This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

The journalist Donovan X. Ramsey was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1987, the very height of the

crack epidemic.

I didn't know what life was like before crack,

and I wanted to understand the ways that it shaped our society.

Ramsey has written an account of the crack era of the 1980s and 90s,

and it's called When Crack was King, a people's history of a misunderstood era.

And that I was also very interested in just questions of addiction

and how we as a society deal with addiction on an individual level, but also at scale.

The newest and one of the deadliest drugs sweeping the country today is Crack, a potent,

inexpensive, highly addictive form of cocaine.

It infects families, whole communities, and its mere presence changes the lives and perceptions of everyone who comes near it.

Crack has become the street drug of choice in the United States, a cheap, powerful high.

What does crack do to the mind and body, and why is it the most addictive drug in history?

Once you try it, you hook to it.

Those sometimes sensationalized stories about crack were a regular presence on the nightly news.

But Ramsey was after something much deeper. He weaves together the lives of four individuals

bound up with the epidemic and forms an analysis of how crack devastated so many lives

and really changed the country. You know, I was a young reporter at the Washington Post in the early

80s, and when you're a young reporter, very often you're, you do what's called night police. You're covering

crimes, fires, and accidents at night.

And the crack epidemic really took hold in Washington in those years.

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