"Crack erupted across America’s marginalized urban neighborhoods in the 1980s like a biblical plague torn from the pages of Revelation. The drug offered an inexpensive, nirvana-like high, leaving users clamoring for ever larger doses in a hopeless yet insatiable quest to sustain the same levels of bliss. It was the perfect 'superdrug,' and Black communities, redlined in concrete city blocks, were neglected as their wealthier white neighbors escaped crack’s worst embrace. Those left behind absorbed the brunt of an apocalyptic epidemic that redrew a generation with ruthless precision across racial and economic fault lines. Donovan X. Ramsey came of age in a crack-era neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, where it was better not to ask questions...."
NY Times: Why Crack Became the 1980s ‘Superdrug’
Guernica: After the Murder By Donovan X. Ramsey
amazon: When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era
A man selling crack on West 42nd Street in Manhattan in 1987.
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