When Crack Was King: looking back on an epidemic that destroyed lives
There were times when Donovan X Ramsey thought writing this book was going to kill him. As he struggled through each chapter, “the story fought back”, inflicting brain fog, insomnia, stomach pains, heart palpitations. “On more than one occasion I visited the ER, certain that I was dying,” the 35-year-old writes.
But he got it done: When Crack Was King is a panoramic social and political history of the crack cocaine epidemic that destroyed countless Black lives in the 1980s and 90s. Ramsey came to realise that his illness was not due to “book jitters” or a mysterious medical condition. After visiting the 10 cities hardest hit by crack and interviewing hundreds of former addicts, crime victims, community activists, ex-prisoners, journalists, police officers and politicians, he was manifesting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Writing is a process of making sense and making meaning so you sort of metabolise the information that you take in,” Ramsey, a journalist and author based in Los Angeles, says by phone during a trip to New York. “My body completely rejected the process. I lost 40lb because I could barely keep anything on my stomach. I was so anxious that I started having heart palpitations. And it was finishing the book which was like complete digestion of this process.”
The book’s dustjacket describes the crack epidemic as arguably the least examined crisis of American history. There has been a collective amnesia around the drug that became widespread in the 1980s, especially in low-income communities, with ruinous social and economic consequences.
People became involved in drug trafficking and other criminal activities to support their addiction or capitalise on the drug’s demand. Politicians and the media spread myths about a doomed generation of “crack babies”. Police crackdowns and strict anti-drug laws led to mass incarceration, primarily from low-income communities of colour.
Ramsey reports from the cities that were at the frontline – Newark, Washington, New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Los
Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis and Philadelphia – and weaves a narrative through four people who lived it. They are Elgin Swift, the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a “crack house”; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early decriminalisation advocate; and Shawn McCray, basketball prodigy and cofounder of the notorious Newark, New Jersey, trafficking group the Zoo Crew.
Each struck a nerve with Ramsey, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987 and, by the age of five or six, had heard the word crackhead countless times, usually from other children. One of his earliest memories is of a neighbour, Michelle, whom he did not meet but encountered through the whispers of others: sad, a mess, a crackhead.
He recalls: “I have these distinct memories of going to bed at night to the sound of her playing one particular Patti LaBelle record on a loop. The song is If Only You Knew and the lyrics are in part, ‘You don’t even suspect / Could probably care less / About the changes I’ve been going through’. Even though I was maybe five, I understood on an emotional level that that she was communicating something about her life.”
Growing up, Ramsey witnessed daily the ravages of crack in his neighbourhood – and the way police responded. “My town was like a steel town where nobody talked about steel. Crack was everywhere. It’s fallout was everywhere but it was something that we avoided because of the fear and the shame of, if you looked directly at it then maybe it would gobble you up somehow.