Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

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I grew up in Baltimore City, born in the 70s. Up until the drug war in the 80s, it was a multiracial working class city. I lived near "Pigtown" one of the poorer areas, but I was never afraid to go out at night.

During the summer months when it was hot and humid, I'd sleep during the day, and friends and I would sneak out and walk all over the city in the middle of the night, we were only 11-12 years old.

Yes, we hung out on the stairs of our row houses, and on the corners of the streets, and played radios loud, but by and large, violence was confined mostly to bullying. In fact, we had often walked down Pratt street past Martin Luther King Boulevard with no problem from the people living in the projects.

Things changed after the drug war started in the 80s. I started experiencing shootings. Kids got shot at my school. I'd hear gunshots all during the night. I even got caught up in a shootout at one point, which sounded like firecrackers going off if it wasn't for the sounds of bullets ricocheting off of the brick houses (thank god old Baltimore rowhouses had real brick facades)

Many of my childhood friends became drug addicts, crack houses sprung up around my home. One of the friends I knew who I thought would graduate highschool and college, who was smart and into electronics, ended up as the neighborhood drug kingpin. Older neighbors and others who could, fled the city for the suburbs. Homes were boarded out, and soon, it looked like Mad Max. Our house sprouted bars on the windows.

If it hadn't been for my 300 baud vic-modem and Vic-20/C64, I wouldn't have gotten off the streets. I mostly survived by vanishing into the online world, and staying in libraries, and avoiding the streets.

To me, the war against crack cocaine is what leveled Baltimore. Not the drug itself, if the government had treated it as a public health problem, things might have turned out better. But the drug war only served to make drugs the most lucrative, most important part of the local economy, and for the losers in that economy, the dopamine it provided became an escape from despair.

It's curious the difference in response to the current "opioid epidemic". Where is the police crackdown in this case?

There's a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people's drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man's aspirin). A few rocks of crack got you an arrest with jail time, repeat 3 times, and a fatherless home is created with a new felon in the system. But white professionals who did coke? Slap on the wrist unless they were possessing huge amounts.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor, and exceptionally biased against poor minorities. Since Baltimore demographics are heavily represented by minorities, it's no surprise things happening differently there vs Appalachia.

The 'drug war' has always been intended to treat black and white users differently (and consequently the drugs they tend to reach for differently, not the other way around as many people assume); in many ways that was the whole point. See this article from Harpers [1]:

> I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.

> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Or maybe there might be an other confounder than skin color ? Maybe SES status of drug addict influences the way they finance their habit You might want to compare the impact of crack in black neighborhoods on violent crime and the impact of opioids in white neighborhoods on violent crime. Assuming the justice/police system is actually concerned about violent crimes, Occam's razor shaves off the racist assumptions pretty nicely. Also cf. Locking up our own https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-o...

+1 for Locking up Our Own - really interesting study of how the crack war led to massive incarceration of black youth, using DC as the primary case study

Aren't minorities the majority in Baltimore? I don't know what the difference is between Baltimore City and whatever is Baltimore in practice, but the statistics I've seen today [0] suggest that "minorities" are white people.

Honest question - how can the criminal justice system in Baltimore be biased against 'black people's drugs' as a minority when they are numerically in the majority? It is an interesting logistical challenge to discriminate against a 60% voting block in a democracy. Is criminal justice enforced by non-city actors? (I'm not an American)

[0] planning.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/2a_City%20Profile%20-%203.30.16_0.pdf

> how can the criminal justice system in Baltimore be biased against 'black people's drugs' as a minority when they are numerically in the majority?

Oh, they SO can be. They might be numerically in the majority, but the people in power (including some Black people) don't give a SHIT about poor Black people. And act like it.

Not all the people in power are elected (lots of unelected people and institutions have SO much power, like Johns Hopkins, and major developers). But for those who are elected, how they keep getting elected when not only Black people but probably poor Black people are a majority, it's a bit of a mystery to me too.

</lives in Baltimore>

This is playing semantics, when using the term 'minority', we're talking about within the entire United States. Baltimore doesn't make federal drug laws, Washington D.C. does.

Police are tasked with enforcing these laws which are HEAVILY biased towards the kinds of drugs African Americans deal with.

Possession of 28 grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense; it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence.

The way that white supremacy works is that black people are penalized even in the small enclaves where they constitute a local majority. Note that the laws that punish crack (used by lower income black people) 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine [0] are federal in nature.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-fed...

the federal penalties for crack were indeed more severe than ordinary cocaine, and black legislators championed the laws that made it so:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/why-many-black-p...

crack cocaine did incredible damage to urban black communities, and the laws were a reflection of that. obviously the laws went on to do incredible damage in their own right as well.

Crack didn't do the damage, the illegal black market for crack did most of the damage. Black people, heavily suffering from violence associated with illegal black markets, mistakenly backed mandatory harsh sentencing which devastated their communities even more.

Dealing with crack usage as a public health problem would have been far superior.

The harshest of the drug war existed prior to the 1994 crime bill as well.

haven’t encountered many crackheads, eh? crack did plenty of damage itself

I lived sandwiched in between two crackhouses for years, and my own sister and brother smoked crack (later my sister died ultimately from heroin). And? My father was an alcoholic and alcoholics have been destroying families for years.

Locking up 1 out of 4 African American males for drug possession or addict isn't going to fix the problem, it only makes it worse.

my friend, i don't disagree with you

To answer your question, yes Baltimore is majority black at roughly 64%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore

As an FYI, Baltimore City and Baltimore County are separate entities (the city is not part of the county).

I cannot speak on the 70s and 80s, but from present observation OP’s assessment of crack vs. cocaine penalties would perhaps be more relevant to a city like NYC than Baltimore. Cocaine (the good stuff rich white people would buy) is not as common because there isn’t enough of a market that could afford it. Overall, heroin is now the most ubiquitous drug with other prescription meds/opioids used as substitutes sometimes. Heroin has really hit the city hard.

In terms of policing/justice, corruption is a pretty big issue. On an everyday level, the police basically won’t do shit unless there is a crime worth their while (so in a hit-and-run or theft for example don’t expect much help).

The neighborhoods in the East and West sides are high in violent crime from gangs and drugs. There are blocks with more rundown vacant houses than occupied ones. Compared to the gentrified pockets, these areas are like favelas.

Baltimore has its redeeming highlights, but it’s nowhere near the industrious city it once was, and is still trying to find a new direction.

To understand the present, look to the past.

Ask yourself who the original majority population in the area were, and where they went. Then ask yourself who the current majority population is, where they came from, and how and why they arrived there. Then ask yourself what population has had the most power there over, say, the last 400 years. You may find that a majority population does not always have a majority of the power.

You can also compare the current state of affairs to the history of other countries. If the majority population is limited by (1) lack of right to vote, (2) lack of access to vote, (3) lack of information to vote, and (4) lack of belief in the vote, that population's effect on local politics can be shrunk down to have very little impact.

And also consider the practical aspects. Even if 99% of your citizenry vote for something, like increased funding for schools - where is the money going to come from if 75% of your population is impoverished? Definitely not from the federal government. You can't just vote yourself out of a terrible local economy.

Baltimore schools spend about $17 000 per student. This is more than a national average and more than many private schools.

It's not about the money.

It's because most of the laws governing penalties for drug use are not created (and are often not enforced) by local jurisdictions. For example, Federal sentencing guidelines are made in Congress.

Local jurisdictions, when they do participate in enforcement, are incentivized on convictions and other metrics and alignment to the Federal system is better. So, even if the local police, DA, judge and others in the system are national minorities, but local majorities, they are still working for the national majority policies.

I recall I watched too much CNN in the mid-80s and my recollection is that news network was right out front in promoting crack as a special case drug problem that required special law enforcement.

I think the difference is more than race. Wealthy professional coke users don't cause a lot of violent crime or robberies.

Don't they? If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, it stands to reason that coke users are, in actuality, causing more crime. If you were to say, "Which drug users commit the most crimes," that's a bit murkier, leaning towards poorer drug users. But it's very hard to argue that the violence at every step of the cocaine trade, particularly in foreign countries, isn't caused by the market upscale coke users create. They're only a step or two removed from that violence, and certainly the impetus for it.

If police and policy-makers were serious about curbing drug use and truly thought their methods worked, they'd go after coke and crack users with the same methods and intensity.

> If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved,

It doesn't; the intensity of the drug war produces the amount of money involved and the street price, as it creates a barrier to entry (reducing competition) and produces supplier costs; it thus increases the minimum sustainable cost and the ability of suppliers to charge above that cost.

Okay... It seems more chicken or egg, as the market would not have been lucrative and therefore attractive to participants without high potential earnings <i>independent</i> of the costs.

But even if we assume causation runs the way you state, the point is that a drug war's intensity and the amount of money wrapped up in it are inextricably linked. If you're buying expensive drugs, then it's highly likely that high-cost operations are involved. In a lawless industry, that means more lawlessness.

OK I get your point. I was saying a neighborhood full of poor crack addicts will be a dangerous place, so requires "aggressive policing", more than a neighborhood full of coke snorting yuppies.

However both are supplied by the same violent supply chain that the "war" is supposed to stop.

Just to expand and conclude: if aggressive policing works to stem the drug flow by choking the demand, then such tactics should be used for "coke snorting yuppies" as well as "poor crack addicts." That it isn't suggests that there's another impetus (or, an impetus for not using them on the former). The tactics used in enforcing drug laws are often harsh, if not cruel. In the past, the line between American institutions meting out harsh or soft punishments for transgressions has been the same as the one between white and black. So I'm perfectly comfortable saying that race makes all the difference in this context.

I think the bias against crack has more to do with the public perception of a crisis versus powdered cocaine.

Crack was regarded as a national emergency in the 80’s. That never happened with powdered cocaine beyond the local drug wars in Miami.

Right. And the (white) public perception of such things has SO MUCH to do with the public perception of race and what they assume it means, and, to use a phrase that's become popular, "anti-Black tropes". The white public perception. Which is enough.

Are you saying there were no concerns in the black community about crack? And no requests to “put those dealers in jail?”

I doubt that’s true.

No, I'm saying the public perception of "crack vs cocaine" (and crack as a "national emergency" and not cocaine) was significantly influenced by public anti-Black (and anti-poor) biases and perceptions.

Exhibit A: George Bush Sr scaremongering over a bag of crack cocaine on nation wide TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjCPX5eQwik). This is quite similar to the scaremongering of terrorism that got us the Patriot Act, and the Iraq invasion, and the Trump/Fox News's current scaremongering of caravans as if they're an invading army.

The powers that be of reactionary politics love to use fear to divert attention and scapegoat racial minorities or foreigners in order to avoid having to address real problems and potentially stop protecting their paymasters.

It’s called moral panic and happens quite often. See violence in video games and the every common trope about razor blades in Halloween candy.

>very common trope about razor blades in Halloween candy.

You just brought back childhood memories of having to eat smooshed candy bars after my mom got done checking them for razor blades and needles. Every. Single. Halloween.

What about black professionals who did coke? I mean it might be more about class (in the good sense of the word, as in: "classy") rather than race.

Good example: go out in the street in Russia at night drunk, unshaven and with dirty clothes, and you'd be beaten and robbed by cops. Do same in a good suit and shaven and you'll be alright.

First, "drug laws" have almost always been code for racism. Opium laws originally were meant to target Chinese immigrants. Marijuana laws were meant to target Hispanics. Crack laws were meant to target African-Americans.

Second, the density gradient of people is quite different and thus far less profitable. Going after the opioid epidemic means going mostly after single individuals in places far less populated with people. The Internet has also dispersed most drug delivery--this is quite a bit different from when the crackdown on crack was running.

Third, the age of the affected is vastly different and creates a far different optics. If you are rounding up "troubled city teens", you're not going to get much pushback from anyone. If you are rounding up "grandma", the press is going to have a field day. This is not new--there is a reason why you know who Rosa Parks is but not Claudette Colvin.

Aren't most opioids obtained via legitimate prescriptions?

Well, who sells opioids, and who sells crack?

I don't know why this comment was dead, but I'm vouching for it because it's one of the most perceptive ones - just follow the money.

I'm sure all the other reasons listed also play a role, but I'm a bit surprised it escaped everyone (myself included) that opioids line corporate pockets, and crack does not. Given the extent of corporate influence in the US, I'd wager this is the dominant reason.

Pretty sure the white man gets paid off all of that

I grew up in the late 70s, early 80s not too terribly far from Baltimore and have made a number of visits to it over the years. It never had a great reputation outside of the Inner Harbor, but the reputation as a real lost city really crystalized in the late 80s and it never really recovered -- at least not in the way other major cities have had recent Renaissances. I don't really think the reputation is undeserved.

In fact, it used to be a normal part of discussion that Baltimore, Philadelphia and NYC were basically where you went as a tourist to get something stolen from you, and I personally experienced that on a small scale in two of those cities.

However, I never went really into Baltimore until the mid-2000s when on a number of short term contracts I had to go to near Johns Hopkins and then a couple at Morgan State. To be honest, driving through parts of Baltimore was almost indistinguishable from news clips of war torn cities in the Middle East...just absolute urban devastation...but on slow burn. Hopefully its changed, but it comes to mind as the pinnacle example of urban blight when I think of the term.

My wife, who grew up in South Korea in the late 70s under a military dictator, couldn't even fathom the general level of danger and decay she saw on her few visits into the city. She says she felt better in Pittsburgh.

In the early 2010s, an idealistic friend of mine moved to Baltimore, thinking that an influx of well meaning people with good jobs and money could help turn parts of the city around. They lasted 2 years before the financial burden of repairing material stolen off of their house while they were inside it started to become serious and they moved out to the "safer" city of D.C: gutters, siding, wheels on their cars, a gate, a BBQ, all sorts of things.

One adventurous thief stole all the gutters off their house, two screen doors and helped themselves to a number of car parts off of one of their parked cars between the time they came home from work and went out to dinner.

I know it can be turned around. NYC is generally pretty great these days. Philly ain't half bad. Even D.C. outside of the National Mall is worth visiting and most of the city has turned a corner. Baltimore actually has a lot of great islands of culture to offer, but it's a generation of hard work to get the city turned around.

Another way to think about it is if D.C. and Baltimore metro areas are combined, it could be a unified urban conglomeration that hits around 10 million people, one of the largest in the country, has pretty much the entire Federal Government and many major financial hubs as well as huge biotech, startup and other tech scenes...it has a population larger than the San Francisco Bay Area and could be a much large major economic force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...

https://ggwash.org/files/baltwash2.pdf

Wait what, you just compare inner city Baltimore to Pittsburgh?

Why wouldn't you? Similar population, similar Rust Belt industries that declined or folded at a similar time. The two cities have a lot in common.

I just read a comment someone posted here about how DC and NYC grew up too much to support large scale drug operations and so Baltimore consequently has this fate. Then I logged in to reply to it and it vanished. I thought it was an interesting theory.

I don’t understand. You mention a number of your friends became drug addicts and then blame the gov’t for trying to fight it. Or do you think the gov’t created those addicts? I’m a bit confused.

I blame the government for fighting it in the wrong way, by locking people up (which costs several times more, and turns non-violent offenders into violent ex-cons who can't get a job because they're ex-felons), instead of fighting it with drug treatment programs.

Drugs are a public health problem.

The drug was was a colssal failure. Having the police roll around the neighborhood and harass junkies helps no one. In fact over policing decimated these communities and vanished a huge part of the population into prisons.

It filled prisons with non-violent offenders which were now sucked into the whirlpool of incarceration. It created a massive prison industrial complex with perverse incentives where the business of locking people up became massivly profitable.

From the start, it was an authoritarian policy designed to make it easier to harass dissidents. [O]

0: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

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