![]() ![]() I think that many people will 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. It made me keep people who I even suspected of being drug addicts - the average 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 on drugs. What it really did was just made me deathly afraid of drug addicts. It didn't really teach me anything useful about drugs. This is the birth of the "very special episode." And we have them to thank for that. I'm so scared," because she's hopped up on speed. This is how you get Jesse on Saved by the Bell saying, " I'm so excited. This is how you get Nancy Reagan on an episode of Diff'rent Strokes. They helped to fund the partnership for a Drug Free America, which produced lots of those really memorable commercials like the scrambled egg : " This is your brain on drugs." 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. On how the anti-drug campaign spearheaded by Ronald and Nancy Reagan vilified drug users And a lot of it ended up in cities on the West Coast, in Oakland and in Los Angeles. It's well documented through reporting at the time that there were lots of Contras that were selling cocaine to the two dealers in the United States. And this has been investigated by a commission led by John Kerry, by efforts led by Maxine Waters. The resulting substance provided a cheap, smokable way for people to get high quickly.Ĭrack spread "like wildfire" across America, Ramsey says, but it tended to hit Black neighborhoods particularly hard: "What it means to be Black in this society is to be hit first and worst."Īs the epidemic took hold, the media presented apocalyptic views of Black neighborhoods transformed by the drug, and warned of a coming wave of "crack babies." Meanwhile, instead of treating the issue as a public health emergency, politicians instituted sentencing guidelines that punished users of crack more harshly than users of powdered cocaine.Īnd so a lot of those drugs, cocaine, ended up in the United States. Berkeley who devised a recipe for freebasing cocaine using water and baking soda. Ramsey traces the advent of crack to a group of chemistry students at U.C. And the crack epidemic seemed like that missing link." fill in what felt like a gap in between the civil rights movement that we hear so much about and where we are today. "So I had this real kind of deep yearning to. "Being a Black man who was born in 1987, the crack epidemic predates me I've never existed in a world where crack didn't exist," he says. For Ramsey, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the story is personal.īook Reviews 'When Crack Was King' follows four people who lived through the drug epidemic In his new book, When Crack Was King: A People's History of A Misunderstood Era, Ramsey examines the crack epidemic of the 1980s and early '90s from the points of view of four people who lived through it - and considers the lasting harm inflicted on the Black community by the government's response. "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." Bush really wanted to start his administration with a bang and being tough on crime and was a big part of that," Ramsey says. Ramsey describes Bush's press conference as a form of propaganda designed to create a panic about the crack epidemic and to "demonize drug dealers and also addicts." Looking back now, author and journalist Donovan X. Bush appeared on live television to discuss what he called the nation's "gravest domestic threat." Sitting at his desk in the oval office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that had been seized in a park across from the White House, saying: "It's as innocent looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones." Bush holds a bag of crack cocaine as he poses for photographers in the Oval Office of the White House, Sept. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |