![]() ![]() Under this act, a variety of mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes were introduced, including those in which crack-related crimes were punished with mandatory sentences a hundred times longer than those associated with cocaine related crimes. This involved measures like the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act, which allowed police to seize assets from drug raids on those too poor to pursue legal retribution, and the Anti Drug Abuse Act, which massively increased federal funding for law enforcement and sharply increased the penalties for drug-related crimes. ![]() The genuine ugliness of the 1980s crack problem provided the conservative Reagan right with the perfect excuse to ramp up the “war on drugs”-which, in practice, amounted to a war on underprivileged drug users. Though the horrors of the time were all too real, sensationalized media coverage of the problem and the government’s misguided attempt to curb it would ultimately only add to the Black community’s struggles. A recent Netflix documentary exploring the era called Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy describes not only multitudes of women who lost or gave up custody of their children due to their crack addiction’s brutality, but one mother who was reportedly willing to swap her four month old son for 20 dollars worth of crack cocaine. ![]() There was also a notable increase in the number of Black children in foster care as Black families were destroyed by crack’s impact. Thus, the toll this epidemic took as it emerged during the eighties is evident not only in the rising rate of cocaine-related overdoses and hospital visits but a near doubling of the homicide rate among Black men aged 14-24 as inter-community violence increased due to cocaine-related street wars. Predictably, abuse of the drug took off, most vehemently in impoverished Black communities-communities where widespread poverty and oppression sweetened the temptation of escaping through a euphoric high and where many young men lacking more reputable opportunities for employment were desperate enough to turn to dealing to make ends meet. It then came roaring back to the center of national attention in the mid-1980s with a boom of cocaine importation and the emergence of crack, a far cheaper version of the drug that offered users a more intense and shorter-lived high.Īt once, what had formerly been only a “rich man’s drug” was suddenly infinitely more accessible than it had ever been-just when it was also becoming more addictive than it had ever been. After cocaine faded from popular American use after it was initially outlawed in the early 1900s, the drug gradually regained prominence throughout the 60s and 70s. ![]()
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