Crack In America: Demon Drugs and Social JusticeCraig Reinarman, Harry G. Levine Crack in America is the definitive book on crack cocaine. In reinterpreting the crack story, it offers new understandings of both drug addiction and drug prohibition. It shows how crack use arose in the face of growing unemployment, poverty, racism, and shrinking social services. It places crack in its historical context—as the latest in a long line of demonized drugs—and it examines the crack scare as a phenomenon in its own right. Most important, it uses crack and the crack scare as windows onto America's larger drug and drug policy problems. Written by a team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences, this book provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack problem to date. It reviews the social pharmacology of crack and offers rich ethnographic case studies of crack binging, addiction, and sales. It explores crack's different impacts on whites, blacks, the middle class, and the poor, and explains why crack was always much less of a problem in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands. Crack in America helps readers understand why the United States has the most repressive, expensive, and yet least effective drug policy in the Western world. It discusses the ways politicians and the media generated the crack scare as the centerpiece of the War on Drugs. It catalogues the costs of the War on Drugs for civil liberties, situates crack use and sales in the political economy of the inner cities in the 1980s, and shows how the drug war led to the most massive wave of imprisonment in U.S. history. Finally, it explains why the failures of drug prohibition have led to the emergence of the harm reduction movement and other opposition forces that are changing the face of U.S. drug policy. |
Contents
Crack in Context Americas Latest Demon Drug | 1 |
The Crack Attack Politics and Media in the Crack Scare | 18 |
Myths and Realities | 53 |
In Search of Horatio Alger Culture and Ideology in the Crack Economy | 57 |
The Contingent Call of the Pipe Bingeing and Addiction Among Heavy Cocaine Smokers | 77 |
Two Women Who Used Cocaine Too Much Class Race Gender Crack and Coke | 98 |
Crack and Homicide in New York City A Case Study in the Epidemiology of Violence | 113 |
The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine Not All Its Cracked Up to Be | 131 |
When Constitutional Rights Seem Too Extravagant to Endure The Crack Scares Impact on Civil Rights and Liberties | 229 |
The Pregnancy Police Fight the War on Drugs | 249 |
Pattern Purpose and Race in the Drug War The Crisis of Credibility in Criminal Justice | 260 |
Drug Prohibition in the US Costs Consequences and Alternatives | 288 |
From Punitive Prohibition to Harm Reduction | 317 |
Punitive Prohibition in America | 321 |
The Cultural Contradictions of Punitive Prohibition | 334 |
Real Opposition Real Alternatives Reducing the Harms of Drug Use and Drug Policy | 345 |
Crack in Comparable Societies | 171 |
Crack Use in Canada A Distant American Cousin | 175 |
Crack in Australia Why is There No Problem? | 194 |
Crack in the Netherlands Effective Social Policy is Effective Drug Policy | 214 |
The Price of Repression | 225 |
Weve Been Here Before Excerpts from the 1967 Report of the Task Force on Narcotics and Drug Abuse of the Presidents Commission on Law Enfor... | 367 |
| 373 | |
| 380 | |
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Crack In America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice Craig Reinarman,Harry G. Levine Limited preview - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
addiction African-Americans alcohol American Amsterdam antidrug arrest Australia Becky behavior binge Chapter claims cocaine users cocaine's crack babies crack epidemic crack scare crack users crack-related crime Criminal Justice culture dealers deaths dose drinking Drug Abuse drug control Drug Enforcement drug laws drug policy drug problems drug prohibition drug scares drug users drug war drug-related economic effects epidemic Erickson evidence example experience federal fetal freebase Grinspoon harm reduction heroin homicides human illicit drug increased injection inner-city Institute on Drug Journal Latino Lester Grinspoon marijuana methadone Monique Narcotics National Institute needle exchange NIDA pharmacological political politicians poor population poverty powder cocaine pregnancy prison programs Psychoactive Drugs punitive prohibition rates reduce reported respondents risk sentences smoking social society street tion Toronto treatment U.S. Department underground economy University Press urban victim violence Waldorf War on Drugs Washington women York City