When Crack Was King

To this miasma of confusion and shame, the adult Ramsey applies tools of the investigative journalist: historical context, public health research, media studies, and critical race theory. He revisits the 1990s production of narratives around crack cocaine shaped by white fear and anti-Black stigma: Washington Post renditions of crack addicts, spurious medical research on the coming generation of crack babies, George H. W. Bush examining a crack vial in the Oval Office. Produced from positions of white privilege—national media, the federal government, state election campaigns—public narratives of “superpredators,” “just say no,” and “law and order” functioned to promote white innocence, vulnerability, and entitlement. Federal and state election campaigns ran on “white-facing solutions to Black facing problems” (271). Ramsay lays bare the production machine behind efforts to install shame in Black America, exploiting and reinscribing harmful stereotypes, painting addicts as grotesque and disposable and surrounding communities as lost. “The crack epidemic has grown in legend since it tailed off in the mid-nineties,” he writes, but, “the further away we get from its height, the more grotesque it has become in the American imagination” (357). In this way, When Crack Was King produces a doubled vision: one that affirms the realities of his childhood experience while at the same time transcending the operating power of its narratives of meaning.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Ramsey points to ways in which these constructs functioned to dehumanize the people in his community. Some of it was bogus: The research on the crack babies has since been rescinded. Some of it was lunacy: Bush staffers hunting in Lafayette Square for a vial of crack. Some of it was professional malpractice: The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post piece represented a shocking collapse of journalistic ethics.⁴ All of this under the accelerant of white anxiety.

Ramsey himself has lived the cost. He identifies an experience common to Black boys: that of having projected upon him a behavior disorder from “the way they were born.”

My peers and I couldn’t name it, but we recognized the disdain of teachers and educators and bristled at it. We avoided the police who profiled us as drug dealers and gangbangers—as “superpredators.” We resisted the low expectations of teachers who regarded us as possible crack babies incapable of learning. (6)

Transcending those childhood experiences, Ramsey uses When Crack Was King to explore the structures and systems that rendered Black American communities susceptible to a drug epidemic. “The crack epidemic was the consequence of the anti-Blackness that permeated and continues to permeate every facet of American society and public policy,” he says (314). The originating power can be exposed as white fear and opportunism. But the policies had a real impact on material conditions: redlining isolated poor communities of color, and banking practices further stratified resource allocation. These systemic practices of racism positioned Black Americans closest to harm, Ramsey says. Crack cocaine was one such harm (35, 49–50).

Finally, in accounting for the vulnerability of Black American communities to the crack epidemic, Ramsey takes his reader to the large canvas of Black American history. The Civil Rights Movement is held up as the chapter of Black liberation. But then the history seems to enter a fog, reemerging with the election of President Barack Obama (33–35, 360).

Emotional vulnerability, in the form of crushed hope, was also a crucial element in the African American body politic. After the 1970s, Black Americans carried a “profound grief, the result of everything they lost in the sixties and seventies—assassinations of leaders, destruction of their communities from riots, a Civil Rights Movement that cost them so much but ultimately missed the mark in securing opportunity and freedom” (298–99).

Amid such circumstances appeared the exogenous factor of crack cocaine, cheap and powerful. The falling price of cocaine exacerbated the problem.

To survive, to function, to keep vulnerable loved ones safe, members of affected communities had to draw up what protections they had: practices of compartmentalization, denial. But the impact of the events is lasting, encoded as trauma. Now, says Ramsey, is the time to observe the collective habits that allowed survival at the expense of feeling. To repudiate survival mode, embrace vulnerability, and reckon with unprocessed and repressed history. Acknowledging a collective pain, Ramsey calls for, and models, such a reckoning.

“It’s time we begin the difficult work of excavating the real stories of the individuals, families, and communities who were swept up in the crack epidemic” (364). The social scientist’s “they” is his “us.” “For people who came face-to-face with the crack epidemic, it was as real as flesh and blood. Crack and its attendant misery permeated every aspect of our lives. For us, the crack epidemic was more than a collection of statistics used in an article or speech. It was a dominating force in our homes, families, and communities” (357).

One of Ramsey’s earliest memories is of a neighbor, Michelle. He did not meet her, but she was part of his formative world: “sad, a mess, a crackhead.” His adult self continues to hear Michelle appealing to him. “I often think of my old neighbor Michelle From Down the Street and wonder what became of her.” His memories of her are sensory, but telling, of going to bed at night to the sound of her playing Patti LaBelle’s “If Only You Knew” on a loop. The lyrics are, in part, “You don’t even suspect / Could probably care less / About the changes I’ve been going through” (12, 363). Elsewhere, Ramsay has said that, even though he was “maybe five, I understood on an emotional level that she was communicating something about her life”; Michelle’s humanity was sending out signals of its reality, heard then but unanswered.⁵ Even at the time, Michelle’s life story was marginalized and repressed.

Ramsey now allows that he heard Michelle’s appeal, hears it still. He is ready to allow experiences their reality and to observe and affirm the vivid and pervasive influence of the crack epidemic and, importantly, retell the story of the epidemic according to those affected by it. His book is the method by which he might bring readers to join him in witnessing the real lives of fellow Americans. Rejecting the “constructs, after all, distortions of flesh-and-blood people,” he explains that “it wasn’t those people—our people, us—who should have been the objects of our fears but the forces that created them” (364).

Crack flooded communities, indelibly shaping the ones that made Ramsay and those he ran with later. “I survived its fallout by some combination of striving, my mother’s mothering, and God’s grace,” he writes. “I came out relatively unscathed but not untouched, and carried the memories with me in everything I did, including my career as a journalist” (6).

Looking back, Ramsey acknowledges that racialized poverty played a role in driving some into the drug trade. In his family, those who participated in the crack market were demonized, but the adult Ramsey recasts the largely Black and Latino dealers as rational actors for whom “the drug trade and the rise of freebase was an unprecedented economic opportunity,” offering the chance to strike “gold in land thought to be barren.” De-racializing the young men in the drug trade, he sees them in a competition for emerging markets: “Like generations of Americans before them, these young prospectors were willing to take on extreme risks and skirt the law in pursuit of their fortunes. The advent of freebase was their Gold Rush, their Homestead Act, their Prohibition” (150).

As backdrop to Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver shades in Appalachia’s susceptibility to the opioid crisis. The 1990s decline of the coal mining industry caused many Appalachians to lose livelihood and meaning. They also lost the infrastructure of hospitals and schools that mining companies had established only contingently for laborers. Poverty rates soared. Desperation set in. Demon observes “[t]he dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn” (280).

Demon Copperhead

Here too, as in Ramsey’s Columbus, the arrival of narcotics was an exogenous factor. Appalachia became the target for new opioids rolled out by pharmaceutical companies. Drug companies flooded West Virginia with 780 million pills over a six-year period, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.⁶ Demon will learn, in time, that “Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive” (416).

“What’s an oxy?” Demon had asked.

That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple. (112)

In the 1990s, synthetic opioids were legal, endorsed by the FDA and the medical establishment. For a long time they were affordable and plentiful. There was no barrier to access, and the use of narcotics became endorsed locally.

In one passage, Kingsolver describes the shared intimacy that occurs when people use:

The next surprise won’t leave my brain. The kit she took out of her purse. The spoon she used first, to scrape the patch. The lighter she held underneath. The cotton ball, the syringe, pulling the cap off the needle and holding it in her mouth like a nurse giving booster shots. I don’t know what I said but she could tell I was scared, and she was sweet with me, the same voice she used with Jip. She’d been saving this, because the first time you do it with somebody, they say it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your life. Like having Jesus in your blood. (351–52)

What was not clear, what drug companies indeed lied about, was that these synthetic opioids are highly addictive. Withdrawal drove cravings so relentless that they superseded pain, making people sick to the point of suicidality. The consumption of OxyContin or fentanyl became a project not of pain management or getting high, but of staving off the sickness of withdrawal. A passage in Demon Copperhead gives voice to the experience of craving:

If you’ve not known the dragon we’re chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor and you’re at rest.

You start trying to get back there, and pretty soon, you’re just trying to get out of bed.

It becomes your job, staving off the dope sickness for another day. Then it becomes your God. No one ever wanted to join that church. (408)

Despite Purdue’s best efforts, the medical establishment came to recognize the highly addictive quality of synthetic opioids. Doctors prescribed more cautiously, and with stronger warnings, but this came with unintended consequences. Changes in the supply of opioids through prescription led vulnerable populations to turn to the black market, and drug cartels readily filled the void with drugs like fentanyl, a synthetic opioid up to 50 times stronger than heroin. A dose equal in size to two grains of salt will kill you. In a single year, more than 70,000 Americans died of overdoses.

Accounts of the miseries of the rural or urban poor effectively exploit the pain of others in ways that (consciously or unconsciously) satisfy readers. Fiction and nonfiction books, consumed primarily by elites living in security, can function to reinforce stereotypes, dampen examples of agency, scandalize and entertain. Sometimes the passage of time is required for insight into the paternalism or prurience at play.

Ramsey is part of a larger movement bringing cultural depictions centered on the suffering of Black and/or rural Americans under critical scrutiny. His When Crack Was King exposes certain tropes and narratives construed by and for the white gaze. “I’ve been all over the country and have interviewed hundreds of people whose lives were touched by crack, but never have I met a ‘crackhead,’” he recounts. He’s met “dealers who thought they’d have just one hit” and “party girls who stayed at the party a little too long,” but writes that their stories were “buried by that word” (363).

The critique of “poverty porn” has been launched at Demon Copperhead. Journalist Lorraine Berry, for instance, challenges what she identifies as Kingsolver’s tone of pity toward the Appalachian people and her depiction of a world in which Appalachians’ “falling into drug abuse, rejecting education, and ‘clinging’ to their ways are moral choices that keep them in their dire circumstances. Appalachia becomes the region of the damned.”⁷

But Kingsolver’s work, while fictional, is explicitly didactic. She fosters empathy and understanding by portraying communities, even communities corroded by narcotic epidemics, as worlds of meaning. She challenges the reader’s irreconciled hypocrisies: “A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the tooth-brushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain” (76).

Kingsolver works on this register of lived experience, painting the beauty and disorder of Demon’s fictionalized world. As a child, Demon’s perceptions do not extend to cultural geography or macroeconomic trends. What he knows is the profundity of his loss upon the death of his mother. This loss sets loose ensuing upheavals in his life. But only when the story is Demon’s to tell does a teenage mother become more than a statistic, or even a nothing, to the local and larger world.

“Mom was the unknown soldier,” says Demon, giving back some honor and meaning to the life of his young mother (113). Her absence would be felt by local institutions as little as had her presence. Walmart would have a new stock girl in time for the Christmas shoppers. Even their kin relations would forget the space she had filled. 

Our trailer home would be thoroughly Cloroxed and every carpet torn out, so the Peggots could rent it to one of Aunt June’s high school friends that got left flat by both her kids’ daddies [ . . . ]. Wanting a fresh start for this girl and her little family, I’m sure they scrubbed the place clean of old stains, including the two pencil lines on the kitchen wall that proved I once stood taller by a hair than my mom. Her life left no marks on a thing. (113)

Only Demon’s recollections, only Kingsolver’s storytelling, renders a life real. Characters internal to Demon’s world alternately participate in and refuse narratives about Appalachians. By my reading, Kingsolver is playing with the tropes, the grotesques, in ways that have ties to Dickens’s David Copperfield. Spectacle is part of the energy of both novels that requires the reader otherwise to tolerate feelings of real sadness. It is true that readers of these works enter regions of the damned. Kingsolver’s passage depicting the secondary opioid unit is especially devastating in its depictions of the degradations facilitated by cravings (397–98). Still, this is a passage of pain. She is challenging readers to recognize the complex interplay of individual and structural factors that contribute to suffering.

Historically, drug use is under stood as a failing of character, a moral or self-disciplinary failing. Ramsey explains that this account was gendered as well. Women who used drugs were stigmatized as characterologically flawed: “The way they coped, with drugs and alcohol, was dismissed as a habit they could break if they weren’t so irresponsible” (261).

Kingsolver and Ramsey link their narratives of human experience to the medical model of addiction, based on brain and behavioral science, which describes how dopamine commands the brain’s attention, urging it to seek more of the pleasure it just experienced. Endorphins release dopamine when we encounter anything exciting. Drugs of abuse cause an unnatural rise in dopamine, to up to 10 times normal levels, so that consuming them is one of the most powerful experiences our brains can have. Prolonged use alters the brain and leads to addiction—a clinical disorder, a chemically predictable outcome.

This model offers the authors critical insight and a morally neutral discourse through which to frame the circumstances and actions of their characters. “Stupid is all the word I’ve had to cover much of my time on God’s grass,” Demon tells us. “But it’s not stupid that makes a bird fly, or a grasshopper rub its knees together and sing. It’s nature. A junkie catches his flight. That sugar on your brain cells sucks away any other purpose. You can think you’re in charge. Walk around thinking this for hours at a time, or a day, till the clock winds down and the human person you were gets yanked out through whatever hole the devil can find” (445). This is not character. It is how we are born.

Kingsolver and Ramsey both highlight the power of community and individual actions in creating safe spaces and providing support. The culture of kin care can prove a necessary asset as the epidemic takes hold.

In the final third of When Crack Was King, Ramsey holds up the detoxification of the community as ultimately self-generated. So ruinous was the devastation of crack that besieged communities generated the autoimmunity of aversion.

Despite commonly held beliefs in Black complacency with drugs and crime, it’s also clear that residents of the communities hardest hit by the crack epidemic played some part in its decline. In several cities, they formed neighborhood patrols and watch groups with the specific goal of driving out drug dealers and closing down crack houses, taking the dangerous work of securing their neighborhoods into their own hands. They also founded organizations, launching campaigns and initiatives to provide access to substance-abuse programs and job training, to beautify streets, build playgrounds, and mentor children. (325)

Ramsey reports on US Department of Justice studies in which youths cited their direct personal observations of the ravages of drug abuse as primary deterrents to crack and heroin use.⁸ Rejection grew organically from horror, Ramsay observes. A generation of young people saw the impact of IV drugs firsthand, or saw its representations in films such as New Jack City and Jungle Fever, and turned away in fear (7).

The Black Arts Movement was likewise crucial to the end of the crack epidemic, says Ramsey. Emergent works in rap and hip-hop served to entertain, but they also worked to reframe the life of drug consumption, warning of its violence.

“Ultimately we saved ourselves,” Ramsey explained in an interview, not “any great intervention” by the government. “The crack epidemic ended because the next cohort of young people who would have used crack looked around at their communities and saw the devastation and said, ‘Not for me.’ And I think a really important thing to underline, is that . . . we didn’t celebrate that.”⁹

This is the redemptive proposal of When Crack Was King: the posing of a new narrative around crack, as a collective extended episode of trauma. Ramsay subverts narratives of debasement and elevates a chapter of survival and resilience. He poses a new tone, one of admiration and even astonishment. “How we survived that with little to no assistance from the larger society is nothing short of amazing” (358). The violence and trauma were real, but the story must be told of Black Americans overcoming the epidemic, of the history of community mobilization and collective recovery. Telling these truths of a hard-won liberation can foster pride, relief, and joy.

The work of processing trauma continues, but Ramsay is sufficiently confident about the closing of the chapter on the crack epidemic to propose that there are “signs all around that Black America is healing itself from the inside out” (358).

In Demon Copperhead, the dear Peggots ultimately cannot take in Demon. They do what they can: seek to shelter their grandson and bring him ham biscuits in his miserable site of foster care. In this way, Demon is never fully alone in the world. “It was true about Aunt June keeping track,” he allows of one Peggot daughter. “Which was not true of my mom in any way, shape, or form” (28).

Demon’s search for kin brings him to Mr. Dick, a small and shrunken man in a wheelchair who has been shunned and tortured in his life. Despite his grotesque appearance, Mr. Dick surprises. When Demon seeks out Mr. Dick in his room, he finds him completing the making of a kite adorned with lines from the work he has just read, Shakespeare’s Richard III. These lines blink to Demon’s story of woe. “So wise so young, they say, do never live long.” “Dispute not with her: she is a lunatic,” and “And if I die no soul will pity me. And why should they since I myself find in myself no pity to myself” (205, italics in original). Words over four hundred years old attest to the terrors of the human condition.

On a day thick with prestorm ions, Demon confronts Mr. Dick. Demon is leaving, and it is time to fly the kite. Momentarily arrested by the abrupt request, Mr. Dick accedes. First, he adds one final inscription to the kite: “Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.” The author knows, though Demon and the reader likely do not, that the line is from David Copperfield. “If that was from him to me, it was more man-to-man talk than I’d ever had in life so far,” Demon reflects. “I said, Okay, let’s do this thing” (210, italics in original).

They run through the field, Demon pushing Mr. Dick in his wheelchair. The boy launches the kite into the stormy sky, then hands the taut line to the wizened older man. Demon renders the scene.

He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant. (210)

Throwing up their own testaments, Kingsolver and Ramsey offer powerful narratives that remind us of the importance of structural vulnerability and revisiting traumatic journeys in addressing addiction and its impact. Resource investment and support within communities are the narrow path that, for some, lead to recovery. To redemption? To salvation? Perhaps. Perhaps a path back to being human.