10 Ways the US Government Used the Crack Epidemic to Justify the War on Drugs
Myth 3: Crack Is Especially Addicting
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse survey in the late 1980s, of those who had ever tried crack, 80 percent had not used it in the past year, and over 90 percent had not used it in the past month. Eventually, the same media that originally made false or misleading claims about crack being “instantaneously addicting” later admitted as much. In 1990, for example, Newsweek wrote: “Donʼt tell the kids, but thereʼs a dirty little secret about crack; as with most other drugs, a lot of people use it without getting addicted. In their zeal to shield young people from the plague of drugs, the media and many drug educators have hyped instant and total addiction.”
Myth 4: Crack Causes Crime and Violence
The media and drug control officials repeatedly claimed that crack was so powerfully addictive that it drove users to desperate acts of crime and violence. Politicians repeated these claims to justify their uniquely punitive new laws against crack. It turns out, however, that this allegation, too, wasn’t true. Of the 414 homicides in New York City in 1988 that the police defined as drug-related, only 7.5 percent were psychopharmacological in nature, where a drugʼs effects were said to be the cause. Most of those were alcohol-related. Nearly three-fourths (74.3 percent) of the total had to do with the dangers of doing business in a black market rather than with the direct behavioral effects of crack or even with crimes born of a craving for crack.
