You're supposed to be writing your emails at about a seventh grade level because I think those are the most

responsible and mine are always tenth grade.

Michael tell me what do you remember about the crack baby phenomenon?

So my understanding of crack babies is that in the 90s during the crack epidemic,

there were mothers who were addicted to crack and their babies were basically born addicted.

So you had hospitals that were inundated with this problem that they didn't know how to solve,

which was babies who were born with withdrawal symptoms. And so these poor kids were suffering

in the first moments of their life because they were going through withdrawals from crack.

I'm going to take us back slightly in time to 1986, which is kind of the start of all this,

when Spin has Spin Magazine has a feature called Crack, a Tiffany drug at Woolworth Prices.

And it was the first feature article on Crack and the first time that a lot of Americans,

a lot of white people in America had heard of Crack.

Well, when did the crack epidemic start? Like how much of a lag time was this?

Well, this was about a year I think after it started really appearing in significant

quantities or as something that the police knew to pay attention to.

Was the writer of the Spin article white?

He was black, which I think is why well actually, I mean it was 1986, so I think a white writer

would have gotten away with this at the time, but he had various lines, you know, he's writing about

Harlem and the opening is, is this a jungle? Yikes.

He talks about how apparently some crack users started free-basing after Richard prior

set himself on fire while free-basing in 1979 and people were like, oh, that sounds pretty good.

Maybe or that sounds like I don't know what the logic is, but there is a part of you that I think

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