Crack’s
Effect on New York City In the Mid-1980s to Present.
Eli
Ruiz
HIST-394
Research
Paper
Final
Draft
Dr.
Beal
April
30, 2001
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In the summer of 1985, New York City was introduced to the drug crack. The ensuing seventeen years have culminated into some of the most turbulent, and crime ridden years in the history of New York City. Crack is the street name for a form of cocaine introduced in the mid-1980s. Crack is smoked, rather then sniffed through the nose, or injected, which are all other ways to use cocaine. Users of the drug inhale the vapors that are given off when the crack is heated (Berger pg.20). Crack cannot burn, and in order to give off the drugs vapors it must be heated to a very high temperature. After the crack has been heated the user will proceed to inhale the vapors. The drug will then pass from the lungs to the person’s bloodstream and then reaches the brain, all within seconds. The user will immediately feel the euphoric sensation that crack brings.
Crack is the strongest form of cocaine available. A New York state drug prosecutor put it this way, “Crack is to cocaine what the atom bomb is to TNT” (Berger pg.21). Crack is extremely addictive and users are usually left addicted after just one use. The drug is relatively cheap and a $10 vial is enough for two hits. The drug will eventually become a very expensive habit though. The high that crack gives is very short-lived and the user finds his or herself in a horrible cycle where they will crave the drug over and over. An addicted user will have a habit that will cost any where from $100-$1500 a day. The user will often steal and commit crimes to supplement their habit.
The risks of getting hooked on crack are far greater than with other forms of cocaine. Addicts, who used cocaine only occasionally, said that after switching to crack they were using the drug three to four times a week. It is almost impossible for crack
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addicts to maintain normal lives. Dr. Jeffery Rosecan, director of the Cocaine Abuse Treatment Program at Colombia-Presbyterian Medical Center often describes crack addicts, often called “crack-heads” as follows, “They first start to suffer personality changes especially paranoia, then their lives start to fall apart, along with their relationships and they move into a life of emotional extremes, crime, illness, and possibly death.”
Crack users range from the Wall Street stockbroker to a homeless person living in Central Park, but by and large this evil drug called crack had its biggest impact on New York’s inner city minority population. A New York doctor, Dr. Mark Gold who is the person who set up and helps run the not for profit organization called 800-COCAINE, a hotline set up to help addicts and perspective users answer questions about the drug and also offers counseling and drug intervention services; suggested that his findings showed that, “occasional users of crack quickly increased, the amount and frequency of crack use until total dependency was achieved.” Men and women who were once law abiding citizens and honest people were now robbing and stealing to pay for the drug, and many who once enjoyed good health were now suffering from a variety of physical and mental aliments springing from their cocaine abuse. Crack brings along with its amazing high, some ominous dangers. Dr. Robert Maslansky is the director of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital substance abuse program. He found that all of the ill effects associated with cocaine like seizures, paranoia, high blood pressure, heart disorders, and weight loss; all are significantly more intense with crack-cocaine (Berger pg. 37). Crack will
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cause the body’s blood vessels to tighten raising a person’s blood pressure by up to 20%-30%. This raise in blood pressure increases the danger of a brain hemorrhage, and higher body temperature. A Princeton brain surgeon, Dr. Carl C. Pfeiffer explained that crack makes the heart muscles more sensitive to the natural stimulant adrenaline, which the body produces. Adrenaline usually makes the heart beat faster. With crack in the system, the heart muscles begin to twitch and are unable to pump blood. The frequent result is death (Berger pg.39).
When crack jumped on the New York scene in the summer of 1985, it was soon dubbed “the new urban epidemic.” Since the drug was so cheap $5 to $10 per vial, its appeal to New York’s lower income inner city minorities was unmistakable. Crack first appeared in the streets of New York City in the summer of 1985. A Lieutenant in New York City Police Departments Narcotic Division Special Projects Unit, Joe E. Lisi, said in 1986, “Ever since the first vial appeared last summer, crack is appearing everywhere, and in increasing quantities” (Berger Pg.20). Lisi estimates that more than half of the cocaine confiscated in New York in 1985 was crack cocaine. He also estimated that in some neighborhoods in New York, that percentage grew to 90% for seizures. The exact place where crack use began is not known, but, most likely it was New York or Los Angeles. The focus of this paper will be the effect that the drug crack had on New York City from 1985 to present day. Since crack is merely another form of cocaine, a closer look should be taken at cocaine.
On the streets he was known as Santa Cruz, but his real name was Jose Santa Cruz Londono. In 1987, the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn, NY, considered him the
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largest supplier of crack and cocaine in New York. A high school dropout, Santa Cruz commanded an organization that extended from his native Colombia, to the street corners
of New York City (Tullis pg.90-97). The Santa Cruz group owned seven factories in Colombia that prepared cocaine powder. He owned four or five airplanes and employed as many as ten pilots to transport the drugs. Cruz’s distribution network also consisted of ten or more lieutenants in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and other American cities. Throughout New York there were dozens of apartments and houses with underground vaults in which caches of cocaine and crack were stored by the Santa Cruz organization. Authorities said that Santa Cruz and his group were distributors of about one ton of cocaine in New York between 1985-1988, and reaped profits of over $51 million. Once on the streets of New York the value of the cocaine becomes significantly higher though (Tullis pg. 90-130). Unlike freebase cocaine, the dealer, not the user, prepares crack cocaine. The dealer will mix regular street cocaine powder with water and baking soda to make a thick paste. This paste is then heated on a stove. Once dry the paste looks like a large hunk of soap or a bowl of slightly dirty sugar that has been formed into one solid lump by moisture in the air. The dealer cuts the paste into small chunks, called “rocks”, now broken down the crack material is now ready to hit the streets.
On July 31st, 1987, Federal authorities said they had smashed a drug ring that they described as the biggest distributor of crack in New York City. Twenty-nine people were subsequently arrested for involvement in the drug ring, which was headed by a 26-year-old Dominican Republic man. The drug ring was believed to be putting out over 10,000 vials of crack per day, mostly in theWashington Heights, section of Manhattan, and the
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Bronx. “The case showed the growth and sophistication of the crack trade, which only two years ago, was made up of low level dealers producing the potent form of cocaine
from their kitchen laboratories, and hawking it on the street corners. While it represented an important step in the fight against crack, it could hardly stamp out the crack epidemic in the city” (case officials quote; NY Times Fri. July 31 1987,B1). These defendants were charged with operating an international ring that distributed “massive amounts” of crack in vials that sold for $10-$20 each. “We believe this group was selling 10,000 vials of crack per day”, said Robert M. Stutman, head of the New York office of the D.E.A., Americans answer to the “war on drugs”. He said that the crack was marketed under the brand name “based balls”, which he described as “the largest brand name on the streets of New York” (NY Times; metro desk; Fri. July 31,1987;B1).
The ringleader of this group New York’s first large scale crack operation, was named Santiago Luis Polanco-Rodriguez. Rodriguez was portrayed by Mr. Stutman as a genius who has probably been “the marketing genius” behind the dramatic spread of crack-cocaine in the Washington Heights area over the past two years. Washington Heights was among the neighborhoods hit hard first by the spread of crack-cocaine. According to the indictment, the group began selling cocaine in New York in 1982, then switched to crack in 1985 when the drug was first introduced to New York. The indictment also said that the ringleader used key lieutenants in New York City. While all the time living in the Dominican Republic, he still continued to oversee the entire operation in New York.
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On the street level crack is sold by gang members and dealers often-called soldiers for they are always out in the open air, and on the streets pushing their drug to the public. The street pusher is the lowest man on the totem pole of the crack business,
just above the addict. The street pusher sells his wares, usually packaged in glass or plastic vials with colorful caps on the ends for anywhere from $5-$20, or even more depending on the person and the quality of the drug.
In
the mid 1980’s, shortly after the introduction of crack cocaine in the summer
of 1985, New York saw an unprecedented rise in city crime, and murders. It was called a “crime wave,” and crack was
the reason this wave came crashing into New York, almost decimating its inner
city in the mid-eighties. From precinct
houses to prisons, the criminal justice system in New York City was bulging and
straining to cope with the rise of crack.
Six months after the introduction of the drug in New York in 1985, by 1986,
the state courts were backlogged and overcrowded with all kinds of criminal
drug cases. Demand was exploding for
more trial space, prosecutors, public defenders, and jail cells. “The special anti-crack unit had been very
successful”, the commander of the New York Police Departments Narcotic
division, Deputy Chief Francis C. Hall said, one key effort against the drug,
“You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see we are pushing more people
into the system than the system can handle” (NY Times; Nov. 24,1986;Mon., PG
1,column 5). The city of New York
was spending several hundred million dollars to expand the capacity of courts
and jails. “The system is under
enormous stress,” said the executive director of the Legal Aid Society,
Archibald R. Murray, “if there is a continued increase in cases, you could
bring the system to the edge of collapse”(NY Times Nov. 24,
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1986, pg 1, column 5). In May 1986 an undercover narcotics of unit 101 officers was established by the New York City Police Department to arrest the sellers of crack-cocaine, and to breakup “crack houses,” where the addicts usually assemble to smoke the
powerful drug. The formation of this unit came as Rudolph W. Giulliani, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan reported that 44 suspected dealers of the drug had been arrested as a result of raids by city police a few nights before. The special unit had citywide jurisdiction and consisted of experienced narcotics officers. “Crack has become in a very short period of time the drug of choice in New York City, we believe it is leading to too much violent crime”, said city police commissioner Benjamin Ward in 1986 (NY Times, May 22, 1986, PG 1,column 1). In making this announcement, the commissioner said statistics seemed to indicate a rise in theft, homicides, and other serious crimes related to the appearance of crack over the last six months.
By 1986, the crack trade was by all means, still growing, but in many areas like Washington Heights and the Bronx, widespread arrests had driven crack dealers off the streets, and into apartments. So far by 1986, the cities new crack unit alone had made 3,706 arrests for narcotics charges of which about 85% were for felonies (NY Times, May 22,1986, Sec A, column 1). The special narcotics prosecutors’ office reported a 71% increase in the number of felony indictments, with 5,000 indictments expected that year, compared with 3,106 in 1985 and 1,700 in 1980. Perhaps the most dramatic and explosive symptom is the crowding of the cities correctional system, where prisoners are held until they go though the courts or where they may serve sentences of up to one year. The system in 1986 was holding 13,475 prisoners and was at 104% capacity. Crowded
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conditions at the Riker’s Island facility led to riots that April among prisoners. Despite the jails expansion of 3,000 spaces since 1983, the city said it could not predict the advent
of crack and has not been able to keep up with the influx of prisoners (NY Times, Nov. 24,1986, PG 1, column 5).
Children were also affected by the introduction of crack cocaine in New York City. Suddenly it was commonplace to find headlines that read, “Woman Throws her Two Sons From 4th Floor”, as was the case on November 27, 1986, where a 28 year old woman after locking herself in her children’s room, flung her two young sons out of the window of their fourth story Bronx apartment, and then jumped out herself. Four-year-old Lawrence Barber was killed, but the woman identified as Alexandria Douglas, and her other son, Lamont Boyce age six, were in critical condition in Bronx Municipal Hospital Center. Hour’s later police found several vials of crack and several bags of cocaine in the bedroom from which the woman had jumped (NY Times Nov. 28,1986, Sec A, PG 1). The problem of crack-addicted mothers is also a burden being placed on the city of New York. Often when an addict to the drug conceives a baby, that baby, since the mother continued to abuse crack throughout her pregnancy will be born addicted to crack-cocaine also, and will in turn display the same symptoms of addiction and withdrawal, and will sometimes suffer permanent damaging neurological disorders later in life. The rise in child abuse cases, along with the addition of “crack babies” into the picture left the city of New York short on social workers, to handle the huge influx of cases in the mid to late 1980s (Trebach pgs.200-225).
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No issue has had more of an impact on the criminal justice system over the past two decades than national drug policy. The “War on Drugs” that was declared in the early 1980s has been a primary contributor to the enormous growth in the prison system
in the United States since that time, and has affected all aspects of the criminal justice system. National policies as response to the problem of drug abuse have emphasized punishment over treatment and have had a disproportionate impact on lower income communities and minorities. Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. Responding to a perceived problem of high rates of drug abuse in the late 1970s the Regan administration and other political leaders officially launched a “war on drugs” policy in 1982. Within a few years, both funding for drug law enforcement and a political focus on the drug war had increased substantially. As a result there was a surge in arrests in the 1980’s. The impact of greater emphasis on law enforcement and incarceration of drug offenders has had a dramatic impact on African Americans as a result of the three overlapping policy decisions of the early eighties.
First, is the concentration of drug law enforcement in inner city areas, secondly harsher sentencing policies, particularly for crack-cocaine; and the drug wars emphasis on law enforcement at the expense of prevention and treatment. Given the shortage of treatment options during this early period in many inner city areas, drug abuse in these communities was more likely to receive attention as a criminal justice problem, rather than a social problem. As a result, African Americans who use drugs are more likely to be arrested than other groups. While African Americans constitute 13% of the nations
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monthly drug users, they represent 35% of those persons arrested for drug possession, 55% of drug possession convictions, and 74% of those sentenced to prison for drug charges (www.sproject.com/test). Under federal law, and similar statutes in some states, offenders convicted of crack-cocaine offences are punished more severely than those
convicted of powder cocaine offenses. Thus, in federal court an offender selling five grams of crack will receive a mandatory minimum sentence of five years as does the offender selling five hundred grams of powder cocaine.
Today huge amounts of cocaine continue to cross international borders on its way to the US. Through the air, and by sea, are still as in its early days the preferred way of smuggling drugs into the US. Whether it be through the Mexico-US border, or from the Caribbean through the Florida peninsula, cocaine still has these smugglers and the big dealers, along with street peddlers lining their pockets with the huge illegal profits that it brings in. Obviously, as long as cocaine finds its way onto the streets of America, and New York, the problem of crack will still be chipping and chipping away at the integrity of the black and Hispanic minorities and the neighborhoods they live in which are still being flooded with crack (www.DEA.org/stats). Crack is still an evident problem today, although not at the scale it was during the mid to late 1980s.
On a day when current mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani went to Brooklyn, NY to tout the renewal of the Bushwick neighborhood, once considered one of the most notorious crack bazaars in the country, Pipo Rios contemplated his business not far from where the mayor spoke. Mr. Rios used to sell crack in the neighborhood, but “street-level drug
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dealers are hard pressed to earn a living these days”, he said. Unlikely as it may be that Mr. Rios is ever invited to City Hall, the change in his life though, is the story of the decline of crack in New York, done in by age, boredom, and new opportunities. Today, in communities that used to have more open air crack markets than grocery stores, where children grew up dodging crack vials, and gunfire, the change from a decade ago is
startling. On the surface, crack has all but disappeared from much of New York, taking with it the violence, and death that crack made a common part of street life. For example, the small triangle of land near Bushwick that was once the place where crack dealers used to stage late night fights with pit bulls is now a community garden. Over the last ten years, the NYPD has made nearly 900,000 drug arrests, more than any other city in the world (NY Times, Sept 19, 1999, pg 1, column1). Still a broader look at the arc of the crack years shows that it was not the incarceration of a generation, or the six fold increase in the narcotics unit, that turned the tide in New York, which police call the crack capital of the world (NY Times, Sept 19, 1999, PG 1, column 1).
A series of studies in recent years have been demonstrated that drug treatment both within and outside of the criminal justice system, is more cost effective in controlling drug abuse and crime than continued expansion of the prison system. A R.A.N.D analysis of these issues concluded that whereas spending one million dollars to expand the use of mandatory sentencing for drug offenders would reduce drug consumption nationally by 13 kilograms, spending the same amount on treatment would reduce consumption by almost eight times that number, or about 100 kilograms.
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Similarly, expanding the use of treatment was estimated to reduce drug related crime up fifteen times, as much as mandatory sentencing.
Studies of drug treatment in prisons have also concluded that inmates who receive treatment are less likely to revert back to drugs than those who do not. One of the oldest programs like this is the Stay’n Out Program of New York State, established in 1977 as a prison-based therapeutic community. Evaluations of the program have found that 77% of
its male graduates are rearrested after parole, compared to 40% of inmates who received no treatment or any counseling (www.sproject.com/test).
Another way to combat the problem would be to come up with some more
rational drug policies. A substantial body of research now exists that documents the injustices and ineffectiveness of drug policies that emphasize enforcement and incarceration over prevention and treatment. The “war on drugs” has substantially contributed to a vastly expanded prison system, and exacted a heavy toll on minority groups in particular. Despite the advances in drug-treatment and innovations such as drug courts, 30% of all inmates sentenced to prison have been convicted of a drug offense. Several steps must be taken in reforming drug policy starting with a shift in funding priorities. Since the 1980’s two-thirds of federal anti-drug funds have been devoted to law enforcement and just one-third to prevention and treatment (Lee PG 67).
Secondly the government needs to repeal many of its mandatory sentencing laws. The legislative modifications to mandatory sentencing in Michigan through the federal “safety value”, demonstrate that overly harsh sentencing can be altered without legislators suffering political consequences. Since 20% of federal offenders are now
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sentenced under the safety value, Congress should at a minimum, examine the potential for expansion of that provision to additional offenders, and examine the effectiveness of other sentencing and treatment options that now exist. Thirdly, the legislators should also explore increasing treatment options within the criminal justice system itself. An increasing amount of prison admissions in recent years consists of probation and parole violators, often as a result of drug use. One-third of offenders or 33.7% admitted to
prison in 1996 consisted of such violators, nearly double the rate 17.6%, in 1980. (Ibid PG 7). While political leaders in recent years have issued calls for mandatory drug testing of offenders under community supervision, in many jurisdictions treatment resources for this group are very inadequate. Drug courts that direct defendants into treatment programs have expanded considerably in recent years, with more than three hundred such courts now in operation. Their use could be expanded to additional jurisdictions as well as to an extended group of defendants in many systems by eliminating unnecessary restrictions on eligibility. These reforms in the criminal justice system would go a long way toward eradicating what is left today of the 1980’s crack epidemic.
“I’m not ready to say we won”, said police commissioner Howard Saffir, “but we’re no longer the crack capital of the world.” He attributed the change to a policy of zero tolerance for anyone using or selling drugs in the open (NY Times, Sept. 19,1999, PG 1, column 1). The drug that was once held as the scourge of New York is still around, of course, and so are its consequences, broken families, battle-scared neighborhoods, and crimes both petty and large. The cheap smoke-able form of cocaine
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has a cheap price and gives its users a quick and powerful high that leaves them wanting more. As long as the drug exists and a demand is till out there, crack will continue to destroy lives, families, and inner city neighborhoods in New York. Through harsh drug laws and mandatory sentencing legislators have been able to enjoy some level of success against the drug, but only through more rational drug policies and the ideas underlined throughout this paper can they enjoy even more success.
This paper will
close with a quote from Casimiro Lopez a 71 year old native New Yorker, as he
strolls down West 139th street in Manhattan, in the heart of the
square mile that the New York Police Force dubbed the crack capital of the
world. “I’m telling you: the drugs never finish, but its much better now
because you don’t see them anymore” (NY Times, Sept 19,1999, PG 1 column 1).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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