Has crack-cocaine lost its bite?

On October 15th Senator Richard Durbin introduced a Bill that would eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has once more recommended doing away with that sentencing disparity this past May. With the drop in crime rates over the past few years and the change in climate with respect to crack-related sentencing, the question remains, how serious a threat is crack-cocaine in terms of social harm?

At the heyday of the crack epidemic that lasted from 1984 to 1990 according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, sentencing practices adopted to quash crack-related violence meant that the possession of five grams of crack is punished with a mandatory five years in prison, the same sentence for the possession of 500 grams of cocaine. And yet crack and powder cocaine, are two different forms of the same illegal substance. 

Professor Alfred Blumstein, one of the most influential US criminologists and recipient of the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, has researched extensively on the connection between illegal drugs and violence. Mr. Blumstein believes it was the dynamic of crack markets that made money and guns available on the streets, coupled with massive arrests, that precipitated the upsurge in violence in the late 80s.

Blumstein associates the escalating violence to the presence of progressively younger drug dealers. Young people were recruited into the crack markets (which started in the early 1980s) as replacements for those who were massively sent off to prison. People in those street markets had to carry guns to protect themselves against street robbers, and the young replacements were less restrained than their older predecessors in their use of the guns. Blumstein notes this led to a gun culture among youths. "Additionally, their peers in the street who had no involvement in drug markets also got guns to mimic (and to defend themselves against) those involved in the market."

The end of the super-predator

Asked whether incarceration played a role as a deterrent for gun violence, Blumstein thinks otherwise. "Perhaps, but the legislation and incarceration did nothing more than generate more replacements as long as the demand existed. By removing drug traffickers from the streets, you opened the way for younger and younger drug traffickers, armed and more likely to engage in violence", he says. 

The violence did come down over 40% from the 1993-2000 period, but the criminologist attributes it to a drop in demand that resulted from direct experience, "people saw the horrors of crack visited on older friends and siblings and parents", said Blumstein. He believes the drop in demand also coincided with a robust economy, and young people who were no longer needed in the crack markets had other options. In his view, "Incarceration had a much smaller effect."

The crack boom meant a surge in violent crime that especially affected teenage African Americans, illustrated by a homicide rate that reportedly quadrupled for African Americans age 13 to 17 during the crack boom. The fear of youth violence generated much media hype, was made especially eloquent through the concept of "super-predator", it pointed to youths exposed to poverty, neglect and illegal drugs as a security threat. Blumstein, however, is categorical: "The 'super-predator' was a rhetorical explanation of the crime rise of the late 1980s, that distinctive population group never existed."

Crack use still high in the US

Crack coverage in the news has plummeted and surveys are scant. In the 2005 New York Times article Up in Smoke, authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt disputed that crack use has fallen quite so much. Noting the lack of direct surveys, Dubner and Levitt argued there are indications that crack use is still significant in the US, citing a drop in cocaine arrests of only 15% since 2000 and that in that same year “Americans were still smoking 70% as much crack as when it was at its peak.” The profile of crack users has changed, “crack use is three times as common in people in their late thirties as it is in late teens of in their twenties.” But most strikingly, crack prices have dropped by 75% since its heyday in the 80s.  As a drug, it produces much less social harm today, argue the authors.

Media fears of mentally deficient “crack babies” exaggerated

With crack use still prevalent, what are the harms? Dr. John C. M Brust, University of Columbia’s Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University and Director of Harlem Hospital Neurology Service, says that although crack cocaine delivers the substance in a quicker way to the brain, that the effects do not differ from cocaine:

“With respect to violence among young cocaine users, the drug is a psycho stimulant and as such produces hyperactivity, impulsivity, and paranoia – behavioral effects particularly unwelcome in teenage males. There can be progression to frank hallucinatory psychosis and delirium.”

The doctor comments however that “most violence associated with the crack epidemic, whether in North or South America, was the result of the drug’s illegality and potential for huge profit.  Cocaine is not unique in this regard; you have undoubtedly been following the virtual societal collapse in parts of Mexico resulting from heroin trafficking.”

Concerns with long term effects of crack use were particularly vivid with fears over the development of crack-babies, children born to crack using mothers. This has not been confirmed in practice, Dr. Brust points out that cocaine exposure in the womb is not indistinguishable from other factors:

“Media fears of mentally deficient “crack babies” crowding American schools turned out to be exaggerated, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of more subtle cognitive or behavioral effects.  Specific in utero effects of cocaine (or of other drugs) are difficult to tease out in a setting of inadequate pre-natal care, incompetent parenting, poverty, and other drugs including alcohol and tobacco.”

Crack and HIV AIDS

Once social harm caused by the crack market has diminished and crack’s effects on the body have been established as comparable to powder cocaine usage, what other threats to public health are present when the issue is specifically crack use? Crack use has been associated with spreading HIV/AIDS.

A new study launched this month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) reported that “people who smoke crack are at increased risk of becoming HIV- infected.” The study further proposes that safe crack kits are distributed and inhalation rooms are adopted to minimize transmission, pointing to mouth sores from crack pipes usage as a possible means for transmitting the virus.

Although critics are not convinced that the link between using crack pipes and transmitting the disease has been clearly established scientifically, they do express concern that crack use is associated with the virus because high-risk sexual behavior, such as sex for crack around the world.

Photo: UNODC

Read Further:

"Up In Smoke" by Dubner and Levitt, the New York Times.