No Place to Sit

I did crack tonight. Well, I think it was crack, it also could have been meth. I’m really not sure; all I know is that while doing outreach I walked by a gentleman smoking on the stairs and there was a bitter alkaloid burning along with the pot in his joint.

The girls I was working with did not take terribly kindly to this, especially since the gentleman blew a big cloud in one lady’s face as she walked by. I just wandered near an open window to set up shop as my compatriots went up and down the halls announcing our presence.

I found the whole thing more or less hilarious, “Come join Outreach- we wont pay you, but you may get free crack!” We joked about our debut into crack use on the way back to the car, but it reminded me how, of all drugs, I have always found crack to be the funniest.

This probably stems from the fact I was born in the early 80′s and crack, or at least stories about crack, were ubiquitous. Spoofs about crack users could be found on various comedy shows, and the phrase “Crack kills,” had been reappropriated to refer to plumbers. Crack. Even the word itself is funny, it’s short and snappy, and in my day was the most common way to describe someone acting crazy. “What, are you on crack or something?” There was no other drug that made so many appearances in my childhood slang. Even marijuana could hardly hold a candle to crack cocaine’s usefulness in my lexicon.

I was an experimental teen, but I never considered doing crack. Like Whitney Houston, I knew that Crack was Whack, everyone from my generation knew that there were drugs, and then there was crack. Crack was the worst drug you could do, one hit could make you instantly addicted and then you’d be on the street selling yourself for drugs and giving birth to crack babies.

It wasn’t until last year that I dug all my assumptions about crack and crack heads out of my head to dust off and reexamine. It was a good time to do so because I was taking a class about how to better serve crack users through harm reduction. I knew that some of my clients used crack, and had just assumed it was those who looked the most strung out. Over a day’s worth of awesome instruction through The Harm Reduction Coalition via Mark Kinzly, I realized that one of the underlying assumptions in my crack schema was that it was a “ghetto drug”. Let’s go back to Whitney for a second, in her famous interview with Dianne Sawyer she says, “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight. Okay? We don’t do crack. We don’t do that. Crack is whack (12/4/02).” This quote is amazing in how much it says about crack and its association with poverty, ghettos, and the underclass of society. Basically, I was just too white and too middle class to smoke crack. The stigma surrounding crack has been condensed into the term crackhead. This magical term replaced junky as the worst of the worst. I would argue that these terms and the degree of stigma associated with them allow us to disassociate ourselves to the point that we no longer have to have any feelings of empathy towards anyone associated with them. In short, a crackhead is less than human.

The question is why. Why crack? Alcohol still does way more damage to our society. Crack isn’t more addictive than cocaine or heroin. The only reason that I have worse associations with crack cocaine than any other drug is that the media ran with it. There is a truck full of evidence to indicate that crack became as stigmatized as it is because it is considered a black person’s drug. And the hefty sentencing that got crack users the same penalty for one gram of crack cocaine, as cocaine users got for 100 grams of cocaine, was a convenient way to let the more well heeled cocaine users off with a slap on the wrist while locking up the crackheads.

This is a topic with which I am far from done. As time goes on I want to link to more research around this, but for now let me tell you what I realized after I stopped assuming my most strung out clients were the crack users. First, I accepted that crack is a drug like any other, people use it for pleasure, they use it for escape, they use it to kill pain, and they use it to pass the time. I was stoked that a client of mine had stopped using heroin; I’ve known her for years and have always enjoyed chatting with her, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that I found out that she had stopped shooting heroin, but continued to smoke crack. It wasn’t obvious that she was a “crackhead”, but what was obvious was that for her, crack was the lesser evil and she considered getting off heroin a big win, and I support her in that. However, I’m not particularly stoked on the crack use or anything, I mean c’mon, we all know that crack kills.

For a nice look at the exaggeration of the crack baby crisis see this New York Time article.