Book Review: Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice

Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, edited by Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xvi + 388 pp., $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. "Clearly, both cocaine and crack have the potential to produce serious harm, even death; but the evidence is-despite government reports showing ever-increasing harm-that most people consume these drugs in a way that does not cause them lasting or even temporary harm." This sentence, from John Morgan and Lynn Zimmer's chapter on the social pharmacology of smokable cocaine (p. 141), captures both the theme and the residual ambivalence of Crack in America. Cocaine is a potent drug, but its dangers have been oversold by cynical journalists and vote-hungry politicians. Cocaine smoking has become the chief pretext for an expensive, unjust, and counterproductive drug war that fails to address the root causes of drug abuse: the despair of the urban underclass. These themes are laid out in two introductory essays by the book's editors, Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, and are developed at length in 12 well-chosen chapters, mostly classic articles from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Phillipe Bourgois's "In Search of Horatio Alger" stresses that crack dealing is a quest for meaning and money by those who have little hope of success in the legitimate economy, a point reiterated by several contributors. "The Contingent Call of the Pipe," by the editors and Dan Waldorf and Sheigla Murphy, argues that few crack users turn their lives into one long binge, drug-war propaganda notwithstanding. Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum's profile of two female crack smokers makes the point that cocaine craving and bingeing are most common among those who have fewer life options. Middle-class users are more likely to use powder, to control their intake, and to avoid prostitution and crime. Most of the violent crime associated with crack, as Paul Goldstein and his collaborators show, is systemic in nature-dealers shooting dealers, not coke-crazies blazing away at the nearest moving object. The notion that crack is a direct, unmediated source of criminal violence is an example of what Morgan and Zimmer call "pharmacocentrism." Drawing upon the pioneering work of Norman Zinberg, the patron saint of this anthology, they and other contributors stress that set and setting are more important than the effect of crack cocaine itself. Users get in trouble with the drug because they have been, so to speak, set up by their miserable life experiences. Crack bingeing blots out the misery. Crack is most dangerous when, in the editors' phrase, it is used as an "antidespondent" drug. Three comparative essays on crack in other nations-Yuet Cheung and Patricia Erickson on Canada, Stephen K. Mugford on Australia, and Peter Cohen on the Netherlandsunderscore the antidespondency theme. Their collective claim is that crack does not flourish in these countries because they have superior social welfare systems and hence a smaller and less desperate underclass. An even more obvious factor, though one discounted by the authors, is their distance from primary cocaine trafficking routes. To reject pharmacological determinism is to reject the belief that drugs are a sufficient cause of addiction. But one need not reject the belief that drugs are a necessary cause. No supply, no users-that's the Ockham's Razor of why there is no crack problem in Australia or, for that matter, in the slums of Calcutta. You can, as Ethan Nadelmann does in his updated essay on U.S. drug policy, concede that increased exposure will entail increased use, yet still reject "prohibition." The reason is that the concomitants of prohibition outweigh the public health gains. Several contributors describe those costs: Ira Glasser and Loren Siegel on the restriction of civil liberties, Loren Siegel on the prosecution and harassment of pregnant drug users, and Troy Duster on the disparate racial impact of the drug war and the crisis in the credibility of the criminal justice system. …