 This is the real story of how Crack changed everything. My name is Aaron Williams. I'm a journalist from Compton, California. I've been researching the effects of the Crack epidemic for over a decade. Crack is the processed version of the party drug cocaine in rock form. I did try it and from that moment on I was chasing the initial high. It goes directly to the pleasure center of your brain. There's just no escape from it once you're addicted. It was so profitable to sell Crack, everybody lost their minds. Increased violence, gangs, riots. The crypts and the bloods have swarmed eastward. The use of Crack increasing quickly. Fearlessly setting up an open-air drug market. The reaction of mainstream America was, oh my god, we have to fix this immediately. They work every day to plot a new and better way to steal our children's lives. That was right around the time the dare came out, the egg and the skillet. This is your brain on drugs. Danger of Crack. Thousands of dollars in cash and firearms. Enough is enough. Trying to fix things without knowing how they got broken in the first place is a great way to break them worse. You had Ronald Reagan getting involved. Retribution must be swift and sure for those who decide to make a career of preying on the innocent. You have the militarized police. I've seen plenty of raids in my lifetime. If you've ever seen the movie straight out of Compton where the tank rams in the door, that was right around the corner from my house. I remember thinking, that's a house. People live there. If you were caught with rock cocaine, they were getting these sentences for 25 years. You've got to have mandatory laws. You've got to show people if you arrest them, we're going to keep them. People are going in at 20 and coming out at 45. How are we supposed to build a community that way? You had this proxy war going on. A Senate investigative panel found that there were people associated with the CIA who were involved with drug trafficking. One of the motives was to raise money for the Contras in Nicaragua. Tonight I can report to you that we've made much progress. It's almost hard to comprehend what might have been if not for this crack scourge that raced through Los Angeles and other major cities. The perception is of crack users as losers. We still need treatment programs and I think that we still need to decriminalize. Our mayor, Asia Brown, has done such a tremendous job of bringing jobs and employment back to Compton. Crime rate has gone down. Things can and should and will get better. But we have to work for it.