Okay, so I'm attaching a link to the paper I wrote on the subject. I did away with the bibliography to make it small enough to link to the forums specs, but the footnotes cover it all. Take it or leave it.
so...
I graduated high school in 1977. I was your typical hard partying rock and roller, deep purple, led zep., Black Sabbath….and drugs were part of it. There was place called alley pond park, ( in the borough of Queens NY) ..on a Friday or Saturday night, wanted to score? That was the place.
It was a veritable marketplace/bizarre for drugs. As soon as you hit the seating/parking area you had guys selling weed, next bench Tuie’s (Tuinol), next bench black beauty’s, next bench Quaaludes, then acid etc etc etc….not a cop in site. They knew, so why they didn’t roust the joint more than once or twice a month? Because there was no violence ( more on that later), and it did not create the pernicious horrid effects crack later would.
The park was an isolated area that no one used at night and it was in Police terms ‘controlled’. I grew up in a housing project, we wettn to alley pond because the courtyard had zero drug dealers, none, nada, zip.
Now in the late 70’s you had as an example of the cocaine outlook, say, Studio 54, the VIP lounge was rampant with cocaine use, they had ashtrays used as coke bins. That was their drug of choice. Coke wasn’t sold at the park ( or that is I never heard of it) because it was too expensive for to relatively little.
In the late 70’s drug dealers actually experienced a glut, coke prices were steady but they had so much product on hand the price began to drop (reports on the appearance of crack go back as far as 1979-80). So some evil bastard thought up crack. The purity was higher than powder, the high was cheap and quick and the price point, the PRICE and packaging put it in range of anyone with 3 bucks and the ‘apparent’ addiction rate was high.
Hospitals started seeing more cocaine related cases related TO crack.. Because the price now put it in range of everyone, it was a drug people with little money could afford on a steady basis….get the picture? They didn’t need “contra drugs” to infuse ‘poor’ neighborhoods, that was already being done, Colombia and Central America at the time were already using weigh stations in the Dominican rep., Jamaica et al and they got plenty into the states.
So, sales shot through the roof, amongst areas that had never seen something so powerful yet so cheap, violence flowed, the homicide rate among black; males minors and juveniles more than doubled, concomitant with the crack craze. The money to be made insured this would happen…it started to take over neighborhoods, street corners became drug zones, by 88 it had become so bad and drug gangs felt so rich and empowered they assassinated a NYC police officer sittingin his car in front of a house of a witness against them.
So, yes the media and gov. did not care to much about powder because it was primarily a bunch of snorting dopes getting dopey, violence and invasive health issues not was not a topic as it was hidden so to speak, as they never reached the critical comparative harm that crack induced.
So, they didn't care about white middle class and up, yet when it exploded in urban African American neighborhoods they introduced measures to try and get it off the streets by adding leverage to the law, well what you have had them do? Nothing?
As far as the people,locked up etc. well, unfortunately that happens with every vice the gov. goes after, the smaller fish get caught in the net, they try and flip them to get the big fish, thats why you rarely see kingpins be it the mafia or drug gangs going to jail, they know how to buffer or disconnect themselves from the order of a crime to the actual hands on execution of the crime, the more buffers the more difficult it is to gain a conviction.
Was it in the end unfair? Perhaps, but just because they were of one skin color doesn't mean there wasn't a problem, attaching some deeper meaning to it, is well just imho, an excuse to move the conversation away from the real issues they choose to disregard by making an excuse for the symptom instead of addressing the disease.
So, now time to step back a bit, it appears your contention is the US was directly complicit in trafficking cocaine or at the very least transporting it? So can you pleaseu elaborate on Michael Agar “
protecting the entry of US relief planes loaded with powder cocaine into the United States”.
Its behind a login I cannot access.
