cosplaying as
Tyrone Biggums, a character in the American
sketch comedy series ''
Chappelle's Show''. Tyrone's character represents an
African-American man who became downtrodden and afflicted by the effects of
crack. A number of authors have discussed race and the crack epidemic, including Memphis Black writer Demico Boothe, who spent 12 years in federal prison after being arrested for the first-time offense of selling crack cocaine at the age of 18, published the book, "Why Are So Many Black Men in Prison?" in 2007. Writer and lawyer
Michelle Alexander's book
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) argues that punitive laws against drugs like crack cocaine adopted under the Reagan administration's
war on drugs resulted in harsh social consequences, including large numbers of young Black men imprisoned for long sentences, the exacerbation of drug crime despite a decrease in illegal drug use in the United States, and increased
police brutality against the Black community resulting in injury and death. According to Alexander, society turned to racist criminal justice policies to avoid exhibiting obvious racism. She writes that, since African Americans were the majority users of crack cocaine, it provided a platform for the government to create laws that were specific to crack. She claims that this was an effective way to imprison Black people without having to do the same to white Americans. Alexander writes that felony drug convictions for crack cocaine fell disproportionately on young Black men, who then lost access to voting, housing, and employment opportunities, which then led to increased violent crime in poor Black communities.
John Pfaff, in his book
Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, criticizes Alexander's assertion that the Drug War, including sentencing disparities for crack, is responsible for mass incarceration. Among his findings are that drug offenders make up only a small part of the prison population, and non-violent drug offenders an even smaller portion; that people convicted of violent crimes make up the majority of prisoners; that county and state justice systems account for the large majority of American prisoners and not the federal system that handles most drug cases; and, subsequently, "national" statistics tell a distorted story when differences in enforcement, conviction, and sentencing are widely disparate between states and counties.
Dark Alliance series San Jose Mercury News journalist
Gary Webb sparked national controversy with his 1996
Dark Alliance series which alleged that Nicaraguan dealers with
Contra ties started and significantly fueled the 1980s crack epidemic. Investigating the lives and connections of Los Angeles crack dealers
Ricky Ross,
Oscar Danilo Blandón, and Norwin Meneses, Webb alleged that profits from these crack sales were funneled to the CIA-supported Contras. The
United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General rejected Webb's claim that there was a "systematic effort by the CIA to protect the drug trafficking activities of the Contras". The DOJ/OIG reported: "We found that Blandon and Meneses were plainly major drug traffickers who enriched themselves at the expense of countless drug users and the communities in which these drug users lived, just like other drug dealers of their magnitude. They also contributed some money to the Contra cause. But we did not find that their activities were the cause of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, much less in the United States as a whole, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras." ==In popular culture==