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Cracked up
How did a drug whose addictive properties were once compared to potato chips become the scourge of America?
By Maia Szalavitz
[05/11/99]

Fixin' under Nixon
A new book examines Richard Nixon's progressive drug policies and the deevolution of the war on drugs.
By Lori Leibovich
[05/11/99]

Beijing journal
An American student watches the not-so-spontaneous uprising against NATO and the U.S.
By S.H.
[05/10/99]

Milosz: Peaceful coexistence is still possible in the Balkans
The Nobel Prize-winning poet, whose own country was devoured by its powerful neighbors, supports the NATO attacks -- and holds out hope for the future.
By Tamara Straus
[05/10/99]

Stop this war
Clinton and his leftist buddies in NATO are squandering our money and our military credibility in the Balkans.
By David Horowitz
[05/10/99]

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"Crack is going away and probably isn't coming back," proclaimed Richard Rosenfield, a professor of criminology at the University of St. Louis, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last November. Recent features in the New York Times and elsewhere have also heralded society's victory over the scourge of the 1980s.

Cracked up How did a drug whose addictive properties were once compared to potato chips become the scourge of America? By Maia Szalavitz Fixin' under Nixon A new book examines Richard Nixon's progressive drug policies and the deevolution of the war on drugs. By Lori Leibovich

The good news, unfortunately, has not reached several big cities where the problem has not gone away. One of them is Miami, the nation's fourth-poorest city, where crack is spreading into new suburban communities, among immigrants, and is taking hold with a new, younger generation of drug users.

In fact, crack is again on the rise among some teenage drug users nationwide, according to recent federal reports. The positive testing rate for cocaine among juvenile arrestees has increased by about 40 percent or more in such cities as Phoenix, San Antonio and Miami, and, according to the latest National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, there's been an upswing in first-time users of cocaine, largely teens. In San Antonio, for instance, the percentage of teen arrestees who test positive for cocaine use jumped 70 percent between 1995 and 1998 -- to 28.9 percent. In Miami, 26 percent of arrested youths ages 15 to 20 (and charged as adults) test positive for cocaine, a jump of nearly 40 percent since 1995. And, for about two-thirds of the criminal suspects, the cocaine in their systems is crack.

It seems as though the biggest shift has not been in the statistics, but in the media spin about those numbers. In analyzing crack's legacy, for instance, the New York Times reported in February "the number of crack users began falling not long after surveys began counting them." Later in the same article, it pointed to the 1997 National Household Survey, which found that "600,000 had smoked cracked within a month, unchanged since 1988." So which is it -- down sharply or unchanged? The confusion most likely is the fault of the study, which depends on voluntary admissions of illegal drug use to total strangers, not to mention finding a valid sample of crack addicts to interview. Good luck: It's a sampling technique that might have some reliability in American suburbs, but hardly in the inner cities.

The real picture, experts contend, is more nuanced than the media's trend stories indicate. The casual use of cocaine has declined and there's a downturn in total crack and cocaine use in many cities, but a hardcore group of crack addicts remain. And in several cities, use among young offenders -- and others -- is rising. One of the main reasons for the death-of-crack stories is doubtless plummeting crime rates in America's largest cities. In New York, the plunging crime rate is a much-touted success story. Even in Miami, the number of murders last year fell below 100 for the first time in 20 years, and the violent crime rates have generally been falling since 1991, about the time total crack use began a gradual decline from its late 1980s peak. Indeed, a 1997 National Institute of Justice report found a strong link between homicide and crack cocaine usage rates.

But just because crime rates are down doesn't mean crack has gone away. Forty-five percent of all males arrested in Miami have cocaine in their systems, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program (ADAM), with, again, roughly two-thirds of them crack users. The Greater Miami area's cocaine-based emergency room admissions are three times the national average, and more than half of all of Miami-Dade County's rehab patients are seeking treatment for cocaine addiction.

Clearly, in Miami, the rumors of crack's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Next page | Teens, Latinos and suburbanites are trying it