‘When Crack Was King’ Dives into the People, and the Myths, of the Crack Epidemic

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 90s had a devastating and lasting effect on black communities and the criminal justice system. But Donovan X Ramsey writes that those who survived the era will hardly ever talk about it and when they do it’s, “like a trauma long accepted in hushed voices, with thousand yard stares.” In his book, When Crack Was King, Ramsey is on a quest to understand the crack era through portraits of a user, a kid of an addict, a dealer, and a politician pushing for treating the epidemic as a public health problem. We talk to Ramsey about his book, the myths that permeate our flawed understanding of the crack era and the resilience of communities that lived through it. Guests: Donovan X. Ramsey, author, "When Crack Was King" - Ramsey is a former senior reporter with the LA Times. He is currently a senior editor with the Marshall Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:37.1	Music From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:48.7	As we've confronted at the opioid crisis, a boom and meth, and the ravages of fentanyl.
0:53.8	There's another drug in another
0:55.2	era that lingers in the minds of many people shaping their responses. That's crack, the
1:00.3	smokable version of cocaine that flooded onto American streets in the 1980s. The problem is,
1:05.8	Donovan X. Ramsey argues in a persuasive new book when crack was king, most people misremember the crack era,
1:12.5	biased by shoddy journalism, undergirded by anti-blackness,
1:15.7	and stewing in the myths created during that time.
1:19.2	Ramsey hopes his work can act as a corrective,
1:21.9	helping American society see the history more clearly
1:25.5	and heal some of the traumas of the times. He's coming up next,
1:29.1	right after this news.
	...

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