Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed by David Farber (review)

The social history of illicit drugs was lacking a thoroughly researched account on crack use in the 1980s and US historian David Farber has filled the gap with a concise, well-written and informative book that sheds light on a dark episode of contemporary American history, and further illustrates the link between racial and economic inequality and psychoactive substance abuse.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, rock cocaine beset several cities across the country and was responsible for widespread addiction and damage to people and property. Urban working-class black communities were the hardest hit by the plague but as Farber thoughtfully contends, "politicians, the mass media, and even a surprising number of drug and public-health experts" inaccurately declared it a nationwide problem (82). Bipartisan policy-makers were largely oblivious to the plight of poor and Black communities. Instead, they swiftly condemned them for their habits and the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act provided a mandatory five-year prison sentence for distributors of five grams of crack. By contrast, cocaine traffickers who were predominantly white or Hispanic, had to peddle five hundred grams of coke to receive a similar sentence.

But examining the tragic consequence of crack use is only one part of the story. Central to Farber's account is crack as a trade that he understands as a form of illicit business, which was the product of its time. In an era of free-wheeling neo-liberal economics, deregulated finance, multinational corporations and diminishing state intervention, crack was a commodity that enabled dealers to make money and create profitable ventures. In turn, it promised them not only to get a stable source of income for basic necessities, but to fulfill their dreams of lavish spending on expensive goods. The crack world was, as Farber argues, a sinister mirror image of global capitalism that encouraged self-gratifying consumerism while exacerbating the class and race divides in America. Meanwhile hip-hop artists of the era, who were sometimes involved in the trade, championed crack dealers "as underground heroes in a racist society that left too many black men with too little dignity and too few opportunities for exuberant economic success." (7)

The book begins with a familiar but well-synthesized history of cocaine—the basic ingredient for crack—which is mixed with baking soda and cooked into a pellet. But powdered cocaine was a comparatively expensive staple and, in the 1980s, dealers saw crack as a way of reaching a much broader market by selling it, often for as little as $2.50 a rock. The second chapter offers a bleak window into the crack trade in major US cities that was dominated by Blacks and other minorities, which led to high-profile arrests and episodes of gang violence. In the following chapter, Farber dwells on the gruesome consequences of heavy crack use, including crime and trading sex (both men and women) to support habits, and his comparison with the virtually non-existent crack scene in the Netherlands, a more progressive country with better welfare policies, supports his argument that the neo-liberal economic context of the US explains its turn to crack. Chapter four examines crack through the lens of manhood and how the trade allowed some self-made men to dramatically improve their status in their community through conspicuous consumerism (expensive clothing, sports cars, jewellery) and ostentatious relief for the needy, who watched them with envy and admiration. Here Farber also discusses the cultural side of the narcotics trade, at a time when "every major city had clubs that attracted the burgeoning, overlapping hip hop and crack dealers' scene." (112) The last two chapters examine the crackdown on rock cocaine at the beginning of the 1980s that was the consequence of a nationwide media scare, within the larger context of President Reagan's "War on Drugs" and the subsequent decline in crack use.

Farber has used the key...