HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, CRACK!

Thirteen Pieces Of The Rock

Sometime in the next few months, the District of Columbia will pass an odd
little milestone. Just about 15 years ago—the exact date is lost somewhere
in a hazy five-minute high—crack arrived in D.C.

The easily marketed, easily ingested cocaine derivative had already hit a
handful of other American cities by the time it rolled down New York Avenue
on buses from New York. But in Washington's fragile ecosystem, the drug
found particularly fertile soil. Well into 1986, crack roots had grown deep
and strong.

Since then, nearly every aspect of life in Washington has been rocked by
the tiny rock. If crack revolutionized D.C.'s robbers, it also transformed
its cops. The drug shaped D.C.'s public image, manipulated its health-care
economy, dominated its politics, and influenced its residential patterns.
It gave us a whole new language. Think of all the phrases we've learned
since the mid-'80s: "Crack whore." "Crack house." "Bitch set me up." And it
delivered roundhouse punches to thousands of individual lives, too.

Forget Marion Barry, home rule, urban renewal, and white flight: Crack
cocaine muscled aside politicians, congressional fiats, and real estate
schemes on its way to becoming the single most important historical
phenomenon to hit the District in the last quarter of the 20th century. In
an insecure city that's constantly trying to show the world how it has
evolved into a cosmopolitan metropolis from a sleepy Southern town, crack
finally allowed hometown Washingtonians to lead the world in something.

No surprise, then, that now that crack has fallen out of the daily news, no
one's eager to remember it. Fifteen years later, crack—the most ephemeral
of chemical experiences—still awaits a historian's reckoning here in
Washington.

It's hard to imagine that crack was ever a newcomer. Unlike others who move
to D.C., it never had to choose just one neighborhood. It maintained a
pied-ˆ-terre in Park View, stately Victorians in Shaw, a whole street in
Trinidad, subsidized units in Benning Terrace. It loved to explore the
city's leafy green parks—but wasn't above hanging out on the city's rutted
sidewalks. Suburbanites by the thousands came to visit it, stopping off
momentarily in town before speeding their Toyota Corollas back toward I-395.

Crack quickly became the most popular kid on the block, displacing former
golden boys like PCP and heroin. Derided as an uncouth country cousin upon
its arrival, crack set about proving the snobs wrong. The new ingénue had a
date to every dance.

Crack's effects were immediate. Old-line dope-dealing monopolies were no
match for it. Soon, it had left its mark on the underground pharmaceutical
economy and helped a whole new class of entrepreneurs show their marketing
savvy. But with the new drug wrecking even the underworld's version of
stability, guns blazed. By the end of the '80s, David Letterman and Johnny
Carson could make as many jokes about D.C. as about Michael Jackson or Dan
Quayle.

The erosion of the District's image, indeed, was the least of crack's
effects. Name a District malady and you'll find crack hanging around—not
the exact cause, perhaps, but an unindicted co-conspirator at the very
least. Thanks to crack, D.C.'s police force got a big cash infusion—and
used it to hire the worst class of cops ever, whose blunders the city is
still trying to recover from. Thanks to crack, D.C.'s social services took
on new burdens, even as crime helped drive from town many of the taxpayers
who once subsidized those services. When the city's budget collapsed,
plenty of irresponsible politicians in the District Building and on Capitol
Hill got the blame. But crack was somewhere in the picture, too.

Every industry was transformed by crack. Newspapers got great stories—but
debased themselves by buying into the era's war-on-drugs hysteria.
Clinicians got grants—but trafficked in kooky theories. Something was in
the air, all right, and it wasn't just a chemical phenomenon. Crack, and
the war against it, represented an economy—and an ideology, too. And
economics and ideology make people do even weirder things than drugs.

And then there was the mayor. Marion Barry consummated D.C.'s dysfunctional
marriage to crack on a grainy videotape shot Jan. 18, 1990. The next few
months—trial, jail, and a stage set for Hizzoner's triumphal
comeback—showed how crack had worked its way to a privileged place at the
center of the city's nexus of race, power, and justice. Crack may have been
taking the knife to countless other poor communities around the nation. But
that spring and summer, only Washington was Crack City.

Nowadays, crack is supposed to be a thing of the past. Sure, the city still
has its old crackheads, coughing their way through the streets. But to hear
the next generation tell it, they're lame old squares. The kids—even the
bad kids—supposedly don't want anything to do with that scene.

But if crack has been beaten back, that's not necessarily because it lost
the drug war. A market shrunk by demographic change, an image battered by a
decade of very public lost souls, and a press bored by endless crack
stories have as much to do with why you don't read a lot about the drug
these days as the collected sermonizing of drug czars, police chiefs, and
politicians.

Crack, of course, is still here. Maybe it always will be. But just because
it's under control—or at least under the carpet—doesn't mean the District
should go forgetting. Washington has never been very good at remembering
its history, embracing its living legends, or recounting its urban myths.
And because crack leaves neither a charming plot line nor an uplifting
lesson in its wake, it's even less appealing to the booster types whose
stories help define the city's image of itself.

Well, here's a start: a handful of vignettes—past and present, sober and
less so—from the world that crack built. They will have to do until some
esteemed scholar clears his or her throat and writes the definitive history
of crack.