain and simple.
There's really no other way to put it. Racism among
drug law. Yeah, and since they introduced the retroactivity releases,
they've reduced seventy sentences for an average of twenty nine
months per inmate and saved American taxpayers five and thirty
(37:14):
million dollars in the process. Um. Other people will say,
you're letting drug offenders out on the streets. Why are
we doing this? And um, so there are two sides. Obviously,
opinion wise to that story. We'd be remiss if we
didn't point out that people are upset about it in
some circles. Oh sure, it's not like that's a that's
a great idea categorically yeah, um, yeah, there's problems with
(37:39):
it for sure. Uh. Can we talk about crack babies? Yeah,
that was another thing that came out of the eighties
was the so called crack baby. Like there was a
huge part of this crack epidemic wasn't just addiction. It
was babies being born addicted to crack. And Uh, thanks
to a paper from by a guy named Dr Ira
(37:59):
ch has No Off, the crack baby fear started sweeping
the nation. I mean huge, man. There's a New York
Times video that you can go watch, like ten minutes
long called retro Reports. Is that what it was called. Yeah,
it was really good and it basically kind of brought
and I remember now, you know, back in the eighties
(38:20):
Peter Jennings on the nightly news saying that you know,
babies are and it's not Peter Jennings, of course, it's
whoever wrote the story. It was Peter Jennings Dan. Rather,
it was People Time Newsweek. Basically saying, these babies are
being born addicted to drugs. It will ultimately cost crack
babies will cost the United States five billion dollars. Yeah,
they were saying it was going to be a lost
(38:41):
generation and a nation of kids who are you can't rehab.
They're going to be the babies or aloof They shake,
they avoid eye contact, they avoid eye contact with their
own mothers, which proves that they're going to be anti
social deviance when they grow up. Yeah. And this is
not like we're not rewriting history, man, it was like
hardcore stuff that they were saying it was gonna be
(39:03):
uh they were One quote was, um, they will not
be able to hold uh, to form to hold a job,
or form meaningful relationships. Right, So they were expected to
completely overwhelm the education system, maybe not even have an
i Q of fifty, Yeah, and then completely overwhelmed social services.
So basically there was this this whole um generation of
(39:24):
kids that were expected to be totally messed up because
their mothers had smoke crack while they were pregnant, and
so women were having their kids taken away from them.
Some women were arrested and um, the the guy the
doctor who wrote the original paper, Dr Ira chsn Off
like started to very quickly back off of his original statements,
(39:45):
which he's still today, Like he admits, like he was
pretty mouthy and not very savvy, pretty media naive, I
guess you could put it. And he said he would
give these long winded statements and then the press would
just pick out like the juiciest part. And like this
guy single handedly created the crack baby myth because it
(40:05):
never panned out in any way, shape or form. And
what they were saying was like the twitchy babies that
you're seeing on TV when they're talking about the the
symptoms of being a cracked baby. That's premature babies. Like
you take any premature baby who's premature for any reason,
and they're going to display these symptoms that are supposedly
associated with crack babies. Yeah, they did. The US government
(40:27):
sponsored a twenty five year study of crack babies, not
a two year study or a five year study. Twenty
five years. They followed these babies up into adulthood. Uh
is now over the funding ran out, and they found
that um by age four, the average i Q of
cocaine exposed children was UH seventy nine. The average i
(40:49):
Q for the non exposed children was one UM. When
it came to readiness at age six, about in each
group scored in the abnormal range. Basically, all of the
findings said, it's the same as these other kids. But
here's the deal. They weren't doing the study against crack
baby babies and white suburban kids. They were doing it
(41:11):
against a like model, which was other you know, poor
black kids basically that were not crack babies. And they
said they are all below average. So the deal is
is it's poverty. Right, it's not crack cocaine. They're scoring
the same as non non crack babies, and they're all
scoring lower because of poverty and and basically bad postnatal
(41:34):
care through adulthood. Right, like you, you might not have
any problems physiologically or not as not or cognitively from
being exposed to crack in the womb, but if your
mom's still smoking crack after you're born, you're probably not
going to get the best care from your parents as possible. UM.
(41:56):
And they did find in that same study that children
that were being raised in like a porting encouraging house,
even in um poverty stricken conditions uh tended to excel. So,
um it is it's pop. It was poverty they found out,
and um, postnatal care like you said, and being born premature.
But yes, but the correct baby thing never happened. It
(42:17):
was another example of hysterics. So right about now, I
want to say, if if it sounds like Chuck and
I are being cavalier, have been cavalier with the idea
of crack, uh, we're not. We're not being cavalier with
crack or addiction. That's nothing to take lightly. But I
think what's created a bit of freneticness or passion maybe
(42:41):
in this one is just this idea that we're able
to look back now thirty years on and say, wow,
like America was genuinely hysterical, and that's it's something to
be amazed by and a little disconcerted with. Two. Yeah,
of course you should not take cocaine or smoke crack
(43:02):
when you're pregnant. No doctor on earth is going to
say that's a good thing. But the crack baby was
a myth. And the one Emory professor that was in
that New York Times researcher in the New York Times
video came out and said, you know what alcohol does
much more physical damage and is much more widespread as
an abuse drug during pregnancy than crack or cocaine ever is.
(43:26):
But they're not lacking ladies up that are pregnant for drinking.
And the reason they were doing it back then it
is because they were poor black women, right, Um, we
should say the crack epidemic also, while the sentences were stiffer,
the the amount you got caught with was a hundred
times smaller to get the same the same rap is
(43:50):
getting caught with powdered cocaine. Yeah, there was something that
came out of this crack epidemic that was a real threat,
and that was the rise of the modern um inter
city gang, at least as far as we know it.
Like crips and Bloods and folks and all those guys.
They they came out of this era. They were able
(44:11):
to buy the guns that they bought and fight the
turf force that they fought because they had this incredibly
addictive drug that they could sell and control pretty easily
in their hands all of a sudden. So where that
came from, who knows, but you can all you can.
(44:31):
The big problem with the crack epidemic that you can
trace directly back to it is the rise of the
modern gang drug gang. So in summary, crack whack, Yeah,
crack babies, myth, crack sentencing laws, whack whack, Gary webb
(44:54):
Um whacked whack. Very nice. I got nothing else? Okay,
perfect chuckers, how about you take us out with some
listener mail. All right, this is from Rebecca and it
is about PTSD and uh police chases. Um. I've been
a fan of you guys since the inception. I've listened
(45:16):
to every episode. I always wanted to write in until now,
I didn't have a reason. Listening to the Police Chase
podcast made me want to share my story. Years ago,
I was the victim of a police chase. Some teenagers
had stolen a car and were pursued by the cops.
I'm not sure what caused them to pursue at high speeds,
but they did. The chase resulted in the kids t
boning my car when I was stopped at a red light.
(45:37):
The kids tried to take an incredibly sharp turn. Essentially,
you turned onto another road and they're going way too fast. Um.
The chase escalated to an on foot chase. UM, and
it actually did end and arrests I ended up having
to be cut out of the car with the jaws
of life only suffered minor head injuries despite my car
being totaled. As a result of the incident, I began
(45:58):
having anxiety and pts D symptoms that were triggered by
police irons in intense stress. I had to receive treatment
similar to some of what you discussed in the PTSD
episode all as well. Now didn't take too long, um,
with therapy to overcome everything. I just wanted to share
the downside of police chases. I don't think that incident
(46:18):
required a high speed chase, and the result could have
been much much worse. I really wish that police would
stop to think before they pursued for minor crimes uh
and would get fined even or have some sort of
penalty for causing accidents within US at by standards. And
that is Rebecca. Well, thanks Rebecca, I appreciate you sharing that.
Sorry that happened to you. I'm glad you're doing better. Yeah. Um.
(46:40):
If you want to share a personal experience from something
that we have talked about in this episode or another one,
you can tweet to us s y SK podcast, Facebook
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know Stuff podcast to
how Stuff worce dot com and has always joined us
at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know
dot com m HM. Stuff you Should Know is a
(47:03):
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Hello everyone, It's me Josh and for this week's s
Y s K Selects, I've chosen our episode how Crack Works,
and Boyle Boy does the title ever say at all?
Because we really really explain how crack works. So enjoy
How Crack Works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a
(00:23):
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w
Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there, and uh, this is Stuff
you should Know. Jerry just waved like she's waving at
(00:43):
the audience of the anger. She's waving to the world.
It's a little weird. She may be on home Bloom. Uh, Josh,
you know what's whack? Uh? Zach Attack from Saved by
the Bell. I don't even know what it is. You
don't know it's Saved by the Bell? Is what's wrong
with No? I know that I know what that show is,
(01:04):
but I've never heard of the Zach Attack. It's just
Zack being zack. Gotcha? That is whack? Yeah, well, never mind.
I thought Crack was whack, but the Zach Attack is
truly whack. No, I disagree. I was gonna say no,
it's not right because that's actually a pretty good show.
But okay, yes, you crack his whack this. We're like
imminent up in here. We're what we're like eminem up
(01:25):
in here. Yeah, I guess so refer to R hip
Hop episode now. No, I'm just saying people that they're
confused about why we sound so stilted and square, just
go listen to hip hop and that explains everything. People
like that one. Surprisingly, Yeah, it's a good one. Man.
We got a good email from a or a Facebook
(01:46):
post from a graffiti artist. Oh yeah, yeah, good stuff.
I can't remember his tag, but it was like really nice.
But he was complimenting us or he was just saying hey, No,
he's like, hey, I'm a graffiti artist and here's my
my work. And I was very impressed. And he is
not on crack no, because he's not whack right exactly,
So Chuck, I have a little, uh a little intro
(02:10):
just if you'll bear with me. And the year was okay,
I was fourteen, Okay, what is it? It's one year
p b G very early on um cocaine, which is
a drug that had been sweeping the nation for about
(02:32):
ten years by then. Yeah, uh, was up to a
hundred and fifty dollars a graham. That's thanks to the
demand um and the available income of its well healed
yuppie users who were willing to spend that kind of
money on it. Sure, it's very much an expensive, white,
(02:55):
upwardly mobile person's drug. Cocaine was wall st Yeah, and
there were at the time articles that kind of said,
cocaine's probably not that addictive. We shouldn't worry that much
about cocaine. It's not a very big deal. It was mostly,
(03:15):
like I said, a white drug. That same year, a
new drug hit the scene. It was cheap, five to
ten bucks pop. It gave you a very quick, very
intense high, short lived, and it swept through lower income
(03:36):
African American areas of the United States, and all of
a sudden we had a problem, an epidemic. Yes, because
it was cocaine in a different form. Yeah, the country
went crazy for it. And not only was it cocaine
in a different form, it was cocaine being used by
a different demographic that as we'll see, America has always
(03:58):
been threatened by and always made legislation to damp and
drug use among Yeah, it's pretty interesting when you dig
into this stuff, and so in when people started to
get worried, Nancy Reagan became concerned. And when Nancy Reagan
became concerned, as as usual, she started to lie. And
(04:21):
we will we will get into what allegedly might have
happened and why crack might have been introduced in this
country because some people think it was the U. S.
Government straight up. C I A, yeah, that's a really
um good point. So what you're referring to is um
Gary Webb's Dark Alliance article, right, yeah, series of articles
(04:42):
in our book from I believe. Gary Webb was an
investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News, and um,
they had a front page story where he basically figured
out the connection between the CIA and the crack epidem
that started in I think in Los Angeles south central.
(05:04):
There was a dude named Freeway Ricky Ross who's still
around I think, yeah, Um, And he was the largest
cocaine distributor UH African American cocaine distributor in l A.
He was big time, and all of a sudden, out
of nowhere, he had a new product called crack, and
it became very popular, very quickly. Um, and Gary webb
(05:28):
In traced the origin of this epidemic back to through
Ricky Ross, back to some Nicaraguan freedom fighting guerrillas that
were backed and trained and possibly commanded by the CIA.
We're getting into this, so we just go ahead and
(05:49):
dive in. Dive in. Yeah, do you want to? Yeah?
Why not? Okay? Um, all right, here's the deal. In Nicaragua,
Central American country. Um, in the nineteen thirties, a man
name Anastasio uh Samosa took power, and then about forty
years later, in nineteen seventy nine, the people revolted, um
(06:10):
overthrew him, and they were called the Sandinistas. Yes, so
you know the whole Contra Sandinista war in Nicaragua that
raged in the seventies and eighties, that's what we're talking about. Yes,
and the Sandinistas. Um, we're a communist and that didn't
fly so well with the US who had long uh
(06:30):
cherished Nicaragua for their farmland and like to have a
toe in their pond, so to speak. And so communism
there didn't fly. And so they said, you know what,
I think maybe we should fund the contrast, maybe give
them a little bit of financial assistance. Yeah, and the
contrasts weren't just one group. They were it was like
an umbrella term for any democratic or UM an anti
(06:52):
communist group that was trying to paramilitarily overthrow the socialist
leadership in Nicaragua. That's right. So we decided to help
fund their civil war. And UM. The problem was that
there wasn't a lot of dough like that we could say, like, hey,
let's use this money to do this, because it was
a secret war. There was no congressional approval. It was
(07:14):
a proxy war with the Soviet Union at the time.
So some allege that this is when UM, the Reagan
administration and the CIA got together to literally introduce cocaine
dealers in cocaine UH to South Central and crack cocaine
to spread throughout the ghettos, to raise money and use
(07:36):
that money to fund the contrast. Right, So here's the thing,
like that was never proven and Gary Webb never ever
said he did not. He didn't say that the government
directly introduced it on purpose or with the aim of
creating an epidemic in the ghetto. He found connections between
the CIA and drug lords, specifically Ricky Ross on one end,
(08:01):
and then the CIA backed impossibly commanded. UM, the Nicaraguan
Democratic Force. Yes, the this Contra force. UM. So their
their business, their group was funded entirely from cocaine sales
(08:22):
and trafficking. And they all went to this guy, Ricky Ross.
And there's no way that the CIA didn't know about this. Yeah,
and there were at the time. Well we'll get back
to Webb in a second. But UM, in the eighties
there was you know, when the whole Iran Contra thing
broke out, there was the Carry Committee who did some investigating.
(08:43):
The Carry Committee report, UH from John Carey. Obviously, UM
found that quote the Contra drug links included payments to
drug traffickers by the U. S. State Department funds authorized
by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the con tris UH.
And then later on there was an internal CIA investigation
(09:03):
in the nineties where they found that there is no
evidence that UM, the CIA actually brought drugs into the
United States. UM. However, and these are these are aal quotes. However,
during the Contra era, the CIA worked with a variety
of people to support the Contrat program. And let me
be frank, there are instances where the CIA did not
(09:26):
in an expeditious or consistent fashion cut off relationships with
individuals supporting the CONTRAT program who are alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity. So basically, the internal investigation said, well,
there might have been some people we were dealing with
that we're doing this, and as it turns out, we
didn't really do much about it. Right, So, as far
(09:49):
as you can go without hyperbole, and it's still pretty shocking. Sure,
the CIA backed, trained, and possibly commanded UM at least
one Perilla group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force and the Nicaraguan
Democratic Force the f d n UM sold cocaine to
(10:12):
Freeway Ricky Ross. Freeway Ricky Ross is where the crack
epidemic originated. And so just to finish up with web
though Um after he wrote this Dark Alliance series, he
was shunned by mainstream press in the United States. Sadly,
all three of the major newspapers, UM, you know, the
(10:32):
l A Times, New York Times, and I guess was
that Washington Post Post came out and they were not
only shunned, they like tried to discredit him. Oh yeah,
they wrote articles they put UM seventeen reporters in twenty
words to a three day rebuttal of Dark Alliance that
was the The l A Times. Yeah. Rather than pick
up the story, they tried to de demolish it, and
(10:55):
Webb New York Times um suggested he was a reckless
reporter prone to getting his facts wrong. He already had
wanted pull a surprise at this point, I think for
something else, and um The Mercury News defended it for
a little while and then backed off and apologized. He
ended up quitting and committed a very weird suicide in
(11:19):
which he shot himself in the head twice. Uh, who knows. Obviously,
if you get on the internet, there are tons of
outlets that say, well, obviously it's not a suicide. It
was a murder. Um, so who knows about that? Other
other people have said, no, it does look kinky, but
the first shot wasn't fatal and he was able to
(11:40):
do it twice. Who knows, draw your own conclusions. Some
raw nerve right there. But he claimed that there were
people like you know, he saw what he thought were
c i A. People like climbing up his fire escape
and stuff the previous days. And who knows. All I'm
saying is they're making a movie about it with Jeremy
Renner this summer is it right? Great good? I'm glad
(12:03):
he I ran across him when I wrote an article
on America's Army Jeremy Renner. Yeah, he wrote an expose
America's Army is this. Uh, it's a video game and
it's basically like a training game for the army where
you can play this free game. Um, but you sign
up to be contacted. If you're any good at it,
(12:25):
the Army contacts you. And he did this. It's like
a recruiting tool through video games. But the Army categorically
denied that's what it was. But that's obviously what it was.
And Gary Gary Webb, one of his last expose a
was on that, and you know, we should mention that
today all three of those major news outlets all say, boy,
we kind of got that one wrong. Yeah, um, we
(12:47):
shouldn't have done that. Maybe we shouldn't have driven Gary
Webb to his possible suicide. So Gary Webb did all
(13:11):
this investigation, did all this leg We're canning connect to
the dots pretty well, but there's still this maddening question
of tantalizing question who invented crack it came out of nowhere,
and so to kind of answer that which we can't, UM,
you have to look at how crack is made, and
look at how crack is made. You have to go
(13:32):
back a lot further than the nine eighties. You have
to go back to the eighteen eighties, and actually a
little further before then, when cocaine first was introduced to
the United States after it was isolated the alkaloid was
isolated from the coca plant in the mid nineteenth century. Yeah,
and that's when it was isolated in I mean for centuries.
(13:52):
People in South America were wise to the fact that
if you chew on this plant, it'll give you some
go juice you can work more. Yeah, and people still
chew the heck out of it. Yeah, So it was
it was no secret to the South Americans. But like
you said, it was the mid eighteen eighties when it
was actually isolated and UM became a narcotic, an abused
(14:15):
narcotic drug. Right. But first UM you could buy it
all over the place. You could order it through catalogs.
UM you can doctors could prescribe it. Sigmund Freud was
an ardent prescriber of it UM and it was a
very popular drug found in tonics. Coca cola for real,
(14:37):
that's not a myth. Um and cocaine was everybody loved
it for a while, yeah until well not until they
still loved it and still do today, I imagine. But
in nineteen fourteen it was made illegal with the Harrison
Narcotics Tax Act and UM, right, which do you remember
I said earlier that like everything like this, crack has
(15:01):
a real history of um. It shows the history of
racism in regards to drug laws. So the Harrison Narcotic
Act UM outlawed opiates and cocaine for the first time
in the United States, and it was based on concerns
like Chinaman were luring white women there were to their
(15:23):
to their dens of iniquity and open Chinatown through opium
and uh, Southern blacks were sniffing cocaine and it gave
them superhuman strength and they were raping white women as
a result. So those two things were passed, and we
have federal legislation from as a result of those kind
(15:44):
of fears. And if you kind of if you keep
that in the back of your mind and then pay
attention to the drug policy that comes out later on
from crack. You'll it's been going on since then and
it continues to today. Are you saying a pattern emerges?
A pattern emerges? So, uh, cocaine is um. Cocaine powder
is You have to actually manufacture it it. You don't
(16:06):
find a cocoa plant and like not shake it and
shake it and white powder falls out. It makes like
a tinkling sound in It is made by dissolving the paste,
the cocoa paste um in a mixture of hydrochloric acid
and water. Then you had some potassium salt separate out
the bad junk, maybe had a little ammonia, and then
the powder is separated out and you've got cocaine powder,
(16:30):
cocaine and from there you can sniff it. You can
add a little water to it and inject it. Yeah,
or you can make something called free base. Yeah. I
never quite understood what free base was. I thought it was.
I thought free basing was a thing. It is, yeah,
but free base is also and it's a noun anniverb Okay,
so maybe I do free base free base. Oh you see,
(16:52):
I've been doing it wrong. You've verb the noun. Okay,
so you've been doing it just just stuff doesn't work.
I don't know what everybody so excited about. Um. So
with free base, you take cocaine and you add something
highly flammable, say ether um, and you after you dissolved
(17:15):
the the cocaine in ammonia, you add ether to it
and then you smoke it. But you're smoking something that
has like a highly flammable solution involved. All that to
Richard Pryer, Yes, when he was filming Busting Loose, he
caught himself on fire. He was smoking free base and
drinking one one proof rome one night and I think
(17:37):
he was doing it in his garage to which so
it was unventilated and he caught fire. Yeah, but you
know what, there's also reports that he set himself on
fire on purpose, that he poured the stuff all over
his head and let him match. Oh we went a
little little cocko self immolation. Um. I think that may
be the right story. Now. I just saw a documentary
on him, and I think that's what they say. I'm
(17:59):
so glad you just corrected me mid podcasts. Do you
have any emails you prevented? Well, I mean that was
the long stories that he free based, and I think
he even came out later and said like, yeah, I
was free basing, but I also purposely set myself on
fire in the ravages of a free basing binge. Okay,
so free basing it was a thing at least as
(18:20):
early as but it was it was difficult to do
multi step process and you needed something like ether. Ether
is not the easiest thing to get your hands on
and dangerous obviously. Sure, um, but there was a way
to smoke cocaine, and free base was the way to
do it. But that never really got a big foothold
(18:40):
in any demographic in the country. It was just kind
of a thing that some people like Richard Pryor did
looking for a more intense high. I guess then all
of a sudden, mysteriously, out of nowhere, there is crack cocaine. Yeah,
crack is also manufactured um, but it doesn't require something
like either or anything flammable. Um. You dissolve it in
(19:02):
a mixture of water and either baking soda, sodium bicarbonate,
UM or ammonia, and you boil it up, separate it
out into the solid, cool it down, and then break
it up and you've got your little whiteish or tan
crack rocks. And if you buy it on the street.
Supposedly they range in size from point one to point
(19:22):
five grams um and they contain the d e A
says between seventy pure cocaine. So it's quite a rush
for you, sure, um, because it's so easy to make
crack from cocaine. Um. Like, nobody imports cracked across the
(19:44):
border into the US. It's all coke that comes into
the US and then Wesley Snipes converts it into crack
uh in a factory operated and run by naked people
because he doesn't trust them. What was that new Jack City? Oh? Man,
I was like blade, Yeah, man, I forgot all about
(20:07):
the Jack City. That was great. And they call it
crack because it makes a crackling sound. That's the baking
soda when you put the fire on it, and speaking
you put the fire on it. That's how you do it. Um,
you have a little I mean, there's different kinds of pipes,
but the most often crack pipe you will see is
the little straight shooter, a little glass tube. Yep, find
(20:27):
him on my dog walks in my neighborhood. Do you
really still yeah, crack is still around. It's not like
it went anywhere. Um, he thought oh, they got that
problem all under control. It's lift uh. So you you
you know, you have the crack in one end and
then a filter of some kind like a steel wool
or something in the other. You heat it up with
your lighter, yeah, under like on the outside of the
(20:49):
glass tube, or you can yeah, I guess hit it
with the flame. But I think if you light it
under the glass tube, that's generally the way to do it.
I think, Yeah, it vaporizes it, that's right, and you
smoke it and and um, pretty much immediately, Uh, you're
going to feel the effects. It's it's an immediate rush
that lasts only about ten or fifteen minutes. And that's
something that I didn't used to know. I learned it
(21:11):
a few years ago, but I had no idea. I
thought a crack, Hi, I was like, you know, a
couple of hours or something. No. I think it's one
of the shortest ties on the market, which is I
guess why it's so addictive and dangerous rampant, because you
come down and you're like, I'd like to do that
again exactly minutes. It's a short high, but it's also
(21:31):
an extremely intense high too, So um. Yeah, the the
the it's addictiveness or potential for addictiveness is really high. Yeah,
and so I know this article summarized very nicely for
you exactly how it reacts with the brain, and so
why don't you go ahead and just lay it on people? Alright.
It has to do with dopamine, as we know. Yeah, dopamine.
(21:53):
It's like your pleasure center. It's it's the the basis
of the reward system that we have, which is how
we learn to eat and how we learn to have sex,
to reproduce. Like we we feel good when we do
certain things, we want to do it again, and the
basis of that is dopamine. So in the brain, the
way it functions normally is UH neuron will release dopamine
(22:15):
and it will travel to a neighboring neuron, causing it
to fire and release a pleasurable sensation. And then that
dopamine UH molecule travels back to the original neuron via
a transporter and is reabsorbed. So it does its little
thing and then goes back home and it's good. Right,
(22:35):
There's a certain finite amount of pleasure humans are designed
to experience naturally, because when we say reabsorbed, we said
it said that a lot. I don't think people understand
that means basically, it turns that off again. Right, It
does its thing and it's done. It doesn't do its
thing and do its thing and do its thing and
do its thing. It does its thing once and goes
back to the original neuron exactly, sits on the couch
(22:58):
and its little neuron waits to be released again. Let
me know when you have sex again or eat something
or some pizza. UM. So with with crack or other
drugs that UM target the dopamine system, UM, they interrupt
the process. Crack specifically interrupts the process of reuptake or reabsorption.
(23:20):
So you're you're smoking the crack, right, and it triggers
this dopamine release flood. But crack attaches to the transporter
which keeps the UH, the dopamine from being reabsorbed, which
means it's just floating around in the synapse, the area
between two neurons, like hitting that one neuron again and
(23:42):
again and again. And it does it all throughout the
brain or all throughout the ventral tegmental area. And you
have this long or well not long, but you have
this very intense pleasurable sensation. Right, So basically the re uptake,
they just shut that down, so you're out there on
your own and then just floating around. Yes, your brain
(24:03):
is a big pleasure center. And then after I guess
five to fifteen minutes, like the crack wears off in
the dopamine is taken up once more. That's right, and
the high is over and your are left going I
want to do that again, exactly. I guess we should
talk about some of the effects of crack use. Um. Obviously,
(24:24):
just like with cocaine any kind of stimulant like that
or in phetamine, you're gonna be at risk for heart attack. Yeah,
sometimes on the spot and because you smoke it too,
Like it has real, um, real potential for problems with
your respiratory system and your cardio pulmonary system in general. Yeah,
stroke is also a risk. Um. It's gonna make you
(24:45):
very energize at first. You might although your senses may
be heightened temporarily, your heart rate is gonna shoot through
the roof, your pupils are gonna dilate, your temperature is
gonna rise. Um, you're gonna be pretty anxious or irritable
as you start to come down, and then you could
be really aggressive and you could you know, be more
(25:06):
prone to start a fight with a cop yeel like
you have superhuman strength or say some crazy stuff to
a passer by on the sidewalk because you have and
you have went to a gunk on the corners of
your mouth. That's true. Uh. If you have it with alcohol,
that's not a good combination because that produces a chemical
called uh coca ethylene. Yeah, lifts up like this is
(25:28):
a thing. It's like toxic is I'll get out. Well,
it's the crack or cocaine and alcohol um produce a
third drug, basically a hybrid drug that's more than the
sum of its parts. And um it creates a longer
lasting intense or high from crack. Um. But it's also
(25:50):
really toxic to the liver, really bad for you. Yeah,
as if alcohol itself wasn't. Yeah, And it's not like
you have to do anything to it or to to
get this the like you just drink and smoke crack
and your body does the rest. Your your metabolism breaks
the stuff down and creates this coca ethylene and it's
like alcohol on cocaine. So, as we said, it's super addictive. Um.
(26:17):
And of course all this stuff whenever you hear about
drugs being addictive, it's all dependent on the person. Of course.
One person might smoke crack and never want to do
it again. One person might be hooked immediately. Uh. It
all depends on your your susceptibility to addiction, which varies
greatly for sure. Um. I remember learning when I was
(26:38):
a kid that you smoke crack once and you're addictive
for life. Yeah. I heard that about heroin too. Um. Yeah.
The but there is a very high potential for abuse
with crack because it's long, it's short, short term, short high,
but an intense high. Yeah. And what we don't want
to say, like crack it's not addictive, but we don't
(26:58):
want to spread the uh misinformation once you're hooked, Yeah,
which was really big in the eighties and the in
the Nancy Reagan War on Drug era, Like a lot
of misinformation was put out there just to scare people. Um. Yeah.
So um, we're talking about it being addictive. It's addictive
and because of the effect that it has on dopamine,
(27:22):
but it's also deletrious to your health because of the
effect that it has on your dopamine reward system. Well, yeah,
because uh, and I know we've covered this in other drugs.
If you do enough drugs like this, um, it rewires
your brain to the point where it just isn't working
the same any longer you atually needed. Your brain has
like something some sort of sensor in there that's like, Okay,
(27:45):
there's way too much dopamine going on. This person should
not be feeling this much pleasure. So I'm going to
just stop producing as much dopamine naturally don't need it.
I'm going to destroy the dopamine that's floating around in
the synapsism, going to reduce the level so that when
you now, when you stop smoking crack, the the let
down is way worse because you don't have as much
(28:07):
natural dopamine as you did before you started smoking crack.
And um, so you're craving. Your desire for crack to
get back up is much more intense, much higher. Yeah.
And here's the thing with crack, which is a little weird. Um,
many times you need to smoke more and more of
it because of what you were just talking about, because
(28:29):
you need to get that high. But sometimes it will
actually make you more sensitive to it. And you will
get super high off crack even as an addict, super
quick and you could super die instantly. Um, which I'm
not sure if they've reconciled how it can do both
of those things depending on who you are. Well, I
(28:51):
think it's the same thing. It's like, you know, some
people get addicted to it immediately and other people take longer. No,
but I'm just talking about how it affects you. But
I guess is the same with alcohol, because some hardcore
alcoholics take a long time to get drunk and some
get drunk like really quickly. Right, yeah, so it gets
this the same deal. I guess I'd probably have to
do with metabolism, passons metabolism, right, I guess so. So Um,
(29:15):
once you, once you are fully addicted, if you stop
smoking crack, which by the way, I think I speak
for Chuck too, and I say we highly recommend it
if you smoke crack, to stop smoking crack. Yeah, and
if you haven't started yet, then just keep that up. Yes,
do not start smoking crack, no reason to um if
you have all if it's if you listen to this
(29:37):
podcast after you became addicted to crack. Um, if you
withdraw from crack. You're going to experience a pretty big
calm down in general. Yeah, severe depression, anxiety, cravings. You're
gonna be not fun to be around. You're gonna be
really irritable and anxious UM and exhausted yet like agitated
(29:58):
all at the same time. Yeah. The good news is
that your brain will eventually restructure itself to return its
dopamine levels back to normal or somewhere near normal. UM,
So you won't be depressed or withdrawn or anxious or
irritated irritable for the rest of your life. It's just
while you're undergoing withdrawals. That's what it's going to be like.
(30:20):
And it won't be pretty. It won't be pretty now.
And there's no UM medication designed to specifically treat crack UM,
and most therapies are pretty standard rehab therapy, like cognitive
behavioral therapy, which teaches you how to UM, how to
basically go through life resisting the temptation of smoking crack,
(30:45):
how to disassociate maybe UM triggers like places you go
just from that lifestyle. Yeah, just to decouple your mentality
from being addicted. It's just standard. You have treatment pretty
much and we covered that like extensively in addiction. And
there's another type of treatment that I hadn't heard of,
(31:07):
UM called contingency management. Had you heard of that? No?
I hadn't. Actually, it's apparently fairly popular for crack treatment.
Well what is it. Well, basically, it's, um, you are
rewarded for not smoking crack, which I'm sure goes over
really well with Republicans. Where's my reward exactly? I haven't
smoked crack ever, Well, you haven't been addicted. You have
(31:29):
to be addicted, so um, the uh, you're given like
a voucher or something. You make it like thirty days
you get a free movie ticket or something, or like
you're given stuff to um Yeah, incentive not doing crack.
And I'm sure stuff that is healthy, good for you
distracts you from thinking about crack. That kind of thing.
(31:49):
I hadn't heard of that before this article. Give someone
a movie ticket. You know you did good today by
not smoking crack. Here's a movie ticket, right. Uh. Always
like the street terms, we should go over those real quick,
because street terms, I think you're probably just made up
by the media. Yeah, you know, I always feel like
(32:09):
they probably just call it crack or rock or they
call it bassa or French fries or real tops or
glow glow that's like, um, wasn't that the drug? And
strangers with candy was jerry like rubbed down or gums
and they call it like glow. Probably that great um
rock sand that's my favorite, hot cakes, c d s.
(32:33):
Where is that? Candy? Sugar yam, jelly beans? I guess
they kind of makes sense. Jelly beans and French fries
makes sense. French fries does, yeah, because I mean doesn't
it look kind of like little pieces of French fries? Um, Yeah,
it's it's more. It makes more sense than bossa. Well
that's or real tops or here's one. There's no way
(32:57):
that anyone in the history of humanity has ever called
crack this electric kool aid. Yeah, they got the wrong
drug there. Yeah, that would be acid from the famous
book Like what is that? I don't know. I think
those are newspaper writers who've never been on the streets
the kids today around the electric coolie. So one thing
(33:36):
that we talked about about crack is the weird sentencing
um laws dating back to nineteen and up until two
thousand and ten, when we passed the Fair Sentencing Act.
If you were caught with one gram of crack cocaine,
you would get as much time as someone caught with
(33:57):
one grams of cocaine. Outer. Yes, and let's go back
over this. In a graham of cocaine, powdered cocaine cost
a hundred dollars, a hundred and fifty dollars, and it
was extraordinarily favored predominantly by white people. Crack comes along
five to ten bucks, cheap, intense, high um, and it
(34:19):
becomes favored by African Americans statistically speaking. Yeah, so some
might allege that the US government actually had a hand
in introducing crack to the ghettos and then made stiffer
sentencing once people were addicted to crack to put And
I'm not saying crack users are like awesome people and
(34:41):
people should do this, but it's a non violent crime,
and they were being put in prison for the same
amount of time as white counterparts who may be raped
and murdered people a hundred to one ratio to get
caught with a hundred times the powdered cocaine, to get
the same sentence as somebody caught with a hundredth of
(35:01):
that amount of crack and it's not like that anymore.
They were all well hold on when there was one
other thing too, There were mandatory minimum sentences that were
extraordinarily harsh. Just getting caught with a little bit of
crack on you, any amount of crack. I believe you
got five years automatically five years. That was the mandatory
minimum for possession. Five years in prison for nothing else.
(35:22):
Like you could just be walking down the street and
get caught with crack and never have committed another crime
in your entire life, and you would get five years
in prison for that. And that was from the Anti
Drug Abuse Act, of which screams Nancy Reagan, um. And
it was that was a big deal. It was the
(35:43):
law of the land until two thousand. Yeah, and uh
finally Congress past the Fair Sentencing Act, which reverted the
ratio to one to eighteen instead of UH one to
a hundred by weight, and I got rid of that
mandatory minimum. And now Attorney General Eric Holder is actually
trying to get some retroactivity in these sentences and not
(36:05):
trying to they are actually releasing some people from prison. Um.
I remember we talked about that in the Presidential Partner episode,
Like that was something that a lot of people were
calling for was blanket pardoned non violent crack users who
had been busted under this these mandatory minimums. Here's an
idea rehab somebody. But even still, there's still a skew
(36:28):
in the ratio between crack and cocaine. Um. Uh, probably arrests, no,
not not just that, the the sentences. I guess it's
still an eighteen to one ratio. It used to be
a hundred one, but it's still eighteen to one, And
people are like, why not just make it one to
want it's both it's cocaine and it's cocaine exactly, like,
what's the problem here. So, yeah, there's been a long
(36:51):
history of UM, I guess racism just put plain and simple.
There's really no other way to put it. Racism among
drug law. Yeah, and since they introduced the retroactivity releases,
they've reduced seventy sentences for an average of twenty nine
months per inmate and saved American taxpayers five and thirty
(37:14):
million dollars in the process. Um. Other people will say,
you're letting drug offenders out on the streets. Why are
we doing this? And um, so there are two sides. Obviously,
opinion wise to that story. We'd be remiss if we
didn't point out that people are upset about it in
some circles. Oh sure, it's not like that's a that's
a great idea categorically yeah, um, yeah, there's problems with
(37:39):
it for sure. Uh. Can we talk about crack babies? Yeah,
that was another thing that came out of the eighties
was the so called crack baby. Like there was a
huge part of this crack epidemic wasn't just addiction. It
was babies being born addicted to crack. And Uh, thanks
to a paper from by a guy named Dr Ira
(37:59):
ch has No Off, the crack baby fear started sweeping
the nation. I mean huge, man. There's a New York
Times video that you can go watch, like ten minutes
long called retro Reports. Is that what it was called. Yeah,
it was really good and it basically kind of brought
and I remember now, you know, back in the eighties
(38:20):
Peter Jennings on the nightly news saying that you know,
babies are and it's not Peter Jennings, of course, it's
whoever wrote the story. It was Peter Jennings Dan. Rather,
it was People Time Newsweek. Basically saying, these babies are
being born addicted to drugs. It will ultimately cost crack
babies will cost the United States five billion dollars. Yeah,
they were saying it was going to be a lost
(38:41):
generation and a nation of kids who are you can't rehab.
They're going to be the babies or aloof They shake,
they avoid eye contact, they avoid eye contact with their
own mothers, which proves that they're going to be anti
social deviance when they grow up. Yeah. And this is
not like we're not rewriting history, man, it was like
hardcore stuff that they were saying it was gonna be
(39:03):
uh they were One quote was, um, they will not
be able to hold uh, to form to hold a job,
or form meaningful relationships. Right, So they were expected to
completely overwhelm the education system, maybe not even have an
i Q of fifty, Yeah, and then completely overwhelmed social services.
So basically there was this this whole um generation of
(39:24):
kids that were expected to be totally messed up because
their mothers had smoke crack while they were pregnant, and
so women were having their kids taken away from them.
Some women were arrested and um, the the guy the
doctor who wrote the original paper, Dr Ira chsn Off
like started to very quickly back off of his original statements,
(39:45):
which he's still today, Like he admits, like he was
pretty mouthy and not very savvy, pretty media naive, I
guess you could put it. And he said he would
give these long winded statements and then the press would
just pick out like the juiciest part. And like this
guy single handedly created the crack baby myth because it
(40:05):
never panned out in any way, shape or form. And
what they were saying was like the twitchy babies that
you're seeing on TV when they're talking about the the
symptoms of being a cracked baby. That's premature babies. Like
you take any premature baby who's premature for any reason,
and they're going to display these symptoms that are supposedly
associated with crack babies. Yeah, they did. The US government
(40:27):
sponsored a twenty five year study of crack babies, not
a two year study or a five year study. Twenty
five years. They followed these babies up into adulthood. Uh
is now over the funding ran out, and they found
that um by age four, the average i Q of
cocaine exposed children was UH seventy nine. The average i
(40:49):
Q for the non exposed children was one UM. When
it came to readiness at age six, about in each
group scored in the abnormal range. Basically, all of the
findings said, it's the same as these other kids. But
here's the deal. They weren't doing the study against crack
baby babies and white suburban kids. They were doing it
(41:11):
against a like model, which was other you know, poor
black kids basically that were not crack babies. And they
said they are all below average. So the deal is
is it's poverty. Right, it's not crack cocaine. They're scoring
the same as non non crack babies, and they're all
scoring lower because of poverty and and basically bad postnatal
(41:34):
care through adulthood. Right, like you, you might not have
any problems physiologically or not as not or cognitively from
being exposed to crack in the womb, but if your
mom's still smoking crack after you're born, you're probably not
going to get the best care from your parents as possible. UM.
(41:56):
And they did find in that same study that children
that were being raised in like a porting encouraging house,
even in um poverty stricken conditions uh tended to excel. So,
um it is it's pop. It was poverty they found out,
and um, postnatal care like you said, and being born premature.
But yes, but the correct baby thing never happened. It
(42:17):
was another example of hysterics. So right about now, I
want to say, if if it sounds like Chuck and
I are being cavalier, have been cavalier with the idea
of crack, uh, we're not. We're not being cavalier with
crack or addiction. That's nothing to take lightly. But I
think what's created a bit of freneticness or passion maybe
(42:41):
in this one is just this idea that we're able
to look back now thirty years on and say, wow,
like America was genuinely hysterical, and that's it's something to
be amazed by and a little disconcerted with. Two. Yeah,
of course you should not take cocaine or smoke crack
(43:02):
when you're pregnant. No doctor on earth is going to
say that's a good thing. But the crack baby was
a myth. And the one Emory professor that was in
that New York Times researcher in the New York Times
video came out and said, you know what alcohol does
much more physical damage and is much more widespread as
an abuse drug during pregnancy than crack or cocaine ever is.
(43:26):
But they're not lacking ladies up that are pregnant for drinking.
And the reason they were doing it back then it
is because they were poor black women, right, Um, we
should say the crack epidemic also, while the sentences were stiffer,
the the amount you got caught with was a hundred
times smaller to get the same the same rap is
(43:50):
getting caught with powdered cocaine. Yeah, there was something that
came out of this crack epidemic that was a real threat,
and that was the rise of the modern um inter
city gang, at least as far as we know it.
Like crips and Bloods and folks and all those guys.
They they came out of this era. They were able
(44:11):
to buy the guns that they bought and fight the
turf force that they fought because they had this incredibly
addictive drug that they could sell and control pretty easily
in their hands all of a sudden. So where that
came from, who knows, but you can all you can.
(44:31):
The big problem with the crack epidemic that you can
trace directly back to it is the rise of the
modern gang drug gang. So in summary, crack whack, Yeah,
crack babies, myth, crack sentencing laws, whack whack, Gary webb
(44:54):
Um whacked whack. Very nice. I got nothing else? Okay,
perfect chuckers, how about you take us out with some
listener mail. All right, this is from Rebecca and it
is about PTSD and uh police chases. Um. I've been
a fan of you guys since the inception. I've listened
(45:16):
to every episode. I always wanted to write in until now,
I didn't have a reason. Listening to the Police Chase
podcast made me want to share my story. Years ago,
I was the victim of a police chase. Some teenagers
had stolen a car and were pursued by the cops.
I'm not sure what caused them to pursue at high speeds,
but they did. The chase resulted in the kids t
boning my car when I was stopped at a red light.
(45:37):
The kids tried to take an incredibly sharp turn. Essentially,
you turned onto another road and they're going way too fast. Um.
The chase escalated to an on foot chase. UM, and
it actually did end and arrests I ended up having
to be cut out of the car with the jaws
of life only suffered minor head injuries despite my car
being totaled. As a result of the incident, I began
(45:58):
having anxiety and pts D symptoms that were triggered by
police irons in intense stress. I had to receive treatment
similar to some of what you discussed in the PTSD
episode all as well. Now didn't take too long, um,
with therapy to overcome everything. I just wanted to share
the downside of police chases. I don't think that incident
(46:18):
required a high speed chase, and the result could have
been much much worse. I really wish that police would
stop to think before they pursued for minor crimes uh
and would get fined even or have some sort of
penalty for causing accidents within US at by standards. And
that is Rebecca. Well, thanks Rebecca, I appreciate you sharing that.
Sorry that happened to you. I'm glad you're doing better. Yeah. Um.
(46:40):
If you want to share a personal experience from something
that we have talked about in this episode or another one,
you can tweet to us s y SK podcast, Facebook
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know Stuff podcast to
how Stuff worce dot com and has always joined us
at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know
dot com m HM. Stuff you Should Know is a
(47:03):
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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