 On June 18th, 1986, a young basketball player named Lynn Bias was celebrating. The Boston Celtics had recently selected him as their first round draft pick and Reebok offered him a multi-million dollar deal. Even before he played in the NBA, he was a national star. At night, he went to lie down saying he didn't feel well and he never woke up. At 8.55 in the morning, on June 19th, he was pronounced dead from heart failure. The autopsy revealed that there was cocaine in his system and the ramifications from this would be enormous. Now, it's worth clarifying here that the medical examiners did attribute the cocaine to his death. I've heard some people argue that they never concluded that cocaine was the cause of his death, only that it was in a system, but the medical examiners did conclude that cocaine overdose was the cause of death. However, the media and the government jumped on a few things about the story that are under dispute. One is that Lynn Bias was smoking crack. In reality, they don't know how he consumed the cocaine, but it probably wasn't crack. One report speculated he could have smoked free-base cocaine, though that wasn't really popular in 1986, but others said he either snorted it or swallowed it in a drink. Nobody knows exactly how he consumed the cocaine, but I personally remember being taught in school that he smoked crack and his death occurred right after crack was starting to make national news, so it was a convenient narrative to jump on. I also remember being taught that it was the first time that Bias had ever used cocaine. Some of his teammates claimed this to be fair, but these accounts are obviously suspect. The primary reason that it was reported that he used cocaine for the first time was that the media and the government had already been cultivating an image of cocaine use that it was instantly addictive. So using cocaine and crack one time could make you completely addicted. I also remember being taught this when I was younger, but it's completely untrue. That narrative about cocaine addiction is an absolute fabrication. Part of the reason it was easy to spread this narrative in the case of Lynn Bias is because prior to his overdose, the media was presenting him as this squeaky, clean kid from a good family. So they just concluded that this must have been his first time using cocaine. It probably wasn't, and some reports have contested this, but nobody really knows for sure. Regardless of the actual specific circumstances of Lynn Bias's death, this was the exact kind of catastrophe the government couldn't let go to waste. On the morning that his death was reported in the press, Lynn Bias was all anybody could talk about in Congress. Tip O'Neill, the Democratic representative of Boston, who was the speaker of the House at the time, was screaming for blood. There had better be some anti-cocaine legislation, and it had better not be something that the Republicans could take sole credit for. With the death of Lynn Bias, the cocaine scare of the 1990s had reached its apogee. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. In this episode, we're going to look at the so-called crack epidemic that dominated both news and politics in the second half of Reagan's presidency. The death of Lynn Bias wasn't the beginning of the cocaine scare. It was merely the tragedy that the government and the media needed to finally get nationwide attention of the stories they had been trying to generate for the past few years. In the summer of 1981, Times Magazine ran a cover story titled, High on Cocaine, a drug with status and menace. But despite the demagogic title, the article presented cocaine as a relatively safe drug, at least compared to heroin, and cocaine users were painted as the wealthy elite, such as Richard Pryor, who made the news a year before for setting himself on fire while preparing freebase cocaine. By the mid-80s, things were changing. The Colombian drug trade was exploding with the infamous Medellin cartel, which is the one that Pablo Escobar was a part of, and their rival, the Cali cartel, supplying huge amounts of cocaine to the U.S. and driving down the price. So it was becoming more widely available. By this time, cocaine in its powder form was being used by more middle and upper-class people who would work during the week and party on the weekends, referred to colloquially as weekend warriors. But it was really the illegal cocaine trade that first started getting attention rather than the negative effects of the cocaine itself. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times ran the first story about a new form of cocaine called rock, or basuco. Now, crack, rocks, and basuco are different things, but this wasn't known at the time. The three smokable forms of cocaine that have been popular in different regions and times are freebase cocaine, basuco, and crack. Basuco is a cocaine paste that is produced in the process of producing cocaine powder, but it never became popular in the United States. It was only ever very big in South America. Basuco's cocaine is the cooking of cocaine with ether that pretty much turns it back into basuco, but it was never widely used either. But in the 1980s, somebody figured out that if you cook cocaine with baking soda and water, you get smokable form that you can sell very cheaply, and they started calling this rock after its shape, or a crack, after the noise made when smoking it. And in 1985, the press and the police thought basuco and crack were the same thing until the police in the South Bronx started interrogating heroin addicts about it and found out that dealers had tried to sell basuco, but nobody used it. But crack was everywhere in LA and New York. What made crack popular was the fact that you could purchase a hit for maybe $10. So where powder cocaine had largely been a rich man's drug, crack became the poor man's drug. And also, the hit from crack was far more intense, though the high only lasted for about 10 minutes. But in terms of how dangerous it was, crack is chemically virtually the same thing as powder cocaine, but by making it smokable, you're no longer limited by the nasal membranes, so you're able to take in far larger and more potent dose at one time. So the media started jumping on this. Later in 1985, the CBS Evening News ran a story showing images of a baby shivering from withdrawals. The reporter, Susan Spencer, she reported that the baby was exposed to cocaine as a fetus and was now suffering from withdrawals, and she called this a cocaine baby. Now, the interesting thing is that this was completely untrue. Most likely the baby they were showing did inherit heroin addiction from the mother, which is a thing. But the reporter was simply saying it was a co-addicted baby. But cocaine addiction doesn't cause withdrawals. The addictive aspects of cocaine is very different from heroin. Cocaine addiction is more aptly referred to as reinforcement, which means that using it makes people want to use more, but you don't suffer chemical withdrawals when you stop. But the report of cocaine-addicted babies was based off of a single study done by Dr. Ira Chasnoff that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. And the study looked at 23 women and suggested a possible link between health problems and cocaine. The problem in the study is that the women were also drinking alcohol. They were smoking tobacco. They were smoking marijuana, all while pregnant, and they had poor preminal care and other variables that were not controlled for. But the media ran with the story and started reporting on cocaine-addicted infants. Another scientist, Dr. Claire Coles, who specializes in babies who had fetal exposure to these substances, tobacco and alcohol and marijuana, she read the study and incorporated cocaine into her own research and started trying to set reporters straight on the matter when they called to ask her for her expert opinion. And instead of reporting the truth, which is that there was no discernible link between fetal cocaine exposure and health issues, the reporter stopped calling Dr. Coles and started instead simply interviewing hospital works, even clerical workers, about the cocaine baby problem. So basically, the media crafted a narrative saying that babies who were exposed to cocaine suffered from cocaine withdrawals and other health problems, and then they interviewed hospital employees with no actual expertise on the matter and aired to the hospital workers repeating the media narrative back to them. By the end of the year, the cocaine baby had evolved into the crack baby and any child suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome or heroin addiction or other health problems was being counted as a crack baby. So suddenly, this condition with zero scientific basis was an epidemic and the legal consequences of crack babies had other negative consequences as well. In 1989, the Washington Post ran a story with the headline crack babies. The worst threat is mom herself. And another story titled, She Smoked Crack, Then Killed Her Children. So the government started treating it like child abuse. Now, there's certainly a case to be made that if you're smoking crack while you're pregnant, whether it's bad for the child or not, you aren't really fit to be a parent. So I don't want to make an argument like it's all right to smoke crack or anything else, because that's obviously not the case. Crack is a very dangerous substance that hardly bears repeating. But we still have to look at the negative consequences of the government policies imposed to combat these issues. One is that women who wanted to get treatment for their drug addiction would actually avoid getting treatment if they were pregnant. Now, if policy were designed based on the actual facts, which is that crack use is bad for the mother, but harmless to the fetus, then you would think the policy would encourage women to seek treatment. But if the women got treated, their child would be taken from them so they would simply avoid seeking help. Another was the issue of toilet bowl babies. Now, these were children who were born essentially in secret where they or the mother could not get medical attention if needed. One San Francisco deputy city attorney reported on seeing a drastic increase in these kinds of cases following the crackdown on crack babies. But the worst cases were the women who simply tried to induce miscarriage before birth because they were going to go to trial and they didn't want to face the harsher criminal charges for using drugs while pregnant. Now, again, despite whatever case may be made about how bad it is to use drugs while pregnant or while raising children, we have to be able to acknowledge the contradictions in imposing policies which were largely driven by pro-life Republicans that do have the real effect of driving women to deliberately induce miscarriage. So regardless of what your position on any given issue is, we have to be aware of all the real world consequences of the policies being imposed on people. And no matter how you feel about the people who use crack while pregnant, the way the government came down on them is nothing short of evil. In 1989, a woman named Jennifer Johnson was a crack addict who was pregnant and she actually admitted to being a crack user because she wanted to get treatment. And on more than one occasion, she sought help and found nothing. And when she gave birth, the doctor recorded that her baby, quote, looked and acted as we would expect a baby to look and act. So the baby was perfectly healthy. But she admitted again to the doctor that she had used cocaine while she was pregnant. So the hospital reported her child as a crack baby. So Jeff Dean, the assistant state attorney for Florida at the time, decided he'd test out a new strategy for prosecuting her. He decided to charge her with delivering cocaine to a minor like somebody selling drugs at a school. But because abortion laws had made it so that a fetus was not considered a human in the eyes of the law, this argument was that the delivery of cocaine took place in the 60 seconds between the birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Now this is absolute nonsense. Even if fetuses did receive cocaine through the umbilical cord, which it appears from the studies that they do not, Jennifer Johnson was obviously not smoking crack while she was giving birth. But the judge bought the argument and Jennifer Johnson became the first woman ever to be convicted for this particular drug crime. And when the judge gave his decision, he said, quote, pregnant addicts have a responsibility to seek treatment, which completely ignores the fact that Jennifer Johnson had sought treatment and simply found nothing available. And I'm not saying that the government should subsidize treatment, so that would at least be better than spending tax dollars on police and prisons to arrest drug offenders, but the government's policies on drug use actually create barriers for even free market in charity treatment centers because the people who would use them are in many cases afraid to seek treatment because they have to admit to a criminal felony to do so. In 1986, only a few months before the death of Linbias, Newsweek ran a story entitled, Kids and Cocaine, An Epidemic Strikes Middle America. In it, the author Arnold Washington said, quote, there's no such thing as recreational use of crack. It is almost instantaneous addiction. Now, Washington had no basis for this claim, none. But once the claim was made, it was spread without a critical thought. Suddenly, crack cocaine could make you addicted with the first hit. It was being reported as the most addictive drug ever created. Once Linbias died a few months later, all of these fabrications made it very easy to suggest that his cocaine use was really crack use. And it was his first time using crack and that just goes to confirm everything we've already been saying, right? It's just government finding a way to cycle their own narrative to reaffirm it. So of course, these claims about instantaneous addiction were patently false. Only about 10% of the people who have ever used crack use it regularly. So while we may say that crack is addictive due to the reinforcement characteristic, it is less addictive than things like heroin or nicotine. The idea that cocaine was heavily used among teenagers was also unsupported. In fact, at this time, even marijuana use was declining among teens. But deaths from cocaine overdoses were grossly inflated because anybody who came to the emergency room for any reason and simply had cocaine in their system was counted as a cocaine overdose. This was true even for the people who had heroin in their system or alcohol in their system. But even with these methods of inflating the numbers, 1984 only saw 604 deaths related to cocaine abuse according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network statistics. Not long after this, Newsweek ran another story titled The Plague Among Us. And this article literally compared the cocaine epidemic to the bubonic plague. So 604 deaths is pretty much the same thing as the bubonic plague according to Newsweek in 1984. The government couldn't get enough of this. In 1986, Senator Alfons DeMotto and the U.S. Attorney Rudolph Geolani, they posed as a UPS driver and a member of the Hell's Angels respectively to go and purchase crack from a street dealer while an unmarked van videotaped them to show the world what a crack deal looked like. Around the same time, ABC News aired footage of a crack house raid, which was the first time the news had ever shown footage of a drug raid. And the head of the New York DEA called it combat footage and compared it to coverage of the Vietnam War. A couple of months later after that, CBS aired a news documentary entitled 48 Hours on Crack Street and NBC countered with their own special called Cocaine Country. So they were getting the best ratings they'd seen in years. People were eating this stuff up. Now there's one quick story that I have to bring up as well. The Reagan administration was obviously thinking of all the different ways it could take advantage of the crack cocaine hype. So in one meeting, customs commissioner, William Von Raib, brought up the idea of using the Air Force to shoot down planes suspected of smuggling drugs. This was actually a step too far for most people in the Reagan cabinet. But there was one guy who spoke up and defended Von Raib's idea, saying that the Supreme Court has ruled that police can legally shoot a felon who is about to commit a violent felony. So this precedent could be used to justify using the Air Force to shoot down potentially drug smuggling planes. And you're gonna love this. The person who defended this idea was none other than the assistant attorney general, Bill Weld, Gary Johnson's vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in the last election. I think I mentioned this in the Cocaine episode, a few episodes back when they shot down a plane and killed a pastor's wife and their seven month old daughter right over Peru. So these policies were essentially put into action eventually. When George H.W. Bush came into office, he wanted to keep the momentum against crack going. So for his first televised speech, he wanted to show how easy it was to purchase crack. And the way he and his team decided to do this was to show the American people that you could actually purchase crack cocaine right across the street of the White House. And this is exactly what George H.W. Bush did. In the speech, he held up a bag of crack and told the American people that an agent actually purchased this right by the White House. And he technically wasn't lying. What he didn't tell them was how difficult it was to get a crack dealer to come to the White House to sell the agent the crack. So the DEA got one of their undercover agents, a man named Sam Gaye, and asked him if he could make a crack by near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So Gaye had a drug dealer named Keith Jackson. He'd been buying small amounts of crack from for a little while and he calls him up and he says, hey, can you meet me in Lafayette Park? And Jackson asks where that is and Lafayette Park is just across from the White House. So that's what Gaye tells him. And then Jackson says, where's the White House? So Gaye has to give him instructions on where to bring the crack. So when Jackson and Gaye meet to make the crack deal, which was actually the day after, because the first time Jackson didn't even show up and Gaye had to do all this again. So when he finally did show up, the White House had a hidden video camera set up to film the incident. But they never got their footage because a homeless woman started attacking the cameraman saying, don't take my picture, don't take my picture. So the White House did get their crack even though they didn't get the footage of it. They bought it right in front of the White House just like they wanted and they didn't have the video footage to prove the crack by to the American public. But nevertheless, President Bush had his bag of crack to show the camera when he gave a speech and he could technically truthfully say that it was purchased right by the White House even if he conveniently left out the trouble that his undercover agent had to go through to get it in front of the White House. But two weeks later, the Washington Post ran a story revealing the details of the crack by. Now with egg on their face, the White House staff had to do something. So they reacted by going and arresting Keith Jackson, this 18 year old kid who was lured into this crack deal and they had him tried for selling crack cocaine, putting him up for a 10 year sentence. Now the best news is that this story might show the first signs of the public getting fed up with the government's tactics in waging the drug war because the jurors were deadlocked after some refused to rule him guilty because they felt he had been set up by the police. There's one other major story about cocaine that I would be remiss if I didn't talk about but it's a big one so I'm only gonna be able to give the highlights in this episode and that's the story of the CIA's complicity in smuggling cocaine out of Latin America. For most of the 20th century, Nicaragua was ruled by the Samosa family and they had the support of the US government because they were faithfully opposed to communists. But when Jimmy Carter came into office, he yanked all of the USA to the Samosas because of the brutal and oppressive tactics used by his National Guard, which was basically the domestic military he used to keep a tight rule on the country. With the funding cut, Samosa had a much more difficult time suppressing the communist revolutionaries and in September of 1980, some Argentine communists actually shot a rocket-pelled grenade and fired a handful of M16s right into the Mercedes-Benz of Anastasio Samosa while he was in Paraguay and this, of course, killed him. So throughout the 1980s, Nicaragua would be ruled by the communist Sandinistas and this was unacceptable to the Reagan administration. So the scandal most people know about from this was when Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was secretly and illegally selling weapons to Iran and then funneling the money into a Swiss bank account and then secretly and illegally using the money to fund the Contras, which was a group of former Samosa supporters who were fighting back against the Sandinistas. This is the infamous Iran-Contra affair. But this was not the only way that the CIA was helping the Contras get funding. The other major source of funding came from smuggling cocaine into the United States, particularly in Los Angeles. Now, this story has been exaggerated in conspiracy theories like that the CIA invented crack cocaine to destroy the black community and all this nonsense. The CIA did not invent crack cocaine and they were not using cocaine to target African-Americans. The goal of the CIA was to combat Latin American communists and because Congress had made it illegal to provide direct funding for the Contras, they had to fund them secretly. So the CIA simply didn't care that the funds were obtained by bringing cocaine into the United States. The drug war was the problem of other agencies. That was the DEA's problem, right? Not the CIA's. So the actual complicity of the CIA has been exaggerated as well. The CIA wasn't itself smuggling the drugs, it was just supervising the Contras. But the Contras who were smuggling the drugs were paid CIA agents who received legal protection in their illegal drug trade. Most of the reason people think that the CIA was itself directly smuggling drugs is because of the confusion over the title CIA agent. An actual United States CIA employee is called a CIA officer, not an agent. A CIA agent is a foreign person who is paid by the CIA to conduct certain tasks that are in line with the CIA goals. So when most people talk about the CIA agents, they actually mean CIA officers. So it is true that CIA agents were smuggling cocaine in the United States, but this only refers to the members of the Contras who were paid by the CIA to help organize against the Sandinistas. The CIA was essentially supervising the operation. So it's still quite a scandal, but not as much of a scandal as a lot of people believe. The story broke in the mid-1990s by a reporter named Gary Webb after the girlfriend of a drug dealer named Rafael Cornejo called him to talk about Cornejo's case, and she told him that he'd been sitting in jail for three years awaiting trial, but his case was not coming to trial because the man he worked for had ties to the CIA. Cornejo's employer was Norwin Menises. The chief witness in the Cornejo case was a drug smuggler named Oscar Danilo Blondone. Like Menises, he was a contra-cocaine smuggler with a connection to the CIA, and what interested Gary Webb the most about Blondone was that he was only at the trial as a witness. When Gary Webb visited freeway Rick Ross in prison, where he was incarcerated for being one of the major cocaine dealers in Los Angeles, Ross told Gary Webb that Blondone had sold many times more cocaine than he had. So Blondone testified at Ross's trial, and there, under oath, he admitted to smuggling cocaine for the CIA. So Gary Webb wrote up a story about this for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, it was a three-part story actually, and now Webb knew that the story he was writing sounded very far-fetched. So he made a website for the story where he uploaded the source documents he used to back up his claims. He knew that he had to document this very meticulously because of how far-fetched it sounded to most people. So after Webb's story hit the news, he was invited onto some radio shows and people started connecting the CIA smuggling to the crack epidemic in Los Angeles. So people in the LA area were flooding the press in the government with demands for investigation into the story. Webb's website, meanwhile, was getting more than a million hits a day. Now, it might be worth mentioning here before I talk about the smear campaign that would be waged against Webb that a number of internal investigations by the government have actually confirmed and vindicated Webb's claim. So there are some conspiracy theories that have evolved out of Webb's story like the claim that the CIA invented crack and other nonsense that I mentioned earlier, but none of these stories came from Gary Webb himself. So it was pretty much been vindicated. What he was reporting on was absolutely true. So shortly after the story blew up, Gary Webb was invited into Lou Water Show on CNN to talk about the story. And another guest brought into way was Ronald Kessler, who had written the book Inside the CIA. When Kessler was asked for input, he laid into Webb. He said that Webb had zero evidence to back up his story, which was patently false since Webb had been carefully documenting all of his evidence and making it publicly available online. These were declassified FBI documents, DEA documents, plenty of official government documents that verified everything Webb had been saying. So Webb defended himself in the interview quite well, but it would be a little avail as this was only the start of the media slander of him. After this interview, there was an onslaught of attacks on Webb's story coming from the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, just to name some of the major newspapers attacking him. So people all over the media were now calling Webb a conspiracy theorist and denouncing him, his story, and the mercury news that printed it. One of the most vicious attacks came when Webb gave an interview to Chris Matthews. Now Matthews had previously worked for Tip O'Neill, which if you remember from earlier in the episode, was the representative in Lynn Bias's district and was one of the major pushers for a new drug law following Bias's death. Matthews' interview pretty much hit all the talking points for the attacks against Gary Webb. He claimed that Webb gave no supporting evidence, still choosing to ignore the documents Webb had made available online, and he argued that the story couldn't be true because the Contras had plenty of CIA money, so they didn't need to smuggle cocaine, which is just kind of a laughable objection. Webb actually fought back so well against Matthews that after the interview, Matthews reportedly stormed off the set, accusing his staff of setting him up. But despite Webb's fact-centered defense, the media kept attacking him and mercury news for reporting the story. The Washington Post ran multiple stories, including one front page story titled, CIA and Crack, Evidence is Lacking of Contratide Plot. Other reporters started praising the post for supposedly discrediting mercury news. At first, the editor of mercury news fought back to Fending Webb, but the post wouldn't even publish the letter from mercury's editor. So he actually, Gary Webb's editor wrote a letter to the Washington Post saying, look, here's all this evidence, here's everything that's been done, here's the story. They wouldn't even publish it, right? Which is kind of unconventional in a situation like that. So mercury news put another investigative reporter, Peter Carey, on the job of verifying Gary Webb's story. Carey looked into the documentary evidence and backed Webb up. It all checked out. But the pressure remained on mercury news, and they started putting more pressure on Webb. He was told, for one thing, not to take any book or movie deals, which is pretty much the dream of an investigative reporter. So that's a very hard demand to take. And because it would make him look like Webb had a vested interest in making stuff up, apparently that was the claim that he was given. Then on a single day, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran a story attacking mercury news for printing Webb's articles. The LA Times story was a three-parter put out by 14 reporters and three editors. The stories were basically reporting on the hype that Webb's article had received and were painting it ironically as an example of media lies getting out of hand, which was more true of the smear campaign waged by the major outlets. Finally, mercury news had enough of being tapped for defending Webb and they turned on him as well. The editor, Jerry Seppos, who had previously been defending Webb, decided to publish a letter in the paper admitting, quote, mistakes in Gary Webb's series. And he informed Webb that the letter was going to be published, but he was all but admitting that he was doing so just to get the attacks against mercury news to stop. Now the attacks on Webb continued, but he no longer had the support of the paper he published his stories in. In 1997, mercury news even ran a story titled, CIA clears itself in crack investigation. Oh geez, that's a shocker. So Webb resigned from the paper and his resignation was presented by the media as essentially proof of his guilt and having fabricated the story. I mean, it's just absurd that people were buying this. So the next year, two different internal investigations, one by the CIA and one by the Department of Justice would actually vindicate Webb's story, but it would hardly matter by then. In fact, when these investigations were completed, new documents were declassified that showed that Gary Webb was actually understating the level of involvement the CIA had in cocaine smuggling because they showed that both the CIA and DEA were protecting smugglers from arrest, which was something that he did not include in his original story. That is where I'm gonna close this episode today on the crack epidemic. We're only gonna do one more episode on the war on drugs, which is going to wrap up the Reagan years and kind of take us into the 1990s. So you're definitely gonna wanna listen to this if you wanna hear the complete story, which really isn't the complete story, but where I'm gonna stop it on the war on drugs in the United States. So if you have not already subscribed to the podcast, you wanna do so and until then, thanks for listening. For more content like this, visit mesis.org.