America’s Drug War, Revealed (rebroadcast)
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2019
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How a baggie of crack cocaine packed with fear, distortion and misconceptions, and one presidential address in the 1980s, helped shape the war on drugs.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. |
| 0:08.2 | I'm Al Etzen. |
| 0:10.4 | I was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in the early 70s. |
| 0:13.8 | And all my memories of where I lived is this kind of utopia. |
| 0:17.1 | Keep in mind, this is in the eyes of a kid, but it was just perfect. |
| 0:21.7 | A middle-class black neighborhood where I knew all of our neighbors. |
| 0:25.2 | I got to play until the street lights came on. |
| 0:27.6 | Every weekend, a bunch of kids came over and hung out in the basement |
| 0:31.3 | because my dad had the only VHS player around. |
| 0:35.0 | The house we lived in was a fixer-upper. |
| 0:37.0 | My parents poured all their money, sweat, and love into that home. |
| 0:41.0 | And by the time we moved to Florida in the 80s, my dad was so proud of that house it heard to leave. |
| 0:47.5 | I didn't get back to Jersey for a visit till about four years later, |
| 0:51.0 | in the middle of the crack epidemic. |
| 0:53.4 | And my little neighborhood was hit hard. |
| 0:55.9 | The streets I used to play on, they just looked different. |
| 0:58.8 | A lot of my friends had left and those who stayed told us that our old house had turned into a crack house. |
| 1:05.7 | Boarded up, diminished, and dark. |
| 1:09.3 | I will never forget the look in my dad's eyes. |
| 1:13.3 | Like he'd lost something, he'd never get back that day. |
| 1:18.6 | This season, the podcast The Uncertain Hour for Marketplace |
| 1:22.2 | is looking back at that time, at the crack epidemic and seeing how it connects to the opiate crisis America is dealing with today. |
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