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1986- 1990: The Crack Epidemic and the War on Drugs
Chapter one: Origins of an Epidemic
The ten year period of the 1980s was a complicated decade for US politics. The change of leadership from the relatively easy going Jimmy Carter administration to the hard line conservative cabinet of Ronald Reagan meant there would be a number of radical changes in policy and it could be argued that these radical changes had a radical effect on American society at large. Whilst Carter had aimed at creating a peaceful climate with the Soviet Union using the SALT talks and a period of detente, whilst he was lenient on recreational drug use and aimed to be resourceful on energy and environmental concerns, his successor on the other hand set out to destroy what he deemed the “Evil Empire” and the dangers of “Narcoterrorism”. Drug use for Reagan was an American problem that had to be stamped out, but in the 1980s the problem seemed only to grow. At the begining of the decade there were almost double the number of African Americans in American universities and colleges as there were incarcerated in State and county penitentiaries. Four years later, the statistics would reveal a drastically different scenario. The six year period between 1984 and 1990 saw a massive surge in the levels of street crime, drug addiction, overdose and homicide of many major American cities. The blame is almost always placed on the introduction of crack cocaine into inner city areas and whilst there were reports of the appearance of crack in Los Angeles, San Diego and Houston as early as 1981, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) recognizes 1984 to be the first year of "the crack epidemic". The crack epidemic saw a dramatic increase in the numbers of Americans addicted to cocaine. In 1985, the number of people who admitted using cocaine on a routine basis increased from 4.2 million to 5.8 million, according to the Department of Health and Human Service's National Household Survey. Likewise, cocaine-related hospital emergencies continued to increase nationwide during 1985 and 1986. According to DAWN statistics, in 1985, cocaine-related hospital emergencies rose by 12 percent, from 23,500 to 26,300; and in 1986, they increased 110 percent, from 26,300 to 55,200. Between 1984 and 1987, cocaine incidents increased fourfold[1]. This chapter aims to discover what this new drug was, how it emerged, even to examine the shadier origins of the “epidemic”.
Up until the late 19th century, cocaine was used extensively fairly extensively in the United States, not just as an aid to recreational vices but as a pain killer and medicinal tonic recommended and prescribed by doctors. Toward the end of the century, its negative effects began to be recognized and the Pure Food and Drug act of 1906 was the first law to control the use of the drug and the health crisis it caused. It was finally legislated against in the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act and after a series of problems (involving the arrest of around 3,000 doctors and spates of gang violence), use began to decline. It was not until the 1970s that cocaine would experience resurgence as a parlour drug for college students and young white professionals as a study aid or party drug. The drug became particularly popular in the disco culture, as usage was very common and popular in many discos such as the notorious Studio 54. The emergence of crack and the epidemic that ensued follows a slightly different path. The official DEA line points to the Bahamas, where the majority of cocaine was kept before it was transported to Miami. There, a huge glut of cocaine powder caused the price of the drug to drop by 80%[2]. As a result, drug dealers facing this drop made a "shrewd marketing decision" to convert the powder to crack, a smoke-able form of cocaine. It is easy to say why; crack was easy to produce, had a high level of purity, did not require needle injection (thereby avoiding a major route for hepatitis or AIDS infections), bypassed the danger of flammable liquids such as ether used to prepare the other smoke-able form of cocaine - "freebase" and it was cheap: a single dose could cost as little as $2.50. In comparison, powder cocaine was available on the street at an average of 55 percent purity for $100 per gram. Additionally, smoking crack allowed a large quantity of cocaine to be absorbed directly into the blood stream from the lungs and then to reach the brain quickly; the user typically experiences the high within 10 seconds. These factors made dealing crack highly profitable, the instant high and low cost meant that users often found the appeal irresistible and unable to control their use. Crack was not a new drug, its active ingredient is entirely cocaine, however it was a marketing innovation. It was a way of packaging a relatively expensive and upscale commodity (powder cocaine) in small inexpensive units. So package, this form of smokeable cocaine was then distributed on the street by young Latinos and African-Americans to a whole new class of customers: residents of impoverished inner-city, neighbourhoods. This made the sale of the drug very profitable for dealers and when Caribbean immigrants taught young people in Miami how to produce crack, South Florida became a principal area for the "conversion laboratories" used to convert cocaine base into cocaine HCl, the form in which cocaine is sold.
Big time drug traffickers such as “Freeway” Ricky Ross soon emerged, cashing in on the appearance of the new drug. For young black males growing up in LA like Ross, drug dealing served (and often still does) as a way out of poverty originally, he had began selling small amounts of inexpensive cocaine to finance tennis lessons, with which he hoped to gain a college scholarship. Unlike the other small time cocaine dealers around him, Ricky Ross’s story is by comparison slightly out of the ordinary. Thanks to a network of friends in South Central and Compton, Ross and his friend Ollie “Big Loc” Newell steadily built up a clientele that granted them more funds to invest in the drug. When Ross’s supplier, a Nicaraguan man called Henry Corrales introduced him to Danilo Blandon, his fortunes would spiral out of control. Within a year, Ross owned millions of dollars of real estate; houses, motels and several other businesses and when crack finally made its way onto the streets of LA in 1983, Blandon and Ross were able to corner the crack market with ease. Crack would take Ross a lot further than just his home of Los Angeles, but he was able to move past California’s borders, expanding his crack empire by selling hundreds of kilos on consignment, offering them to dealers on a “sell now, pay later” basis. By the mid 80s, Ross’s biggest problem seemed to be more in terms of what to do with the cash he was making, than actually making it. ''Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money,'' Ross said. ''We got to the point where it was like, man, we don't want to count no more money.'' Because of his rags-to-riches like rise, Ross has become an almost legendary figure but he admits the damage he caused to his own community made him far from a Robin Hood character some would wish to portray him. He admits also that his success was not solely his own doing. What granted Ross such success as a drug dealer was Blandon’s rock bottom cocaine prices. Where this cocaine was coming from has been the subject of a conspiracy that links the origins of the crack epidemic with the Central Intelligence Agency.
In April 1989, the senate subcommittee on terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications headed by Senator John Kerry of Massachussetts issued a 1,166 page report on drug corruption in Latin America and the Carribean. The subcommittee found that 'there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zone on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras supporters throughout the region.' U.S. officials, the subcommittee said, ‘failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.’ The investigation also revealed that some 'senior policy makers' believed that the use of drug money was 'a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems.'[3] The investigation was followed up in 1991, in a book written by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathon Marshall called Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America. The book illuminated the reality of the drug war. During the cold war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, significant elements within the Contras trafficked extensively in cocaine, supplying much of the North American market while the CIA, National Security Council, and Justice Department acted oblivious to the evidence. Whilst the book raised little media attention, it would be followed up by a series of newspaper articles five years later. After a year long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 examining the CIA/Contra drug running conspiracy. The articles raised a number of key questions: why Danilo Blandon was free and employed by the DEA, why Norwin Meneses despite openly admitting to have supplied Ross with the drug was never touched by the law in comparison to Ross, imprisoned for life without possibility of parole. Along with these questions, Webb’s Dark Alliance would make one stunning allegation which neither the Scott/Marshall book nor the Kerry report had dared to suggest: that this influx of Nicaraguan supplied cocaine had been the catalyst for the entire epidemic that had swept through city after city. What followed was a large scale retaliation from various major newspapers, (including an editorial note that said the story was wrong to imply CIA knowledge of Contra drug-dealing) doubting the merit of Webb’s accusation that the CIA was aware of the transactions taking place but did little to stop them. This was in part down to Webb’s failing to provide evidence that the Blandon-Meneses ring raised “millions” for the Contras or that Blandon was linked to Langley. Ironically though, it was the title and graphic of the story “Dark Alliance” and a picture of a crack smoker superimposed over the CIA logo that most strongly implied a direct CIA connection to drug dealing and titles and graphics are rarely the responsibility of the author. Whilst Webb would later come to agree in an interview that there was no hard evidence that the CIA as an institution or any of its agent-employees, the story of the government agency injecting crack into ghettos had taken hold. As a direct response to the controversy that emerged, the CIA conducted an internal investigation of its role in Nicaragua in relation to the drug trade.
The official statement of the report given by Frederick Hitz, the inspector general in 1998 found that “absolutely no evidence to indicate that CIA as an organization or its employees were involved in any conspiracy to bring drugs into the United States.”[4] However in Hitz’s testimony to congress, he revealed for the very first time that the CIA had a very special agreement with the Justice Department: The CIA did not have to report if its non-employee agents, paid or unpaid, were dealing drugs. In other words, “it was not just incompetence or lack of interest that led the CIA to ignore that their operatives were dealing drugs; it was policy. With the evidence weighing up on both sides, it is almost undeniable that the the CIA would have been entirely pro-active at preventing the flow of Contra drug trafficking. Whilst some DEA agents working in the area claim that they were granted carte-blanche, others confirm reports that drugs were being flown directly into CIA warehouses. However, as noted in a Congressional Report there is almost no doubt that the American intelligence agencies have a long history with working drugs traffickers. During the second world war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA’s parent and sister organizations cultivated relations with leaders of the Italian Mafia in order to keep in touch with exiled Sicilian Mafia leaders. The domestic goal at hand was to prevent sabotage on East Coast ports, whilst in Italy, the aim was to gain intelligence on Sicily prior to the allied invasions. For his wartime services, the imprisoned Charles “Lucky” Luciano earned a pardon and was deported back to Italy where he proceeded to build a vast heroin empire. In 1947, the newly founded CIA aided the Mafia power seizure of Sicily and sent monetary aid to heroin-smuggling gangsters in Marseille to assist in their battle with Communist unions for city’s docks, whilst in the early 70s a Christian Science Monitor correspondent reported that the CIA was ‘cognizant of, if not party to, the extensive movement of opium out of Laos,'[5] quoting one charter pilot who claims that 'opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country.' At the time, some 30,000 U.S. service men in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, South East Asia become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming market[6]. Perhaps this long history could be paraphrased best by Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit:
“In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA”.[7]
One could argue that the CIA’s use of drug traffickers to fight against the dangers of Communism was employed “for the greater good”. Or rather that in order to prevent the “Evil Empire” from gaining a foothold in South America and across the world, some less than reputable characters had to be employed and that shadier methods had to be relied upon. As much of American policies during the Cold War were based on Truman’s “Domino effect” (in that if one country fell prey to Communism, others around it would soon follow suit) the government may have regarded use of the Contras as a necessary evil. This is especially after the failure of the Vietnam war, the government wanted to avoid direct military intervention at all costs. However the war on Communism was conflicting with another of the US Government’s wars: “The War on Drugs”. First started in 1971, by President Richard Nixon, the War on Drugs is an ongoing controversial prohibition campaign intended to reduce illegal drug trade, in order to curb supply and diminish the use of specific psychoactive substances deemed harmful or immoral. The successive administrations of Reagan and Bush embraced the rhetoric and polices of the war, in the process committing vast new resources to the conflict[8]. It was to be a period of zero tolerance, indicated by the words of Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy:
“Each of us has a responsibility to be intolerant of drug use anywhere, anytime by anybody.. We must create an atmosphere of intolerance for drug use in this country.”
If the CIA had been guilty of aiding the Nicaraguan CONTRAs bring in the "cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America...", then the American government could be accused of acting contradictory to both its aims of destroying Narco-terrorism and lowering recreational drug use. If the DEA wielded a sword, the CIA held an olive branch to the illegal importation of drugs into the United States and if the DEA were able to successfully prevent cocaine being delivered from South America, then the CIA would have a much harder time doing its job. With this in mind, it is not difficult to see how the crack epidemic emerged, with the abundance of a highly dangerous, highly desirable substance flooding the drug market of inner cities, drug use was inevitably going to rise. However, in dealing with such a recent history and one that is as controversial as the crack epidemic, it is important to treat the issues with a large degree of caution and sensitivity. When Dark Alliance was first published, a number of conspiracy theories quickly arose as to why the CIA had effectively moved cocaine into America. Ideas such as the CIA had deliberately set out to ruin black neighbourhoods with an influx of an addictive drug are highly unlikely and there is no substantial evidence for the accusations. As we shall come to understand in a later chapter, the war on drugs suffered a number of other problems than a contradiction of government policies but it is still worth noting at this point.
Although the main argument of this chapter was that elements of the American government may have had as much to do with the development of the crack market as the criminal drug dealers , finding out the origins of the drug, who supplied it and where it first began to be sold does not explain how or why levels of crime rose so sharply. It does not even establish whether or not the crack epidemic even took place; despite the statistics showing a strong surge in the levels of dangerous cocaine use and of street crime, one argument suggests that the problem took place only in the front pages of newspapers and in sensationalized news programs broadcasted on television. Also this chapter does not detail how or why media representations of the problem may have affected it. This is something that will be addressed in future chapters, along with the affect of law and enforcement and government policy upon both drug use and crime.
[1]National Institute on Drug Abuse
http://www.streetdrugs.org/pdf/Cocaine05.pdf
[2] US Drug Enforcement Administration 1985-1990
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/history/1985-1990.html
[3] Eric Umansky History 101, The CIA and Drugs
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1998/06/cia_side.html
[5] Congressional Report: A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/980507-l.htm
[6] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, chapter 7. Robbins, Air America, p. 128 and chapter 9
[7] Peter Dayle Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkely: University of California Press 1991)
[8] Bruce Bullington, America’s Drug War: Fact or Fiction?, The Control of Drugs and Drug Users: Reason or Reaction, Ross Coomber pg 108
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