Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbon, and I've got a serious but important topic for you today. In October of seventeen, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency.
In the White House ceremony, Trump said, nobody has seen anything like what's going on now, referring to the thousands of Americans overdosing every year from a class of narcotics that includes prescription painkillers, heroine, and fentanyl, which is a synthetic form of heroin. It's a serious problem and a sentiment echoed by well meaning public figures across the board. But the thing is, we have seen its like before. Back in the nine eighties and early nineties, the crack
cocaine epidemic ravaged poor black communities across the country. When krack arrived in economically depressed urban areas, it proved both powerfully addicted and potentially lucrative. Violent turf wars erupted as dealers fought for control of the market, and the group of addiction caught many people. The guv mints response to the crack epidemic was to double down on the war on drugs, first declared by Richard Nixon in nineteen seventy one.
In nineteen six, Congress passed to the infamous one to one sentencing law, which treated possession of one gram of crack, not the sale, mind just possession, as the equivalent of possessing one hundred grams of powder cocaine. This was on top of a five year mandatory minimum sentence for first time possession of crack. Since black people accounted for eight of crack arrests, black communities were the hardest hit by the criminalization of crack, which sent young black men to
prison at historic rates. The federal prison population swelled between the years five and two thousand, and two thirds of those convictions were for drug offenses. Studies have shown that although Blacks are no more likely than whites to use illegal drugs, there six to ten times more likely to
be incarcerated for drug offenses. In contrast to the tough on crime response to the crack epidemic, which took its toll primarily on poor black unities, the government responds to the opioid crisis, in which more than pent of overdose victims are white, has been wildly different, particularly in the way that elected officials and law enforcement talk about addiction.
Police departments across the country adopted treatment first policies that postponed or forwent criminal prosecution for opioid possession and diverted drug offenders to treatment programs. Police officers in the small town of Laconia, New Hampshire, a state hit particularly hard by overdose deaths, carry business cards that read the Laconia Police Department recognizes that substance misuse is a disease. We
understand you can't fight this alone. One reason that most opioid addicts are white could be because they are more likely to be prescribed pain medication. One study showed that doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication for their black patients, believing falsely that they have higher pain thresholds. But we spoke with Eco Yanka, a law professor at Shiva University, who finds this treatment first rhetoric a little
bitter sweet. He says that while it's heartening to see local law enforcement and elected officials talking about addicts as victims instead of moral degenerates, it's not like any of this is based on new information. He said. We spent two generations locking up young black men for any reason we could, in large part covered by the War on drugs, and then we have an explosion of addiction in the white community, and suddenly everyone starts reading all the science
that's been around for two decades. Yanka is one of many voices calling out the clear racial divide between the hyper criminalization and moral outcry over crack addiction and the leniency and compassion shown towards opioid addiction. When pregnant black mothers became addicted to crack, it created a national panic over crack babies. Today, a baby is born addicted to opioids every nineteen minutes, but there's no parallel vilification of
opioid moms. The crack baby panic of late nineteen eighties was sparked by one preliminary study of just twenty three infants and led to predictions that an entire generation would grow up sickly, brain damaged, and heavily dependent on social services. Longitudinal studies have since exposed the crack baby myth, showing that full term babies born to crack addicted mothers show
no health differences compared to their peers. One of the key talking points of the presidential campaign was the economic toll of globalization on rural, mostly white communities, and how the ensuing joblessness and hopelessness helped to fuel the opioid crisis. We spoke with Maya Slavitts, a New York based journalist
who has written extensively about addiction. They said, the reason we saw crack hit black neighborhoods the way it did in the eighties and nineties was because they had high unemployment levels and were hit hard by d industrialization, all the same things we're seeing in rural white communities now.
Yanka says that plenty of sociologists and economists were making those connections back in the nineteen eighties, but their voices and data were drowned out by a media narrative that preferred to place the blame for the crack epidemic on
negligent black mothers and absent black fathers. While we'd hope that the narrative surrounding today's opioid epidemic wouldn't change if its racial demograph were reversed, we can at least speak glad that some of the people facing addiction aren't going it alone, and that some of the programs being created will help all of our struggling citizens in the future. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.