The Crack Epidemic Was a Weapon — But Fentanyl Is Revealing Who Learned Nothing

Before we talk about what the crack epidemic did to Black America, we need to establish what the crack epidemic was, because the story has been told so many times, from so many angles, that the documented facts have become blurred by narrative. And the facts, in this case, are more damning than any narrative. Crack cocaine arrived in American cities in the early 1980s with a velocity and a precision that does not resemble the organic spread of a recreational drug. It appeared in Los Angeles, in New York, in Miami, in Detroit, in Washington, D.C. — in the poorest, most vulnerable Black neighborhoods in the country — and within three years it had produced a public health catastrophe that would reshape the demography of Black America for a generation. The neighborhoods it entered had already been hollowed out by deindustrialization, by the collapse of manufacturing jobs, by the systematic withdrawal of federal investment that characterized the late 1970s and early 1980s. Crack did not arrive in healthy communities. It arrived in communities that had already been weakened, and it broke them.

The question of how it arrived is the question that Gary Webb spent his career trying to answer and, in the opinion of many, lost his life over. Webb, an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, published his “Dark Alliance” series in 1996, documenting connections between CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, drug traffickers in Central America, and the crack cocaine distribution networks in South Central Los Angeles. Webb’s reporting identified specific individuals — Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, both connected to the Contras — who funneled cocaine into Black neighborhoods through Ricky Ross, who became one of the largest crack distributors in Los Angeles history.

Webb was attacked. The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all published stories challenging his reporting. The Mercury News retracted portions of the series. Webb was reassigned, resigned, and died of suicide in 2004. But here is the part of the story that the obituaries of Webb’s career tend to omit: in 1998, the CIA’s own Inspector General released a two-volume report that partially corroborated Webb’s central claims. The report acknowledged that the CIA had maintained relationships with individuals involved in drug trafficking during the Contra era, that the agency had received allegations of drug trafficking by Contra-connected individuals and had chosen not to investigate, and that the agency’s anti-drug policies had been subordinated to its foreign policy objectives in Central America.

The earlier Kerry Committee report, published by the U.S. Senate in 1989, had already documented that “individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking” and that “the U.S. government failed to address their decisionmaking in a manner consistent with its publicly stated policies.” This was not Webb’s allegation. This was the United States Senate’s finding. And it means that the crack epidemic was not simply a market phenomenon. It was, at minimum, a catastrophe that the federal government knew about, benefited from in terms of foreign policy, and chose not to prevent.

The Sentencing Architecture of Racism

The crack epidemic did not only destroy Black neighborhoods through the drug itself. It destroyed them through the legal response to the drug. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established a sentencing ratio of 100 to 1 between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Possession of five grams of crack — the weight of two sugar packets — triggered a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison. To trigger the same five-year minimum with powder cocaine, you needed to possess five hundred grams — more than a pound. The same drug. The same chemical compound. Cooked and smoked in one form, snorted in another. And the legal system decided that one form was a hundred times more criminal than the other.

The demographics of who used which form were not ambiguous. Crack was concentrated in Black urban communities. Powder cocaine was the drug of choice in white suburbs and on Wall Street. The sentencing disparity was not an accident of pharmacology. It was an architecture of race, and it was designed by legislators who knew exactly which communities would bear the weight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission itself acknowledged this in 2007, documenting that the 100:1 ratio resulted in “significantly more severe sentences for Black offenders than for white offenders” and recommending its elimination. Congress did not eliminate it until 2010, with the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the ratio to 18:1 — still not equal, still not just, but at least no longer a mathematical caricature of racial bias.

The human cost of that twenty-four-year sentencing disparity is measured in generations. Between 1986 and 2010, hundreds of thousands of Black men were sentenced to federal prison under mandatory minimums that would not have applied to white men using the same drug in a different form. Families were destroyed. Children grew up without fathers. Neighborhoods lost their working-age men. The incarceration rate for Black men quadrupled between 1980 and 2000, driven in significant part by crack sentencing laws that targeted Black communities with mathematical precision.

Now Watch What Happens When the Victims Change Color

The opioid and fentanyl crisis has killed more than 500,000 Americans since 1999, according to the CDC. In 2022 alone, synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl — were involved in more than 73,000 overdose deaths. This is a catastrophe of historic proportions, and the majority of its victims are white.

And the national response has been the exact opposite of the crack-era response. During the crack epidemic, addiction was a moral failure. It was a crime. The prescribed treatment was prison, mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and the systematic removal of Black addicts from society. During the opioid crisis, addiction is a disease. It is a public health emergency. The prescribed treatment is medication-assisted therapy, Narcan distribution, harm reduction, treatment centers, and empathy.

This is the double standard, and it is so naked that documenting it feels almost redundant. When Black people were dying of a drug that the federal government helped introduce into their communities, the response was incarceration. When white people began dying of a drug that pharmaceutical companies marketed to their communities, the response was compassion. The Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma produced OxyContin and deliberately concealed its addictive properties, reached a settlement of approximately $6 billion. No member of the Sackler family has served a day in prison. Meanwhile, Black men who sold $50 worth of crack in 1990 served decades in federal prison under mandatory minimums.

I document this double standard not as a revelation — every Black person in America already knows it — but as a foundation for the harder conversation. Because the double standard proves something essential: the crack-era response was racist. It was not a reasonable public health response that happened to affect Black people disproportionately. It was a response calibrated to the race of the victims, and the fentanyl era proves it, because when the race of the victims changed, the response changed too. The science of addiction did not evolve between 1986 and 2016. The race of the dying did.

The Harder Conversation

And now the intervention. Because this article is not a history lesson. It is an intervention, and interventions require the kind of honesty that makes everyone uncomfortable, including the person delivering it.

The crack epidemic was done to Black communities. The documentation is clear. The federal government’s complicity is documented. The sentencing regime was racist. The double standard with the opioid crisis proves it. All of that is true, and none of it is a matter of opinion.

But here is the question that the crack history does not answer: what has the Black community done with the lesson?

According to SAMHSA — the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — Black Americans continue to experience significant rates of substance use disorder. Approximately 7.7 percent of Black adults had a substance use disorder in 2022, and Black Americans are less likely to receive treatment than white Americans with the same conditions. Alcohol abuse remains a significant problem in Black communities. Marijuana dependency, particularly among young Black men, is increasing. And now, synthetic opioids are entering Black communities at accelerating rates — the fentanyl crisis is no longer a white crisis, if it ever was. Overdose deaths among Black Americans have risen faster than in any other demographic group, increasing by more than 44 percent between 2019 and 2021.

This is the part of the conversation where the room goes quiet, because it requires holding two truths simultaneously: the system was weaponized against Black communities, and Black communities must protect themselves regardless. The weapon was external. The wound requires internal treatment. Acknowledging the weapon does not exempt you from treating the wound, and waiting for the system that inflicted the wound to provide the bandage is a strategy that the last forty years have proven to be fatal.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear” (1962)

The Protective Factors Are Documented

The research on what protects individuals and communities from substance abuse is extensive, and it is not mysterious. The National Institute on Drug Abuse identifies five primary protective factors: strong family bonds, parental monitoring and involvement, academic competence, anti-drug use policies, and strong neighborhood attachment. These are not ideological talking points. They are the documented findings of decades of longitudinal research.

Every one of those factors is within the capacity of Black communities to strengthen, regardless of what the federal government does or does not do. Strong family bonds do not require federal funding. Parental monitoring does not require a government program. Academic competence is built in homes and classrooms, not in congressional committee rooms. Anti-drug norms are cultural, and culture is something a community creates, not something a government provides.

Economic opportunity is the sixth factor that the research makes impossible to ignore. Communities with employment, with businesses, with pathways from education to income, have dramatically lower rates of substance abuse than communities without them. This is why the crack epidemic hit deindustrialized Black neighborhoods hardest — not because Black people are more susceptible to drugs, but because communities without economic structure are more vulnerable to every kind of destruction, drugs included. The protective power of a job, a business, a career trajectory is documented in every study of substance abuse risk, and it is the factor that connects the drug crisis to every other crisis discussed on these pages.

The documented success of community-based recovery programs in Black neighborhoods provides evidence that internal solutions work. Programs like the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence’s community networks, faith-based recovery initiatives operating through Black churches, and peer recovery support models have demonstrated measurable reductions in substance abuse in communities that adopted them. The Black church, historically the most powerful institutional force in Black American life, has been a documented source of recovery support for generations — and its role in substance abuse prevention remains significant in the communities where it is strongest.

The Intervention

I am going to say this as plainly as I know how, because the gravity of what was done to Black communities during the crack era demands both honesty about the perpetrators and honesty about the survivors.

The federal government facilitated the introduction of crack cocaine into Black neighborhoods. The documentation exists. The sentencing laws that followed were designed to criminalize Black addiction while ignoring white addiction. The documentation exists. The double standard with the opioid crisis proves that the crack-era response was race-based, not science-based. The documentation exists.

And none of that documentation will stop the next drug from entering the next neighborhood. None of it will stop the next young man from his first hit, his first dependency, his first overdose. None of it will rebuild the family that substance abuse destroyed or restore the years that incarceration stole. The documentation of what was done to us is necessary for justice. But it is not sufficient for survival.

Survival requires internal action: families talking to their children about drugs with the same urgency they talk about police encounters. Communities creating economic opportunity so that the drug economy is not the only economy available. Churches and mosques and community centers serving as recovery infrastructure. Schools teaching the documented science of addiction, not as a scare tactic but as a health curriculum. Men and women who survived the crack era telling their stories not as cautionary tales of what the system did, but as evidence of what resilience can overcome.

The weapon was real. The wound is real. And the treatment must come from within, because the people who sold us the weapon are not coming back with the medicine. They never do. Every generation of Black Americans has learned this lesson, and every generation has been asked to learn it again. The crack epidemic should have been the last time we needed the lesson. The fentanyl numbers suggest we are still learning it.