On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media. Today's episode addicted to anti Blackness.
Today, we're stepping into a chapter of American history that's both sobering and enlightening. The crack cocaine era.
They call it crack, a killer drug, wasting innocent lives.
It's a time that shook communities, and the stories that emerge from it reveal a complex web of struggles, truths, and the power of narratives to shape our perceptions.
During the crack cocaine era, the media played a huge role in shaping public opinion about addiction. Often, Black people struggling with the day were portrayed as sub human super predators, determined to destroy anyone in anything they came in contact with. It's crucial to understand how storytelling and media, be it films, TV shows, or news coverage, influenced the way we saw crack users during that tumultuous time.
Take, for instance, the film Knwjack City. While it's a powerful critique of the crack epidemics impact on communities, it also painted crack users with a broad brush, often showcasing them as violent, uncontrollable criminals. Pooky, played by Chris Rock is a crack user who resorts to crime, reinforcing the idea that addiction inevitably leads to criminal behavior.
And knows romping on that glove that's got men.
Oh, got no control over it now.
And then there's the infamous Just Say No campaign, spearheaded by the Reagan administration and the subsequent local PSAs. These initiatives oversimplified addiction as a personal feeling, neglecting the systemic issues that contributed to the crack epidemic devastating effects. By framing addiction as a purely individual problem, they ignored the social and economic factors that were at play.
But here's the thing. It's not that these stories didn't have elements of truth. There were people whose lives spiraled into crime due to addiction, and communities did experience heightened violence during those years. However, the danger lies in reducing an entire group of people to a single narrative, a single story. The crack cocaine era was far more complex than what these portrayals implied.
And let's not forget the role of music during this era. Hip hop artists used their lyrics to address the crack epidemic head on, while Grandmaster flashes White Lines critiques both the drug trade and the systemic issues that contributed to its proliferation. Other songs like The Dogs Your Mama's on Crack Rock ridicules addicted women in particular and their family members.
And while the crack era was in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, its impact and the way we interact with it through stories is still very much present today.
The way we frame stories about addiction still impacts how we perceive crack addiction and other forms as well. It's a reminder that we must challenge the oversimplified narratives that lead to stigma. Addiction is a complex interplay of biology, environment, and circumstance, and just like back then, we need stories that reflect the full spectrum of experiences, from struggle to recovery and everything in between.
And today we're speaking with an author who is telling a more nuanced story of the crack era.
I'm Katie, I'm Eves, And today we're talking to Donovan X Ramsey about his book When Crack Was King.
I am Donovan x Ramsey. I am a journalist and author from Columbus, Ohio. I report on the Black experience and patterns of power.
All right, Donovan, So we had a time reading your book. When I first heard about it, I had a vision that it would only be about crack users, and then of course when I read it, you had those multiple perspectives. So why was it important for you to include multiple perspectives the addict, the dealer, the mayor, the family member instead of just focusing on the addict.
You know, I really wanted to make an attempt to write a comprehensive history. I feel like black stories sometimes get not sometimes a lot of times get short shripped, and we don't get people's best efforts. So for me, because there hadn't been a comprehensive history of the crack epidemic written, it seemed like an opportunity to tell the story from just more than one perspective. So I wanted
to make sure to get multiple cities. I wanted to tell the story of the pre crack era, what the era was actually like, what the world is like now as a result of it. But I definitely wanted to get different ways that people were impacted by it besides just addiction, because all those stories are important to that history.
Yeah, and also that is such a big story to tell. Like, it's already a big story to tell to just talk about the users, but to talk about the entire context around it is an even bigger story to tell. How did it feel to you to approach such an expansive topic.
Well, I am foolishly overconfident. That is one of our gifts and you know curses, is that everything seems seems doable, at least within journalism. I think, oh, you know, I could do that. And I didn't realize until I was deep into the reporting and writing process just how much I have betten off, you know, like trying to we those pieces together and all of those disparate pieces was it was really difficult and hopefully uphold it off.
I feel like every writer is like, oh, shoot, now I gotta write.
Yeah, it sounded really good in my head, but now it's time to put the words on the paper and it's like, wait, different ordeals exactly. Yeah.
But I think that over confidence in storytelling is how a lot of the best Black stories, for sure get told. Like if you think about like Eyes on the Price or Roots, or you know, those those stories that really like go deep and take it there. If the if the person who would who thought those up knew what it would take to bring these stories to the page or to the screen, like they might have they might
have like second guessed themselves a little bit. So having that over confidence to just go ahead and like tell the story and I don't know, tell everyone you're going to tell the story, so then you feel peer pressure to actually finish it, I think is really important too.
Yeah, and you know what it also is, I think like a part impetus to just jump into a big story is also I feel a part of the Black storytelling tradition. Like you know, I grew up around people that were storytellers and very funny and very persuasive and convincing.
And they might start telling you one story and then they hit you with the you know, well quiet as it's kept, or you know, truth be told or if you take all of these diversions, as they realize the story is much bigger then they thought it would be originally, and you know, and you get there. You know, it's like it's like a part of our storytelling tradition is revision, it is addendums, and so I just try to like embrace that.
Yeah, I feel like it's part of the human experience, like nothing is just so linear, Like you're going to go off on tangents and you're going to find these like really obscure connections, and especially with something like the era, which is, you know, we see it as recent history that you know, either many of us were kind of too young to be really in the know about it, or even people younger than us weren't even born yet. It kind of gets sanitized to like this happened, this happened,
and then this happened, and it doesn't doesn't. We don't get the full breadth of it, which is like very hard. So I'm so glad that when krack was king was out so people can see those different connections, see those different perspectives. And the person that I really loved reading about was Lenny, who was a crack user, and I noticed that she was the only woman out of the
four main people that you spoke with. Was that intentional with that characters selection to have a woman speak to the experiences of being addicted to crack with all that comes with that, the sexual violence and the prostitution and you know, the pimps and all that coming.
In her in her orbit.
You know, it intentional that I knew that I wanted women to be a part of the book for sure, and to have some central characters as women. I found Lenny early on and I interviewed, i should say, like hundreds of people across the countries, across the really twelve
hardest hit cities in twenty eighteen. So, you know, as I got down to it in the actual writing process, after having interviewed her, I realized that her experience as a black woman addict included really everything that can happen to a person while they are experiencing addiction, that you know, she didn't have the protection of maleness in some cases.
You know, women were all all over and all through out the crack epidemic, Black women in particular that they were you know, city officials, they were drug dealers, they were police officers and prosecutors. They were also addicts, but more importantly, they were people who loved folks in all those positions too. And you can't, you know, discount the extent to which black women experienced the crack epidemic just by loving people that were caught up in it.
And it's really impactful for you to just show the entire breath of a person like that with so much empathy, which is antithetical to the kind of portrayals that happened
in media. So I'm wondering, Donovan, for you what it was like to maybe I don't know if this is the word that you would use, but form this counterpoint to media or mainstream and historical media narratives about people who use crack and how there was there were these depths that they couldn't get out of versus the people in your stories whose lives you know, were turned around
and often did end in these positive ways. You know, there was an alchemy in the way that they turned their stories into ones that could change other people's lives in positive ways.
That was essential to me. You know, in writing this book that the place that I started from was the fact that we were living in a post crack era, and I felt like that was something that we hadn't celebrated. So I started from the place that Black Americans survived the crack epidemic and that we survived it without a
whole lot of help. So in finding people who were going to tell that story or sort of illustrate that story, you know, I then was looking for survivors of course, knowing that through telling each of their stories that they would include lots of other people who actually didn't arrived. But that in talking about where we are today, we are a community, a country, you know, really a society that has survived the crack epidemic.
We got to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
I don't think I ever met someone that I could tell that they were using crack. But you have this woman in your neighborhood. Do you remember like hearing songs or watching TV and seeing someone that was portraying a crack user and how you responded to that versus how you responded to the people that you saw in your neighborhood.
I really despise TV representations of addicts, So you know, I think about especially crack addicts, like I think about the Dave Chappelle Tyrone Bigham's character, which is a you know, comical character, and he does, you know, play it in a funny way, and there are you know things that
listen we like laugh to keep from crying. Right, So when you see people in your community who are you know, doing ridiculous things and that you know that they're doing it because they are either high or you know, just just just out of their minds a little bit. It's like, you laugh, because that's just like a part of their character in the neighborhood. So you know. But but we do that for whatever reason, with crack and not with
other drugs. And yeah, you know, I can't help to think that it's you know that, like, you know, there aren't the comical representations of opioid users. And even though they're probably funny too, right, Like, there are things that like, you know, humor that we can find in the behaviors of people who are like nodding off, you know, on their drives to work. I don't think it's funny, but but you know, somebody might. There are a lot of people who either used or became addicted to crack in
the eighties and nineties. The vast majority of those people were white, because like anything in this country, the vast majority of people who experience it use it whatever it is, or white because most people in this country are white. Black and Latino people use drugs, will use use crack in particular, at a disproportionate rate. But we're still the minority of users because they were because we are minority
groups in this country. But for whatever reason, the sort of image of the crack user, you know what I shouldn't say, for whatever reason, because of anti blackness, the the image of the cracks you know, like like like a black person, you know, tweaking and you know, being erratic, which you know is a part of like the behavior of people high on cocaine. But of course, right there is like a spectrum of behaviors among people who do anything. So so those people were a minority of a minority
of a minority. What I should say is that when we create those kind of characters out of a dynamic, what it does is it makes it so that other people who are dealing with addiction, even addiction to crack kind of become invisible. So you know, when you're looking for a quote unquote crackhead, you're looking for tyrone biggems, and then you're unable to see other people who are
struggling with addiction who may not look like that. And and I think it just does a disservice to our understanding of addiction.
Also, you reminded me when you said, like the anti blackness in the crack era versus like folks who are on opioids and we're not getting those like comical depictions the white people get like the benefit of, you know, like all the stuff that the black people went through. Like, oh, well, you don't want us making fun of like opioid users because you said doing that with crack.
What's bad, Like it's an epidemic now and we can actually label it that instead of a quote unquote war.
It's so clear when it's like white people versus black people, and it's like you can like couch and like, oh well, it's the twenty twenties, like we're woke now, like we don't make fun of people. But I would venture to say if the crack era was going on right now, people would be doing the same thing, you know, because it would be like the oh yeah, the personification would be like a black person, and we wouldn't be like public health oriented about the situation because it would still
be like about black people. But of course, like you can't say that for sure because it's not happening, and like opioids are the new thing.
I mean, we sadly, I think might soon be able to make that comparison because the opioid epidemic has shifted from prescription pills, which was its original form, and it has now shifted to street drugs like heroin, and we're seeing now also with fittanol since about twenty twenty, so you know, there is actually a heartening of attitudes around
opioids that corresponds to its blackening, so to speak. So you know, I would just say keep your eye out because America is a wild place that is addicted to anti blackness.
I'm thinking about how in your book you get to see the hirety of the way that things shifted over time. How did that in your view and your perspective and the work that you've done see that shift happening in the way that the media told stories about people who were using crack from the beginning of the era to the end of it.
So in the beginning of the crack epidemic, the media was actually pretty late, you know that that it was really hip hop and like rap music that you know, it's like where we have the earliest sort of accounts of the crack epidemic back when it was called freebase, so it's early. It's like nineteen eighty three. You have
rappers like mc shan on. You know, Jane stopped this crazy thing, talking specifically about a neighbor of his that is using freebase and telling her to stop the same thing about White Lines are from White White Lines by Rand Master Flash, which was an anti cocaine, anti freebase song. Mainstream media doesn't really catch up until about nineteen eighty seven, so and the representations that we get then are almost all about celebrities. You know, it's about Richard Pryor blowing
himself up. It's about you know, athletes in baseball and basketball testing positive for cocaine because they're using this new thing called free base. It's about people like Lynn Bias, who was the number one NBA draft pick. He died of heart figure because he used cocaine, dying the night
of his draft from a cocaine overdose. But the representation at that time was still pretty i would say, curious and certainly not as harsh, are kind of demonizing, because they were still working around this idea of cocaine as like this like glamour drug that rich and famous people used.
It wasn't really until I would say Lynn Bias's death in nineteen was at maybe eighty seven that we see a shift into the crack narrative, So we stop calling the substance freebase and we start calling it crack, and it becomes associated with poor people in the inner city. And then you see this kind of heartening of the reporting where it's focused on, you know, just how depraved the users and dealers are. And that's where we start seeing the emergence of you know, the crackhead trope, the
super predator trope, the crack baby trope. That all of those caricature sort of come to light and then they take on a life of their own, you know, as you see how effective they are to make people afraid. And you know, eventually, as the epidemic way, and the media just got tired of it and really stopped reporting on the epidemic and ultimately didn't really cover its decline because the decline isn't as you know, sensational as the epidemic.
You have an at break, but we'll be back soon.
It's interesting how it goes from curiosity to oh, it's kind of glamorous and mysterious to demonize. And I wanted to ask you, like, how do you think about crack itself as a character and how it acts as a character in when Crack was king, and thinking just about how Crack acted on society. And even in the book, when Lenny comes back from being pregnant, she notices how the neighborhood has changed so much, and like Crack was the thing that was acting on the neighborhood and had
this like very visible impact. So were you thinking about Crack as a character when you were writing when Crack was king.
Absolutely. You know, Crack is the fifth character in the book. So there's Lenny, there's Sean, there's Kurt, and there's Elgin, and the book sort of tracks their lives over this period of time alongside Crack, the sort of rise and ball of this substance. And you know, as a character, Crack is interesting because you know, I established early on in the book that you know, crack is cocaine. It's
just consumed differently. So you know, people, you know, because of the way that it's been positioned in our society, thinks that it's a different substance and that the process of making it somehow transforms it.
I mean, and it's easy when you're thinking of Crack as a character to make it that thing, like is this real villain? Yeah, it's the villain. It's this relic. It's like the motif. So it's very easy to place the emphasis on that object and it being this thing that in turn, it being used by that person transforms it like it's some sort of magical sword or something
like that. When you hold on to it, you have all these different powers, and it just so happens that these powers are ones that everybody's looking at, like, I don't want anything to do with.
That, I think. Also the naming of it, crack sounds so harsh, and the cocaine sounds kind of fancy.
Which is funny because I mean, you like mentioned like the name cocaine that you know that the name of the plant that is derived from is coca and the suffix you know, in means derived from, So it's Latin for like derived from the coca plant. So that name like sounds fancy because it is actually like scientific language for what that substance was. Its original name, freebase, you know, was also a like scientific term. It was it indicated the process by which it was made. That you read
the base from other elements. Almost wonder if you know, if it had retained its original name, if our relationship to it would be different if we would understand that it was the same substances. It's almost like renaming it, you know, allowed it to be different in the imagination, and then it made it harder for us to understand it.
Donovan, I know that you've been researching this book for many years and have collected a lot of media, whether it be PSAs or music videos or movie clips. Was there one that stood out to you and you're like, oh my god, I cannot believe this is real.
Oh yes, the you know, Partnership for a Drug Free America was like a big part of my upbringing. They did all the big anti drug PSAs. There was one that was targeted specifically at at black children in the early nineties, and it starts with, you know, Africans were brought here in change, you know, hundreds of years ago. Do not dishonor your ancestors by using drugs like cracking
and you know, in alcohol. And they literally show like like a room full of kids who are I guess like supposed to be high on cracks, so they're kind of just like laying down and like sedated, which, by the way, crack is a stimulant. People get energy from using crack, they don't, you know, like like it's not
Heroin where they like not off. But then the kids are there with their like high top fades and they're like you know, rebox stuff on and then a chain appears like around their necks as they're like laying there, and I remember thinking to myself as a kid, this is so damn disrespectful, like why are y'all talking about slavery?
Like literally the people making this ad do not give a damn about slavery, And it was just meant to be shaming and like sensational, and uh and I didn't like it, you me as a kid, like I don't want some disembodied white man voice telling me about slavery.
You know.
That was that was wild to me. And then there's one that I think is like, actually, uh, pretty effective. The series was called The Real Kids on the Block, so they were using real you know, black children in this case to like talk about drugs. And it's you know, one point telling his brother that he can't hang out his friend Walter, and his friend is like, you know why, He's like, is Walter do drugs? It was heartwarming to see a conversation between two children in terms they would
actually use about addiction. But when I looked at the research about, you know, how the epidemic ended, it ended because the next cohort of young people decided just not to use crack. That you know, drug trends are like any other trends where in order for them to continue, they have to be picked up by a subsequent generation. So whether it's bell bottoms or pet rocks or you know, acid washed genes, if the next group of people don't
think it's cool, then it ends. Well. Its young people looking at the devastation of their communities that said I'm actually not going to do this. And you know, rates of not just crack but hard drug use for black and Latino people in particular completely plummeted around nineteen ninety two, and they still are tremendously low, like much much lower than they are for white youth.
Because you interviewed so many people for this book, what did you find that were the kinds of stories that they were telling themselves. Were you able to see some of the real time processing in the ways that they told their own stories and their relation to crack.
I found that there was a tremendous amount of shame around the crack epidemic for most people, and for the most part, they just didn't talk about it. So, you know, the four folks that I have, I feel really lucky to have because they were able to talk about their experiences.
Will one have memories of it, you know, because a lot of people that go through traumatic stuff that they just lose time and and and and and those folks still have pretty good memories that they were willing to talk openly to me about what they had been through. And yeah, I like definitely saw some processing, especially with Elgin,
whose father was addicted to crack. You know, it was through talking with Elgin that he realized that he was dealing with some pretty significant anxiety still some like PTSD from his experience, because you know, he had gotten through it,
he just didn't think about it anymore. But you know, I think that it's so important for people that experienced the crack up the day firsthand or second hand, and also you know, really just everybody in this country that we incorporate that period of time into our larger history because it is something that we survived and there are lessons to be learned from the ways that we survived. It was tough, and it was also really hard to
listen to people's stories of the Crack era. But I think it's worth it, like in the end that I understand so much more about our country today as a result of doing that work than I did before.
Yeah, it's I feel like it's an American tradition to not learn from his.
I was just about to say that that it is a recurring pattern.
Yeah, Like, would we be America actually learned from something.
Right, It's like the United States would probably write it on its resume and the skills list like really good at not acknowledging what happens so that I can not grow from it. Yeah.
Yeah. Somebody said once that that within Western cultures that there is this fear of history and this sphere of the dead in particular that is manifested as like fear of ghosts and like ghost stories and like Western traditions, Whereas if you go into like other societies around the world, that there is this way that we embrace ancestors and there are people that like literally can continue to guide
us and to sort of help us. And I think about it in that way that like crack is like a ghost and you know, in like the Western tradition, we're like, oh, you know, like keep that away from us. Let's like exercise it, and we don't embrace it as an ancestor. That can, you know, continue to inform our lives. And I feel like, in a very African way, like I want to make the Crack epidemic and ancestor it is. It is gone, but it is still very present in our minds.
And now it's time for my favorite segment, roll credits, where we give credit to a person, place, thing, idea Donovan x Ramsey, Who, what where?
When?
Why would you like to give credit to? Today?
I want to give credit to the city of Atlanta. Okay, I went to college in Atlanta. I went to Morehouse.
You know.
I mean, I wouldn't be a more House man if I didn't announce the fact that I.
Want to That's true.
But you know, Atlanta has given me so much. And Atlanta's actually where I also wrote when Crack was king that after I did the reporting, I wanted to be somewhere where I felt like I could be at peace and I could be comfortable, and I could work without feeling like the pressure to do anything else. And you haven't gone to college here. I was like, Atlanta is it.
I encourage, like any black person that is doing creative work, if you haven't spent significant time in Atlanta, to spend significant time in Atlanta, because you will be surrounded by characters that will bring out the best of it, and you will be in an environment that kind of like wants you to be here in a way that I feel like other cities are resistant to not necessarily black people, but to like blackness, you know what I mean, like real sauce and flavor, and Atlanta is all about again,
it's the dirty bird. It's all about the flavor.
Yeah, yeah, doing it loudly at Eves. I'm want to give credit to water today. I've been thinking a lot about water recently because I'm usually in the warm months.
I like water, but I don't spend a lot of time in it, and I realized that recently, so I've been trying to reconnect to the ways and I'm linked to water, thinking of thinking of as Donovan mentioned earlier, was talking about earlier ancestors, the way in which rivers are connected to ancestors, submerging myself and bodies of water, meaning things in connection to baptism, rebirth, and also just cooling down because it is super hot. We like to say every summer that it's so hot. I never liked
this before warning but I know. But it's just funny that that that's the talking point every year. But yeah, I mean water and also like obviously it's life giving and in the drinking form. So thankful for that because everybody doesn't get that either, truthfully. Yeah, that's that's my shout out today.
Okay, I feel like y'all are so positive. I would like to give credit to pet peeves. I have a ton of pet peeves, and I feel like pet peeves allow me to like, no, if I'm going to rock with somebody or not, Like if I say, like, what's your pet peeve and you say you don't have none, I just know like we can't be friends. So I'm like, yes you do, and you just don't want to complain with me and like you're not my type of girl.
But yeah, pet peeves, it lets me know like what type of person you are if I ask your pet peeve and you let me know, like, oh, my pet peeve is this, and I'm like I really identify with that, or like nah, I am rock with that for real. So yeah, it's just like a really quick way to judge people, and I know I need that.
But thank you, thank you, thank.
You so much for having me. This was a blast.
If you would like to keep up with Donovan, you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at Donovan x Ramsey.
Go buy his book When Crack Was King, and also a special shout out today to Donovan X Ramsey for all the media clips that he provided from the Crack era. On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on Theme Show. You can also send us an email at hello at on Theme dot Show.
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