Phillipe Bour­gois wrote In Search of Respect: Sell­ing Crack in El Bar­rio, an ethno­graphic study of crack deal­ers in East Harlem, where he lived for five years, befriend­ing the deal­ers and tape record­ing thou­sands of hours of their con­ver­sa­tion. In this pas­sage, Bour­gois explains the con­text in which crack was invented and how it came to dom­i­nate the under­ground economy:

The demise of Mafia hege­mony on the street occurred just as the under­ground econ­omy was redefin­ing itself around cocaine and crack in the mid-1980s, which were sup­plant­ing heroin as the undis­put­edly most prof­itable prod­uct. The vigor of the crack-cocaine econ­omy dur­ing the late 1980s and early 1990s was largely the result of an aggres­sive fed­eral drug pol­icy pri­or­i­tiz­ing the crim­i­nal repres­sion of smug­gling. Some­time in the early to mid-1980s, mar­i­juana importers work­ing the Latin Amer­i­can sup­ply routes adapted to the esca­lat­ing lev­els of search-and-seizure they were fac­ing at U.S. bor­ders by switch­ing from trans­port­ing mar­i­juana to traf­fick­ing in cocaine. Cocaine is much eas­ier to trans­port clan­des­tinely because it takes up only a frac­tion of the phys­i­cal space occu­pied by the equiv­a­lent dol­lar value of mar­i­juana. U.S. inner cities con­se­quently were flooded with high-purity cocaine at bar­gain prices shortly after the fed­eral gov­ern­ment increased drug inter­dic­tion efforts. Accord­ing to the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion, the kilo price of cocaine dropped five­fold dur­ing the 1980s from $80,000 to $15,000.

The Columbian orga­nized crime car­tels who have his­tor­i­cally main­tained a monopolly over cocaine pro­duc­tion and trans­port, responded vig­or­ously to the new mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties in the early 1980s and vio­lently bypassed the tra­di­tional net­works of the Italian-dominated Mafia that spe­cial­ized in heroin. The Columbians tapped directly into the entre­pre­neur­ial urge that is such an inte­gral facet of the Amer­i­can Dream. The magic of a highly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket spawned a new, more prof­itable prod­uct — crack, which is…merely an alloy of cocaine and bak­ing soda. The admix­ture of bak­ing soda, how­ever, allows the psy­choac­tive agent in cocaine to be released when smoked. Pow­der cocaine, on the other hand, can only be sniffed or injected. The cap­il­lar­ies in the lungs have a great absorp­tion capac­ity than the arter­ies of the mus­cu­loskele­tal sys­tem or the veins of the nos­trils. Con­se­quently, crack deliv­ers the psy­choac­tive effects of cocaine to the brain with max­i­mum effi­ciency and speed. Fur­ther­more, within min­utes of smok­ing crack users crave another exhil­a­rat­ing rush of 2 min­utes and a half. They are not con­tent with the sub­tler, longer-term high that comes from sniff­ing pow­der cocaine. This makes crack a per­fectly flex­i­ble con­sumer com­mod­ity. Even though indi­vid­ual doses are inex­pen­sive and there­fore acces­si­ble to the poor, a user with money can spend vir­tu­ally infi­nite sums in a sin­gle extended ses­sion of bing­ing. This tech­no­log­i­cal and mar­ket­ing break­through of alloy­ing cocaine to bak­ing soda unleashed the energy of thou­sands of wanna-be mom-and-pop entre­pre­neurs who were only too eager to estab­lish high-profit, high-risk retail crack busi­nesses. Hence, in late 1985, the Game Room, which had been a strug­gling candy store sell­ing nickel bags of mar­i­juana, upgraded itself to become a video arcade pur­vey­ing $10 vials of crack.

pgs 74–75

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