Why the crack cocaine epidemic hit Black communities 'first and worst'

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. By the time writer Donovan X. Ramsey was about 4 or 5, he'd learned a word that could stop people in their tracks, a slur that could win an argument or put an end to a bully's wrath. The term was crackhead. And growing up in the '90s, they were seen as pariahs, both feared and ignored. Who are these people besides addicts, Ramsey's young mind wondered, and what led them to crack cocaine in the first place? Decades later, Donovan X. Ramsey examines the destruction of the crack cocaine era through the experiences of addicts, drug dealers, families and community members. His new book is called "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era." Donovan X. Ramsey is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, Ebony and Essence. He's been a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, NewsOne and TheGrio and has served as an editor at The Marshall Project and Complex. Donovan, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DONOVAN X RAMSEY: Hey, Tonya. Thank you so much for having me.

MOSLEY: So you start off this book writing about a woman named Michelle who was a crack addict who lived down the street from you growing up in Columbus, Ohio. And, you know, this story is so familiar to me and, really, anyone who grew up in a city ravaged by the crack cocaine epidemic. Everybody seemed to have a Michelle on their block, which kind of makes it surprising that a book like this hadn't been written already. Why did you want to write about it now?

RAMSEY: Yeah. I wanted to write this book for lots of big, grand reasons that have to do with, you know, understanding our criminal justice system or that have to do with, you know, trying to, like, kind of set the record straight about the period. But really, I also just wanted to get to know this kind of mythical figure, Michelle from down the street, better. I remember, you know, my mom, you know, kind of whispering on the phone to her girlfriends, you know, dragging that house phone with the long cord room to room and, you know, complaining about this woman down the street that had people coming in and out of her house at all hours. Or, you know, sometimes people would come knocking on our door, thinking that - they were, you know, looking for Michelle and thinking that maybe she lived there. And that was quite, you know, scary and disturbing to my mom, who was a young single mom.

And - you know, but also at night, you know, I would lay in bed, and like clockwork, you know, once Michelle got to, you know, her activities, she would always put on a Patti LaBelle record. And she would play the song "If Only You Knew" on a loop. And, you know, the lyrics are, like, seared in my head. You know, Patti's like, you know, you don't even suspect - could probably care less about the changes I'm going through. And, you know, in my little, you know, 5-year-old heart, I could tell that she was really in pain. And, you know, as, like, time went on and she really disappeared from our neighborhood, I just never stopped wondering about what exactly it was that she was going through.

MOSLEY: You know, most people of a certain age know this already, but maybe we should first explain what crack actually is. There's this misconception that crack and cocaine are actually different.

RAMSEY: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, crack is a drug - it's really a substance that completely upended our society for a while. It, you know, launched, you know, a new phase in the war on drugs. It created lots of myths and, you know, stereotypes about Black people in urban centers. But it is no different from powder cocaine, which has, you know, existed for, really, time memorial, this idea of taking something like coca leaves and, you know, ingesting it to get a sort of stimulant experience. But its original name was freebase, and that was a chemical term used - the process of making it smokable, which is separating the base of the cocaine compound from its other elements, which then makes it smokable. That sounds kind of scientific and - you know, and kind of hard to wrap your mind around. But I would liken it for anybody that has, you know, experimented with marijuana. It's like the difference between eating an edible or smoking a joint that...

MOSLEY: That's the same thing. It's the manner. Right.

RAMSEY: Exactly. It's the same exact substance, you know, but it's a different process. And it - you know, your body breaks it down differently, which then spurred different patterns of use. So someone who is smoking crack gets a very intense cocaine high that - but it's short-lived, which means that it's more likely something that you would binge than powder cocaine.

MOSLEY: Some of what you wanted to get answers to are, first, the facts of the crack epidemic, free of the stigma and the speculation around it. There's so much of that - and, two, who we were, meaning the Black community before crack. Was that a challenge for you to parse it out for yourself?

RAMSEY: It was. I mean, I think, you know - and I'm sure that maybe you can relate to this, but as a Black journalist, you know, you all - and especially if you do work around Black communities, there are the questions that you know, you know, the sort of average reader in middle America, you know, whatever - you know, whoever that is, the things that they want answered but also the questions that you have for yourself. And for me, being a Black man who was born in 1987, the crack epidemic predates me. Right? Like, I've never existed in a world where crack didn't exist. So I had this real kind of deep yearning to understand who we were before and to fill in what felt like a gap in between the civil rights movement that we, you know, hear so much about and where we are today. And the crack epidemic seemed like that missing link, right? How do you go from the highs of the March on Washington to, you know, Freddie Gray being, you know, tossed around in the back of a police transport vehicle? How do you...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

RAMSEY: ...Go from the highs of, you know, the Voting Rights Act to so much of the other devastation that we see today in the system that we have? And the crack epidemic was that missing link.

MOSLEY: Did you feel that disconnect growing up, too? - because I think I felt that way, too. You put language to it, but you were learning all about these wonderful things that happened - the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. It all seemed so very kumbaya-like in the late '60s, early '70s. And then you're sitting right in the thick of the crack cocaine epidemic and seeing all of this devastation around you. Was that kind of going through your mind even growing up and learning about the history?

RAMSEY: It was. I mean, it's so hard to put this into words. But, like, when you're, like, a Black child in America, you're getting lots of mixed messages. You're getting an official history that has been sanitized completely of any sort of dissident, you know, perspectives that you know exist within your community, right? So for every Martin Luther King Jr., there is a Malcolm X in your neighborhood. You know, when you go to the barbershop, there are people who are like, let's, you know, cast our bucket down where we stand and work hard and, you know, figure out a way to make our lives better in this capitalist system. And there are the guys that are like, let's burn it all down, you know? And they're not all represented in the history that you get.

Beyond that, when it came to something like what was happening with crack, I could never really get straight answers. So, you know, when I say that, what I mean is that the news presented super-predators and crack babies and crackheads and crack houses and this you know, apocalyptic view of neighborhoods like mine. And then when I actually walked around the neighborhood, you know, I saw people working hard. I saw a mix of working-class and poor and middle-class Black people. You know, I saw lots of different perspectives on what was happening. I should also note, though, that people didn't necessarily explain anything to me, you know, that I was witnessing. But my mother - you know, God bless her - really shielded my sisters and I and protected us from what was happening. You know, her favorite thing to say was, you know, mind your business (laughter).

MOSLEY: Right.

RAMSEY: You know, turn your head. You know, if something was happening that, you know, wasn't - you know, didn't directly involve us, it was kind of just keep your head down.

MOSLEY: Donovan, let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era," where Ramsey explores the history of the crack epidemic and the people who lived through it. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE INTERNET SONG, "STAY THE NIGHT")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today we're talking to Donovan Ramsey, journalist and author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era." Ramsey is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, GQ, Ebony and Essence. He's a former staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, NewsOne and TheGrio. And Ramsey holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree in psychology from Morehouse College.

There are several conspiracy theories about how crack cocaine actually made its way into Black communities. And the most enduring theory is that the government had something to do with it. You actually investigated and interrogated this idea. And what did you find?

RAMSEY: You know, in Black communities, you know, as you're growing up, people will tell you crack was dropped off in our neighborhoods to disrupt them, that, you know, to the average Black person, it seems, you know, that crack was a mystery - where it came from. Why us? You know, why did this happen to us in this way? I should start by saying - right? - that it didn't just happen to us, like anything else in American life, that the majority of the folks that used crack were white, because the majority of Americans are white, but that Black and Latino folks did use it at disproportionate rates. And our neighborhoods became sites where it was sold. So then you had another level of disruption beyond the use in terms of the dealing, and then the violence that accompanied the dealing, and ultimately the policing that was a response to it. So first I want to say that.

MOSLEY: Right. But there was this time period where, especially during the Reagan era - we had already been introduced to the war on drugs from the Nixon administration.

RAMSEY: Yes.

MOSLEY: But then there is, really, the solidifying of that through the Reagan era. And so at the same time as we're receiving messages of cracking down on drugs and drug use, we were also seeing this infiltration of crack cocaine in communities of color. You actually found that there was kind of a couple of things that were happening at the same time - not exactly that it was purposely left in Black or brought to Black communities, but that there was kind of a turning away.

RAMSEY: Yes. Yeah. That's the perfect way to put it, is that the government in the '80s was aware that there was, I mean, really, just tons of cocaine being shipped into the United States from, you know, South and Central America. And we had ongoing efforts in South and Central America, in countries like Nicaragua, where we wanted to support rebels known as Contras in Nicaragua to overthrow their government. That was in our, you know, political interests. But Congress would not allow the U.S. government to fund a war in another country.

So the U.S. government got creative - and, you know, this is well-documented - through, you know, programs to actually deliver weapons to the Contras. And when that was no longer feasible, when that became exposed through Ollie North and the whole Iran-Contra affair - that we just allowed them to smuggle drugs. And so a lot of those drugs, cocaine, ended up in the United States. And, you know, this has been investigated by a commission led by John Kerry, by efforts led by Maxine Waters. You know, it's well-documented through reporting at the time that there were, you know, lots of Contras that were selling cocaine to dealers in the United States. And a lot of it ended up in cities on the West Coast, in Oakland, in Los Angeles.

MOSLEY: But then how cocaine then turned into crack was kind of a story of ingenuity.

RAMSEY: It was, you know? Like, any time there's a glut of a substance or a commodity - right? - that's, like, available, people start experimenting with, you know, other ways to consume and distribute it. And crack was no different. I, you know, did tons of interviewing. And I was able to come up with, you know, about five or six different sources that told me the stories of these students at Berkeley who were chemistry students that were just cocaine enthusiasts. And they were trying to figure out different ways to consume it. And they really popularized, you know, freebase in their community.

And it became so popular that there was a book that was published that you can actually find on eBay and Amazon called "The Pleasures Of Cocaine." And it included the recipe for how to create freebase cocaine, not with volatile chemicals like ether or, you know, alcohol, but with water and baking soda. And once that book got around and it spread to different drug enthusiasts in different cities, and then it ultimately made its way to, you know, dealers, what it created was a super-cheap, accessible way of getting what had been a very glamorous drug into the world. And it just spread like wildfire. I should say on this question - right? - of like a conspiracy, what I ultimately determined is that there was no group of, you know, shadowy figures that sat in a room and said, here's how we can destroy Black communities - at least not in the '80s - that the reality is that the way that Black communities are situated, what it means to be Black in this society is to be hit first and worst, that...

MOSLEY: Like the COVID pandemic, which we saw. Yeah.

RAMSEY: Exactly - like COVID, like Katrina, like any other disaster that, you know, Blackness is, you know, more than just like this racial category and about identity. It's about where you are positioned in terms of harm in a society. So if Blackness is - you know, Blackness is this buffer that allows whiteness to be an area for safety and for comfort. So when something like crack becomes, you know, widely available and a problem, we will be hit first and worst. And that's exactly what happened. To make matters worse, the government decided, you know, or at least politicians decided that they wanted to build careers on them criminalizing, you know, this sort of public health emergency. And that's the part that I think really gets to ill intent and racist ideas and efforts to really be disruptive was not necessarily the drug epidemic, but the response to it.

MOSLEY: At first, when crack cocaine made its way to the streets, it felt kind of like, as you put it, a gold rush for Black communities, a chance for people who lived in poverty to actually gain some wealth, to get rich. What did that look like?

RAMSEY: I hadn't really considered this when I set out to write the book because, you know, in my family, drug dealers had really kind of always been villainized. You know, even though I had relatives that sold drugs, we, you know, that was distance between, you know, at least, you know, my mom and sisters and me and them. And, you know, what it looked like for the average usually young man, someone like Sean McCray (ph), who I write about in my book, is that you saw people who had walked holes in their shoes, whose, you know, families struggled to pay the rent be able to provide, you know, basic necessities, to have some, you know, piece of what maybe felt like the American dream. Not most drug dealers got rich, right? Like, not most were kingpins. Most were able...

MOSLEY: Like media portrayed them as these really wealthy guys who lived in these big homes, lots of cars, lots of stacks of money.

RAMSEY: Right.

MOSLEY: That was more rare than actually portrayed.

RAMSEY: Exactly. Or as super predators who were, you know, out to get, you know, kids hooked on drugs and who were eager to get into gun battles in the middle of the streets, that most of them were terrified for their lives, but it was really the only way that they could make money in a period where unemployment was so high and, you know, Black youth unemployment was even higher. And anybody that's been a Black teenager trying to find a job understands just how frustrating that can be and, you know, how kids want things more than anybody else.

MOSLEY: I was actually really struck by something you wrote about the media that we were consuming in the early '80s especially that played a part in Black kids' desire and imagination about wealth. You write, popular culture was obsessed with wealth and upward mobility. Black children were presented almost exclusively with media that encouraged them to transcend the ghetto and reach toward whiteness. And the drug trade was one way to do that. But what got me was your astute observation about the entertainment we were consuming at the time. So shows like "Diff'rent Strokes" and "Gimme A Break!" and "Benson," I had never really put that together what those shows were actually setting the scene for in our desires.

RAMSEY: Oh, it's so wild to look back on because, I mean, none of it would fly today. But, you know, it was a period where in television, basically, it's just show after show of Black person being snatched out of the ghetto and then moving in with the white family, whether it's "Webster" or "Diff'rent Strokes" or "Gimme A Break!" and - I mean, really one after the other. Even "The Jeffersons" - right? - is about moving on up. So, you know, if you are a Black kid growing up in the ghetto, what looks like a real healthy American life is so far away and so unattainable. And then overnight, there's this substance now that's available that you can sell, and you'll make more money than you could have ever imagined.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is Donovan X. Ramsey, journalist and author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era." I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHITE LINES")

DURAN DURAN: (Singing) And go into your little hideaway 'cause white lines blow away. Blow. Rock it. Blow. A million magic crystals painted pure and white, a multimillion dollars almost overnight - twice as sweet as sugar, twice as bitter as salt, and if you get hooked, baby, it's nobody else's fault. So don't do it. Freeze. Rock. Freeze. Rock. Freeze. Rock. Freeze. Rock. Blow. Higher, baby - ah, get higher, baby. Ah, get higher, baby, and don't ever come down. Freebase.

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is journalist and author Donovan X. Ramsey, author of "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era."

Donovan, you paint this roadmap of how policy informed the way we view drugs, from Richard Nixon's war on drugs to Ronald Reagan's promise of a drug-free America to George H.W. Bush's tough-on-crack efforts. And you tell this history that I almost forgot about, when the first Bush administration had this plan to unveil their anti-drug program on national television by holding up a bag of crack. Can you remind us briefly of what happened there?

RAMSEY: Sure. Yeah. George H.W. Bush really wanted to start his administration with a bang, and, you know, being tough on crime and - was a big part of that. So his office made a decision that they wanted to give a big address on drugs, and they wanted to use crack cocaine as a prop. So they, you know, thought, well, naturally, you know, crack is this big, you know, kind of scary thing that's everywhere. We can just go outside the White House and get some crack. And they discovered that they couldn't - right? - that there was tons of, you know, police presence around the White House and that, you know...

MOSLEY: It was harder than they thought, right?

RAMSEY: Yes. So what they did was they created a scenario. They really entrapped a teenager into selling them drugs, a kid who didn't even know where the White House was, sadly - somebody that grew up in D.C., and when he was told to come to the White House for the drop was like, where is that? You know, he had to be directed to a park near the White House that was more familiar. And, you know, they ultimately made the arrest. They got the crack. And, you know, the president was on national TV saying, you know, here's crack secured just in front of the White House. It's that ubiquitous - you know? - and it's coming for you.

And, you know, it's a symbol of the propaganda that surrounded the crack era that created a real panic, that did more than just make people aware. It also, you know, worked to demonize drug dealers and also addicts. You know, I think about, as far back as Reagan with the Partnership for a Drug-Free America - you know, the Reagans are tricky - right? - because they, you know, on one hand, are pushing really draconian policies that come to life in, you know, 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. But they also are pushing really effective media messaging, you know, having both been actors and Ronald Reagan, you know, run several actor's unions and, you know, knowing folks in marketing - that they helped to fund the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which produced lots of those really memorable commercials, like the scrambled egg...

MOSLEY: Those PSA ads. Yes.

RAMSEY: Right. This is your brain on drugs. And - you know, and there also was a real campaign to ask Hollywood directors and writers to send their scripts to the White House for approval, ways of working in anti-drug messaging.

MOSLEY: Really?

RAMSEY: So - yeah, so, you know, this is how you get Nancy Reagan on an episode of "Diff'rent Strokes." This is, you know, how you get Jessie on "Saved By The Bell" saying, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I'm so scared, because she's, you know, hopped up on speed.

MOSLEY: On amphetamines, right. Yep.

RAMSEY: Yes. You know, this is the birth of the very special episode. And, you know, we have them to thank for that. And, you know, sadly, you know, I'm - look. Like, I'm a kid of the '80s. I remember so much of that messaging. And it really, you know, more than taught me - because it didn't really teach me anything useful about drugs. What it really did was just made me deathly afraid of drug addicts. It made me keep people who I even suspected of being drug addicts - right? - the average, you know, houseless person on the street - so far away from me because I was terrified that they were just these zombies that were out to get me and to get me hooked, you know, on drugs. It made them untouchables.

And, you know, it's something, because I think that many people will try to credit Nancy Reagan and the Just Say No campaign and DARE and all that stuff for ending the drug epidemic - or the crack epidemic. There's no evidence of that. But I do think there's lots of evidence that it really - that the propaganda made us not understand addiction in ways that we're still paying for.

MOSLEY: Yeah. This propaganda, it included movies and music. It also included journalism, and one of the more well-known pieces of journalism was this investigative report about an 8-year-old third-generation addict published in The Washington Post. And it was called "Jimmy's World." It was so popular that when it was published, it was then republished in papers throughout the country. And it resonated so deeply with readers that even Nancy Reagan spoke about it. The only problem is that it wasn't true. The reporter made it up.

RAMSEY: Yeah. Now, Tonya, had you known about this story before you read it?

MOSLEY: I only knew about it because I read about it, like, five years ago. But, no, I didn't know about it in the moment.

RAMSEY: Yeah.

MOSLEY: I didn't know about it when it was published.

RAMSEY: It's so wild - right? - that, you know, even us, as Black journalists, a lot of people don't know that Janet Cooke is the only person to ever give back a Pulitzer and that the story that won this Pulitzer was "Jimmy's World." It was a complete fabrication about a 9-year-old heroin addict that was published in The Washington Post. It ran on the front page with illustrations, of course, because there were no photos. It was published under the leadership of Bob Woodward, who, you know, is a journalism icon and legend. And what you see when you peel back the layers of "Jimmy's World" is a real willingness - really a eagerness, I should say - to tell a story like this, to tell a story of a 9-year-old heroin addict in D.C. who lives in a shooting gallery, who is the product of a incestuous relationship between his grandfather and his mother, whose stepfather shoots him up whenever he gets a little too rambunctious.

MOSLEY: The details were wild.

RAMSEY: Absolutely wild. And, you know, Black reporters at The Post at the time said, do not publish this. This is completely made up, it doesn't sound right, that we've been in these communities. We've never heard of a Jimmy. You know, Janet Cooke, who was the reporter, could not produce any additional information about Jimmy or about his family. When she drove other reporters around to find the house that he supposedly lived in, she couldn't find it. And then ultimately - right? - because they couldn't, The Post decided to run illustrations based on her recollections of Jimmy. As somebody that has worked in a metro section of a newspaper (laughter), this is highly unlikely - right? - like, on, like, a procedural level of how the...

MOSLEY: Right.

RAMSEY: ...News is made. But lots of corners were cut because the story mapped so well onto notions of Black pathology because people wanted it to be true, to be honest.

MOSLEY: Right, because you basically say, I mean, it represents something else - the country's appetite for stories about Black suffering.

RAMSEY: Yeah, yeah. And that suffering hasn't - I mean, that sort of appetite hasn't changed, I don't think. That - you know, I've been in lots of editorial meetings where people are willing to say the wildest things about Black people and to entertain the wildest notions about Black people. And, like, otherwise smart people - right? - like, otherwise smart journalists will suspend their rational thought if a story seems good in that way. And they're often too - I don't want to say too good to be true. They're often too messed up to be true.

MOSLEY: One of the biggest instances of misinformation spread by mainstream media during that time was also the myth of the crack baby. I actually remember my ninth-grade algebra teacher talking almost every week about how he had to retire within a few years because that's when the crack babies would be entering high school. I mean, we've talked about this quite a bit over the years, but we now know that the fears about Black babies never really - Black crack babies never really materialized. But you write about how that myth impacted all Black children, including you, in your education growing up.

RAMSEY: Absolutely. That - a researcher named Ira Chasnoff in Chicago did one study of a handful of Black mothers who were cocaine users. And what he found after those mothers had given birth was that many of their babies had things like tremors and low birth weight, and they sort of struggled to meet benchmarks, you know, in their infancy. And from that, he published a report about cocaine-exposed babies that then launched what became this crack baby notion. And, you know, lots of reporting was done about these irredeemable babies - mostly Black and Latino children - and how they were going to be a huge weight on society, that they would sort of never be able to come back from what their mothers had done to them.

Charles Krauthammer, a columnist who was writing for The Post at the time, said that death would have been more suitable for these babies than to actually live. And what we've seen through the research longitudinal studies of cocaine-exposed babies was that, one, the symptoms that Chasnoff were seeing were actually related to premature birth, that the effect of cocaine is that it can cause complications that then leave to - that lead to premature birth and that the tremors and the developmental things that were being seen in infancy were actually associated with the babies being born early and not necessarily with the cocaine exposure. And then, you know, decades later, there is no measurable difference between those children and their counterparts, children born at the same time, raised in the same areas, you know, with the same sort of resources. So I say that to say that the crack baby myth has been debunked. But...

MOSLEY: Debunked, yeah.

RAMSEY: For me, as a Black child growing up in the '80s and '90s, I was treated as though I was a suspect of, you know, being a crack baby. That - you know, the ways that teachers treated me and really other Black children in my class as mainly Black boys was as though there was something fundamentally wrong with us, that we needed to be maybe medicated to be able to be in class or that any challenge that we presented as students, whether it was talking too much - which was my problem - or, you know, if it was not being able to sit still - that that was evidence that something was wrong with us.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era," where Ramsey explores the history of the crack epidemic and the people who lived through it. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARVIN GAYE SONG, "INNER CITY BLUES")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today we're talking to Donovan Ramsey, journalist and author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era." Ramsey is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ and Ebony. He's a former staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, NewsOne and TheGrio.

Donovan, how did the crack epidemic end?

RAMSEY: You know, the crack epidemic ended, you know, not because the drug warriors rode in on white horses or because Nancy Reagan said, just say no. The crack epidemic ended because the next cohort of young people who would have used crack looked around at their communities and saw the devastation and said, you know, not for me. And I think that's a really important thing to underline - is that, one, that we - that the crack epidemic is over. You know, we didn't celebrate that. So let's celebrate the fact that the crack epidemic is over. Let's celebrate the fact that we survived it without a whole lot of intervention from the government and that it was young people who made the decision to not continue the trend. You know, and that's not according to me. That's according to research by the Department of Justice where they surveyed the hardest hit cities around the country, and interviewed young people, and said essentially, you know, why aren't you doing crack? And they said, you know, it - that - like, that whole world is too scary.

So what you see, you know, when you look at the stats is a rise in crack use starting about 1982, 1983. It completely takes off about 1987. It then plateaus between 1990, which is really the hardest years of the crack epidemic, and 1992. And as a really interesting kind of aside, you know, throughout my research do - you know, writing - in writing the book, I listened to a lot of hip-hop at the time.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

RAMSEY: And I came across this - I mean, this litany of anti-crack messaging - you know, "Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing" by MC Shan and "Hey Young World" by Slick Rick, "Night Of The Living Baseheads" by Public Enemy. I mean, song after song - "Dope Man" by...

MOSLEY: What about "Yo Mama's On Crack Rock" (ph)?

RAMSEY: "Yo Mama's"...

MOSLEY: Because that...

RAMSEY: ..."On Crack Rock" by The Boys, I think.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

RAMSEY: An absolute wild song - right? - where you have - I mean, in a really interesting way - right? - like, young people from these communities giving messaging back to other young people from these communities. And I think it was more powerful than what Nancy Reagan was doing on "Diff'rent Strokes." It had more credibility. You know, you also see it in the filmmaking of the time, what I would call kind of hip-hop filmmaking - you know, films like "Boyz N The Hood." I would even say "Clockers."

MOSLEY: "Jungle Fever." Yeah.

RAMSEY: "Jungle Fever," right. Samuel L. Jackson as Gator in "Jungle Fever" scared the mess out of me. You know, he's like, stealing his mama's color TV to get high.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

RAMSEY: Or "New Jack City." Chris Rock as Pookie, you know. And so then what you see is this decline in 1992, just a complete plummet where Black and Latino youth are not using not only cocaine, but, I mean, stopped using hard drugs almost entirely. But during that year, you see a huge spike in marijuana use among those groups. And that happens to be, I just want to say, the year that Dr. Dre dropped "The Chronic" and which is...

MOSLEY: The music is so powerful, yes.

RAMSEY: It's so powerful. And, you know, at the time, you know, rappers would say that they were just representing what was happening in the streets. And I always thought that was like a little bit of a cop out. I'm going to be honest. I was like, you know, it just...

MOSLEY: Why?

RAMSEY: ...Sounded too...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

RAMSEY: You know, it just sounded too convenient. And I knew that there was, you know, this mix - right? - of messaging. But what I will say is that despite the fact that there was some really unsavory, misogynistic mainly, violent...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

RAMSEY: ...Messaging in hip-hop, the position on crack was consistent, which is that's not cool to do, and it's having a terrible effect in our community.

MOSLEY: One of the things that you're pushing for in this book is ending the mandatory minimum sentencing for federal drug offenses. I was really surprised to learn that this is something that we're still talking about. There's a difference in crack sentencing versus cocaine and other drugs.

RAMSEY: We really owe it to the folks that survived the crack epidemic and the folks that didn't to get right when it comes to drugs and addiction in America, that we missed the opportunity in the '80s and '90s, and then we kind of turned away because it happened to those people over there. And, you know, now we're seeing it come back to new populations. But, you know, we still live with the residue of the crack era. That we still live with this dragnet that we created that we just applied across communities of color. And, you know, today, that's all that we have, you know, in terms of real policy when it comes to trying to put out something like the fire of a drug epidemic.

So I would love to see the end of the mandatory minimums that came about during the crack era, which basically take away the discretion from judges when it comes to possession charges. It says, you know, basically you do the crime, you have to do X, Y, Z time and, you know, doesn't allow judges to be able to use their discernment to determine maybe who should go to jail for decades and who shouldn't.

I also want to see an end to this disparity that you mentioned between sentencing for crack and powder cocaine. It was originally 100 to one, meaning that you got essentially 100 times the amount of time for crack than you would for the same substance in powder form. Under Barack Obama and Eric Holder as his attorney general, that was reduced to 18 to one around 2010, but it still exists. With all that we know about crack, with all the compassion that we have now for addicts, we still haven't moved far enough to eliminate that disparity entirely.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is Donovan X. Ramsey, journalist and author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today we're talking to Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the new book "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era," where Ramsey explores the history of the crack epidemic and the people who lived through it.

You know, it was so deeply rewarding to see these experiences written on a page that, not long ago, society didn't really think were stories worth being told. But I also had to take a lot of breaks reading this book because it was also very triggering to me, and I read that it was the same for you in writing it.

RAMSEY: It was. I have - you know, in covering Black America, I've, you know, also had to cover a lot of tragedy and, you know, hear a lot of traumatic things from people. And I'd always prided myself on being able to kind of, like, you know, alchemize it, you know, to kind of take it in and to process it and turn it into something beautiful and meaningful and not be affected. But after five years of putting together this book, I was completely wrecked. I lost 40 pounds. I had a heart tremor where I had to wear a - I was getting palpitations and had to wear a heart monitor. Every loud noise scared me. I mean, my, like, nerves were completely shot. And I realized - well, you know, first, I didn't know what was going on. You know, of course, it can't be this book that I'm writing. You know?

MOSLEY: Right.

RAMSEY: You know, like, maybe I'm just dying. And, you know, I had to take seriously what had happened and what had happened to the people that I talked to and how seriously impactful those events were in their lives and how, you know, the stuff that I went through impacted me. I was, you know, a kid having to get down on the ground when I heard gunshots, and that was just a normal thing. You know, you're in the middle of play. You hear gunshots. You get on the ground. You get back up, and you keep playing. You know, having my first bike stolen by a crack addict and the fear of having to go home and explain that to my mom, that I had, you know, given somebody my bike to fix and he never came back with it - that stuff lived in me, and it needed to be excavated.

I want to say that I'm doing much better now, including having gained the weight back, unfortunately (laughter). But I think the message from that for me is that lots of us that lived through that period - we still have some stuff that we have to deal with. You know? We need to ask our, you know, family about that aunt or uncle who kind of disappeared and nobody talks about. We need to honor those people and lift up - first, learn their stories, then lift their stories up as a part of our stories - and that we won't heal until we make sense of the crack epidemic not as this aside but as a part of who we've been and what we've been through.

MOSLEY: Well, Donovan X. Ramsey, I think you did a good job. Thank you for this book. Thank you for bringing language to a time period and an experience that so many people experience and are living with. Thank you so much.

RAMSEY: Thank you, Tonya. It's been such a pleasure.

MOSLEY: Donovan X. Ramsey is the author of "When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era." If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like our interview about the Supreme Court term that just ended or about the risks and benefits of AI, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And for a behind-the-scenes look at our show and recommendations from our producers, subscribe to our free newsletter. You'll find a link on our website, whyy.org/freshair.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

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