Crack in Australia

[redrum]

Hi cyber people! Does anyone hear know the reason why Crack isnt popular in Oz. Coke is fairly easy to get (albeit expensive) but Crack is definetly hard to come by. I know Crack is ultra-popular in the States & the UK just wandering why it isnt here though?

 

[RobertRollie]

Uh...well im no expert but I was under the impression that crack == cocaine...?

 

[Pleonastic]

Nah, they're slightly different...
Normal powder cocaine (the stuff you snort) can't be smoked - it burns rather than vaporising. However cocaine freebase vaporises nicely. The freebase form is what's referred to as "crack"...
Crack can be made directly from normal coke, and it's a relatively simple procedure. I'm not going to explain how to do that here though - if anyone has to ask where to find the info then chances are they'd be out of their depth trying to actually do it. If anyone has that knowledge it would be appreciated if it wasn't posted here - there'd be nothing gained in terms of harm minimisation and the specific details are irrelevant to the discussion.
As for why there's not much crack in Australia - as usual it depends who you know, but I guess there's just no real market for it. If anyone wants to go into the social politics of it they're more than welcome to...
[ 22 September 2002: Message edited by: Pleonastic ]

 

[phase_dancer]

Crack is the impure freebase, originally a "waste" product from clandestine labs. At one time this was either recycled or supplied to locals as a cheap form of smoke-able cocaine.
I believe the crack market which exists in the US probably came about purely from cartel opportunism. An enormous coke market grew that pleased the rich, but another market was waiting with those less fortunate. A cheaper product was all that was needed. This market would have easily been fed from an abundant waste product, initially shipped through existing networks.
Europe is different in that it seems to have something to trade. A post in a recent news thread indicates the Coke barons prefer to swap cocaine for ecstasy rather than receive cash. As could be imagined, this amount of illicit trade could easily generate a market - virtually out of nothing.
As for Australia, unless they want DMT from wattle, I don't think we have that much to offer in exchange
Nowadays as opposed to the early coke America in the 60’s and 70’s, a crack market would be expected to follow any upsurge in cocaine use. There are some who turn every bit of coke they get into freebase. Such is the attraction. Of course in Aus that means they are usually reminded every time they release the free base, just how little cocaine by weight they have actually bought. For these people, cheaper rock could either delay the inevitable money hole, or simply provide the favorite, ready formed and rearing to go.
If the market in Australia grows enough, it could/would probably evolve in much the same way as the US. I believe this would be more likely if Australia continues to improve its global economical position. The big problem is the distance. Because of this I think the surviving cartels will concentrate on a transatlantic tunnel before an attempt at a trans Pacific
[ 22 September 2002: Message edited by: phase_dancer ]

 

[anfalicious]

nothing to add, just like to say nice post guys. This is something that has interested me for a while. So yeah, well done

 

[johnboy]

Crack is the impure freebase, originally a "waste" product from clandestine labs. At one time this was either recycled or supplied to locals as a cheap form of smoke-able cocaine.
I'd have to respectfully disagree. It was never a waste product. "Crack" was simply a smokable form of cocaine made that purpose. Originally users would purchase the cocaine in powder form and do the conversion themselves, as is done now in Australia. Then one day someone had the great idea of preparing for the consumer, thereby saving them time. Legend has it was a man called "Freeway" Ricky Ross. I'm going to scan in a chapter from a great book called [url="Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" which explains the whole insane tale.
[ 22 September 2002: Message edited by: johnboy ]

 

[phase_dancer]

Thanks JB,
Until I can dig up the reference (if it's at all possible) I'll agree with your comments.

 

[johnboy]

The idea of smoking cocaine was not new: as far back as 1886, Parke, Davis had marketed coca cigars. It had never caught on, however, owing to a quirk of the drug's chemistry. Cocaine hydrochloride - the form in which is usually taken - is highly sensitive to heat. In fact, when burned, it destabilises completely, so placing a line of coke into a cigarette paper and attempting to smoke it pretty much ensures that you are simply burning money. In order to smoke it, the cocaine must be chemically changed into a form that vaporises rather than degrades when heated. Clearly, noted Humblestone and Clarke in 1979, such a form had been discovered.
Actually the discovery was not new. People had been smoking cocaine for years in South America. An early stage in the extraction of the drug from coca leaves involves its transformation into a paste called pasta basica, commonly known as pasta, bazuko or base. This off-white sludgy substance is the standard currency of the cocaine trade: as Henry Hurd Rusby had discovered, it is easy to make, easy to transport, and just a couple of steps away from pure cocaine hydrochloride. What Rusby had not noted, however, was that base could be smoked. It could be smoked because, prior to refining, base vaporises nicely when heated. South Americans in the cocaine industry took to scraping up small amounts of base and stuffing it into cigarettes. The result was a fast, intense rush. At this stage, however, no one smoked paste except those involved in cocaine production. It was a habit of the trade. But, with a high this intense, it was bound to catch on sooner or later.
At some point in the early 1970s someone in North America realised the potential of smoking cocaine. Although no one has ever managed to track down the guy responsible, the sequence of events that -took place has been reconstructed by a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Ron Siegel. Siegel, the world's foremost expert on the history of the science of cocaine, spent many years logging the evolution of crack way back before anyone had even heard the word 'crack'. In 1982 he published the definitive account in The Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. It has yet to be bettered.
The way Siegel tells it, at some point in the early 1970s, possibly 1970 itself, an American cocaine trafficker visited Peru to check up on production. While down there he noticed that some of the workers were smoking something they called 'base'. He tried some and was bowled over by the results. Once back in the United States, he tried smoking cocaine the way he had seen it done in Peru. But there was a problem. Cocaine hydrochloride didn't smoke right.
Siegel speculates that this guy called a friend who knew something about chemistry to ask why it didn't smoke right, telling him that he was looking for a cocaine derivative that the Peruvians had called 'base'. Could the chemist help him to make some? Together they looked up the word 'base' in a chemistry encyclopedia and realised that cocaine hydrochloride was a salt but that it could be converted into a basic -or 'base' - form quite easily by removing the hydrochloride molecule. Presumably, they figured, that form was what the traffickers in South America had been smoking - hence their name for it, 'base'. In order to convert the cocaine salt into a base it was only necessary to add a strong alkali, dissolve the result in a powerful solvent such as ether and allow the cocaine to crystallise out. They tried it. It worked. Because the process involved releasing the cocaine base from cocaine hydrochloride, they called it 'freeing the base' - or 'freebasing'.
In fact these guys had got it all wrong. The growers in South America had been smoking a crude mixture of cocaine compounds that included cocaine sulphate. 'Base' was just their name for it. Instead of crude, contaminated cocaine sulphate, the Americans • found themselves smoking pure cocaine base. As Siegel says, They were smoking something that no one on the planet had ever smoked before.' It was extraordinarily powerful. At the time, of course, cocaine was so rare and expensive that freebasing was slow to catch on. Even regular cocaine was rare in the early 1970s. But, once the market had picked up and the price began to drop, more and more people tried it.
Initially, freebasing was a great secret. It
required a fair amount of good-quality cocaine - which precluded most of the population from trying it - and also some knowledge of chemistry and a few pieces of apparatus (beakers, measuring flasks and solvents). Also, it was in the interests of those who knew how to convert cocaine into freebase not to spread it around too much. Dealers who knew the secret went into the freebase business, hiring themselves out as 'chemists', showing up at the kind of parties where there would be a lot of coke (in the early stages, these were exclusively the preserve of pop stars and traffickers) and offering to cook up freebase in return for their own personal use of it. Marijuana trafficker Allen Long recalled how he was accosted by one of these characters in New York. Because he was making regular flights to Colombia, he always picked up a little cocaine to bring back for his own personal use.
It was at a party in New York and I had the coke - because 1 was picking it up for two dollars a gram, you know. So I had some and I just dumped it on to the table and I was doing this line and some guy said to me, 'You know, you're wasting that coke.' And I'm, like, 'Huh?' And he said, 'You should do this' - and hejust took the cocaine to the kitchen and he made some base and we started to smoke it... He just did it in the kitchen. He called it freebase.
Soon it became obvious that there wasn't much of a secret to making freebase after all. The process required no understanding of chemistry whatsoever: it could be learned by rote. Pretty soon, alternative handbooks to cocaine began to appear in head shops across the United States describing how wonderful freebasing made you feel. Some of them instructed the reader how to make freebase. One 1979 manual I found in the Drugscope library in London, called Attention Coke Lovers! Freebase = the best thing since sex/, talked the reader through the process step by step, concluding that freebase is 'considerably less harmful, physically, than regular cocaine in any quantity'. This was a common misconception: at this point it was thought that the only risk of cocaine abuse was damage to the mucous membranes. Smoking seemed to be a way of avoiding even that. By the late 1970s, head shops across the States were selling all sorts of paraphernalia for making, and taking, freebase, from special pipes in which to smoke it to extraction kits that came complete with instructions and all the correct solvents. Siegel estimates that 300,000 freebase kits had been sold by 1980.
There was a problem with freebasing. The rush induced by smoking cocaine was extremely intense but it was matched by the brevity of the high. This served to make it considerably more addictive. Freebasers began behaving strangely, erratically, as they tried to get hold of more of the drug. Long explains:
One of the habits of freebasers is that they start looking at the floor all the time, looking for spare little bits of freebase. Even if they're talking to you, all the time they're looking at the floor. It's strange but everyone does it. I once slapped a friend because of it. I was talking and he was looking around and I said, 'Stop that. Look at me,' and he went, 'Yeah, yeah,' and I said, 'If you don't look at me, I'm going to slap you.' And he went, 'Yeah' and was just looking all around the floor for these pieces of base. And so I slapped him. Didn't make any difference. I've seen people crawling around on their hands and knees under the table, convinced that there is some little bit somewhere on the floor.
All over the country cocaine users found themselves bickering like children. Whose cocaine was it? Who made the freebase? Whose pipe was it? And, most importantly, whose turn was it with the pipe? This was the problem with freebase: it was so pleasurable that, once you started, it was impossible to stop.
The medical community was well aware that cocaine smoking was catching on. In 1976 Siegel had published a paper indicating that monkeys in the laboratory could be taught to smoke freebase. This was an extraordinary revelation: trying to get mammals to smoke anything is hard because they have a natural aversion to smoke. Thus, in smoking experiments with other drugs, Siegel had had to coerce monkeys into inhaling by offering them a reward when they did it. Unlike any other drug he had tried, however, he found that monkeys would smoke cocaine with no other motivating factor. They actually enjoyed it. In his book Intoxication he describes the bizarre spectacle of one of his research subjects, a monkey called Phoebe, inhaling freebase deeply, then exhaling, and trying desperately to lick the smoke as it wafted away. He was impressed: 'We could never find a drug that monkeys would choose to smoke without a further enhancement, like a treat after they smoked a cigarette,' he told High Times, 'but cocaine freebase they would.'
...In fact, the first time most Americans heard of freebasing was when the comedian Richard Pryor blew himself up doing it.
On 9 June 1980 Pryor was just winding up a freebase binge at his home in Northridge, California, when things went wrong. Having finished all his cocaine, Pryor decided to drink the highercentage-proof rum from his water pipe. Unfortunately he had been smoking freebase for five days and was not entirely up to speed: he spilled it down his front. Also unfortunately, he then decided to light a cigarette. Finally unfortunately, he was wearing a nylon shirt at the time. Whoops. The moment he lit the match the alcohol, the shirt and Pryor himself exploded into flames. As he was later to report in a stand-up performance (after months of burns treatment) 'I did the one-hundred-yard dash in 4.3!' Prior's mishap provided great copy for the papers, propelling freebasing into the public consciousness. WHEN COCAINE CAN KILL ran the Newsweek headline.
Some time earlier than this the drug press had been half-heartedly warning readers about freebasing. In April, Rolling Stone had published a piece entitled FREEBASE: A TREACHEROUS OBSESSION. Even High Times, bible of the recreational drug abuser, ran a piece entitled CAN You SMOKE WITHOUT GETTING BURNED? concluding that 'it's a real nice high but it has no sustaining power. You get right up there but then you're back down two minutes later, and the next day you can feel really sick.' This kind of publicity should have discouraged the use of freebase in the United States. Perhaps it did. What it also did, however, was to introduce new recruits to the technique: if Richard Pryor was doing it - well, it had to be pretty good, right? As one crack addict I interviewed in the Bahamas pointed out to me, 'I first heard about cocaine smoking through Richard Pryor. That was what made it interesting to me.'
On the street it was widely assumed that the main danger of freebase was that of explosions: after Pryor, no one was really comfortable with all those chemicals around any more. So everyone was delighted when it was discovered that fancy chemicals and equipment were not really necessary. In fact making cocaine freebase was so simple that any number of chemicals could be used, the only key element being that you mix your coke with an alkali strong enough to leach off the hydrochloride.
For a while, freebasers experimented with a number of chemicals - the most popular of which was ammonia. Then they discovered a perfect alkali which just happened to be available in every comer store: baking soda. Making freebase with baking soda was so easy that even a child could do it. No dangerous chemicals, no expensive conversion kits. Nothing. In fact the baking soda recipe was not new: it had been around since the mid-1970s, even gaining a mention at Tennyson Guyer's hearings in 1979. However, it had not been widespread. Now it began gaining converts: the 1980 Rolling Stone piece on freebasing reported cryptically on 'an even simpler technique [for making freebase] that involved dissolving street cocaine in a solution of
water and baking soda and letting the solution dry out'. In 1981 the secret was out, as a freebase journal, The Natural Process: Base-ic Instructions and Baking Soda Recipe, went into print. Although one new way of making freebase might have appeared insignificant at the time, the 'base-ic' technique was to create havoc. It was this form of freebase that hit the Caribbean in 1978 and 1979.
Early reports of baking soda freebase are sporadic: one researcher heard of a drug called 'roxanne', or 'baking soda base' from the Dutch Antilles, made by mixing cocaine with water, rum and baking soda. Another recalled hearing about a drug in the Turks and Caicos Islands that 'looked like a pebble and people would smoke it and go crazy'. The recipes may have varied somewhat but the idea was the same: this was the old freebase technique in a new, easy-to-use incarnation. With the amounts of cocaine that were passing through the Bahamas it was perhaps no surprise that there were people willing to experiment with it. According to David, one of the original crack users in Nassau, who started in 1979:
Cocaine was going for fifty dollars an ounce [at the time]. It was washing up on the beach for free, you know? One woman who picked up a consignment didn't know what it was and used it as washing powder. My friends and I would smoke it in a komoke - a sort of pipe made out of a glass and some tinfoil and some water. We always cooked it with baking soda, never ammonia or anything else. We didn't call it crack. It was 'freebase'. And then we called it 'rock'. I didn't appreciate it at first. But I was soon into it. And so was everyone else.
Michael, another cocaine smoker in the late 1970s, reported that the reason he tried freebasing was that there was so much cocaine in the Bahamas at the time that 'people were bored with it'. Smoking cocaine was something new. Baking-soda freebase, or 'rock', soon became the drug of choice in the Bahamas. And that's where the trouble started. Because the problem with freebasing was not that it was explosive on occasions but that it was terribly addictive. There was a good reason for this and it had to do with the chemistry of the drug in the brain.
In Part Two we'll learn about "Freeway" Ricky Ross, and how he swore he didn't put any of that evil "Crack" in his rock cocaine.
[ 22 September 2002: Message edited by: johnboy ]

 

[apollo]

It's not as uncommon as you think - I've known a few people to have tried it. In Sydney (I can't speak for anyone else) I'm told it's mostly supplied by people commonly regarded as 'dodgy and untrustworthy'. I'm also led to believe it's mostly present in a very "in" crowd... Thus it's difficult to obtain for most.
As for popularity, it's expensive, short lived & excessively addicitive... It doesn't suprise me that it isn't very popular.

 

[redrum]

great post John.. very informative

 

[Mr. Horse]

fascinating johnboy.. can you provide us with the link or the rest of the story, i'm dieing to know what happens next

 

[johnboy]

er no links i'm afraid, all of this was scanned from a book by hand. when i get some time i'll put up the rest of the chapter.

 

[SeveredPsyche]

Druglibrary.org has some information. It makes vague reference to a difference between crack and freebase cocaine.

 

[johnboy]

What to say about Freeway Ricky? He doesn't look like his photographs. Press pictures of Ross show a dangerous-looking dude with dreadlocks and a shifty look in his eye. In fact he has had all his hair shaven, is slightly built and short - certainly no more than five foot eight or nine. He smiles frequently and breaks into infectious laughter without provocation. He has the most amazingly delicate hands. Hardly what you would expect of the most evil man in America. But the greatest surprise is to come. Because, the moment he starts talking, one thing becomes abundantly clear: this guy is smart. Seriously smart. Of all the interviewees I contacted in the course of researching this book - including a Nobel Laureate and a number of extremely serious scientists - Ross came across as the brightest. By far.
We chatted about his appeal for a while and he told me how he had got into this mess. It was the story of crack cocaine in America.
Ricky Donnell Ross was born in Texas but his family moved to South Central Los Angeles in the 1960s. Their house was situated right by the main LA freeway so, since there were a number of other Ross families in the neighbourhood, Ricky became known as 'Ricky from the freeway', and eventually 'Freeway Ricky'. Like everyone else in his neighbourhood he went to school and, like everyone else in his neighbourhood, he couldn't see the point of it:

School wasn't for me. It wasn't something that I saw I could use. I'm looking for stuff that I can use. And if I can't use it, I don't want it. So school, now that I look back on it - nobody ever explained school to me. They never showed me why I should learn to read, why I should learn to write. Why I should learn mathematics ... when it came to reading and writing, I didn't never catch on.
Ricky's lack of prowess in the classroom did not seem to matter, however, because he had something else going for him: he was a natural sportsman. Picked up by a talent scout in a local park, he soon found himself playing tennis. When his friends began competing in local competitions and winning, he started taking it seriously and by the time he was approaching the end of high school, he was considering going professional. What he needed first, however, was a sports scholarship to university. His friends were offered places at various colleges in California and Ricky felt that it was only a matter of time: he was a good player and he knew it. Then everything fell apart.

I wanted to go to Long Beach State but academically I just couldn't cut it. My coach asked me how my grades were. Found out I couldn't read. I was eighteen then. I was still in school ... by nineteen my opportunities just started slipping away from me. People started finding out I couldn't read.
Ross's college hopes collapsed. He dropped out of school just months before graduation, gave up playing tennis and took to hanging out in a friend's garage, watching TV. Until this point, because of tennis, he had never had any contact with drugs: he was too busy and was aware that rumours of drug abuse had the potential to wreck a tennis career. Now, however, there was no reason not to. When a friend approached him at Christmas 1979 and gave him $50 worth of cocaine, he was intrigued;

One of my partners went to college to play football and somebody had turned him on to it there. He came back and showed it to me. He said, This is worth fifty dollars.' I looked at it and said it wasn't worth no fifty dollars. I said, 'What is it?' and he said, 'It's cocaine.' I didn't believe it. That's how I got introduced. I didn't try it. It took me a while. Maybe a couple of months. It was too expensive.
Ross took the cocaine and showed it to a few friends, one of whom immediately offered him $100 for it. He was impressed. A couple of hours later the friend rang him and asked if he could get his hands on any more. Now he was really impressed. Ricky Ross was about to become a cocaine dealer. At the time, cocaine was still a very expensive drug and most of the residents in Ross's neighbourhood couldn't afford it. There was a real lack of suppliers. Ross now found himself with a serious contact and a large circle of acquaintances willing to pay him money to supply them with cocaine. It was child's play:

The next thing I know, I'm making a hundred, two hundred dollars a day, sitting in the garage, listening to the radio and watching TV. People would just walk up. 'Hey man, I need a fifty-dollar.' Til go and phone my boy.' 'Hey man, I need a fifty-dollar.' It just kept on going like that. And me and my boy, Arl - he had just got out of jail - so when he got out I said to him, 'Man, this stuff is rolling! This shit is cracking. It's on'
As yet, Ross and his friend were selling other people's cocaine for them, taking a cut of the profit. Having realised the value of the market, however, they now decided to go into business for themselves. First they needed to buy a substantial amount of coke: $300 worth. They stole a car, stripped it down, sold the parts and came up with the cash. They then invested it in 3 grams of cocaine and started their own little supply business. Soon they found themselves plugged into all the wealthy homes in the neighbourhood. People would finish their jobs on Friday, collect their pay cheques and look for a way to celebrate. Ross helped them. Through a fortuitous meeting with a girlfriend's father - who had a lot of friends who were into cocaine - Ross found himself with a safe, exclusive client base capable of coming up with a lot of money every I'riday. By now it was early 1980 and he had been dealing cocaine for just six months.
Ross had not yet encountered freebase. Although the friend to whom he had sold the first $50 rock of cocaine had cooked it up and smoked it in front of him, it didn't occur to him that there might be .1 market for it. As freebasing spread in the more affluent black neighbourhoods, however, so he began to deal more and more and people opened up to him. They were buying cocaine but they were not happy. 'Once we got to maybe two or three ounces [a week], people started coming all the time,' he said, 'early in the mornings and stuff like that, and they started saying, "Man! I got to go home and cook this stuff up! Shit! Why ain't you got this stuff ready?" And I was, like, "Huh?"'
Ross decided to cook up a little cocaine freebase and offer it to his customers ready to smoke so that they wouldn't have to bother when they got home. Although he didn't know how to make freebase, he had a friend called Stephan who did. He offered him $50 to make the first batch. Since cocaine chunks were known as 'rocks' and he was offering it ready to smoke, he called the result 'Ready Rock'.

We started selling Ready Rock. 'Oh, we got Ready Rock.' It was kind of like filling a gap, you know? When they come early in the morning, they got to go to work, you know, six o'clock, and then they got to go home and cook it up and they don't want to go through all that. So we just started saying, 'You want Ready Rock or powder? Whichever way you want it.'
Initially Ross's customers were suspicious of this new product: even freebasers didn't trust it. But the more astute soon cottoned on and people started asking specifically for Ready Rock. People who had never heard of freebasing began to try it. Of course, they liked it. The market expanded. Within a couple of months Ross's friend Stephan was cooking up multi-ounce quantities of cocaine three or four times a week. Ross paid him $300-400 a time. Then he got sick of paying.

They wouldn't teach you how to cook cocaine in the early days. Because it was money. If you could cook, you could charge ... I'd hire people to cook for me, and, after I'd watched them for a while I was sitting there with them and I keep looking - and pretty soon 1 had enough dope and I was, like, well, if I fuck it up I'll lose, you know, but if he can do it, I can do it. So I tried it. And it worked. That's how I learned. From him. I fired him! He had to get him another job! And after that I started teaching all the guys how to do it.
Originally Ross and Arl had got into the cocaine business to make $5,000 so that they could buy a car. Three months after they had started trading they went into the bedroom where they kept their savings and counted all the cash. It came to $20,000. They caught each other's eye: 'We looked at each other. "Quit?" "Not a chance!" "Let's get a hundred!"'
Ross surrounded himself with homeboys and set about revolutionising South Central's cocaine scene. Each time he traded he buried his profits in more and more cocaine. The more cocaine he bought, the lower the price dropped. He passed on this discount to his clients. This brought in more custom - enabling him to buy more cocaine at still lower wholesale prices. Street prices of cocaine began to plummet in California. Ready Rock was a massive hit with everyone who came into contact with it. As he moved up the drug-dealing ladder, so he moved away from the street sellers and personal users and began supplying other dealers instead. He eventually established a hierarchy for the South Central cocaine industry, buying up houses, gutting the interiors and making Ready Rock industrially. Houses would deal in different denominations: smalltime dealers would go to House A, where they had to spend $100 at a time. Bigger dealers might go to House B, where they would spent $1,000. At the top of the scale he established a main house where wholesalers would come to buy multi-kilo quantities.
In setting up houses like this, he says, he wanted to help small dealers become big dealers, to give them the opportunity to get into the cocaine trade and make some real money. The more they managed to sell, the higher the house they could visit and the lower the price of the cocaine. According to Ross many of his early customers went on to become millionaires.
As demand for Ready Rock began to outstrip that for powder cocaine, production had to be scaled up. Initially Ross had made freebase in small medicine vials, one gram at a time. When his house began filling up with vials he had moved on to pill bottles, then mayonnaise jars and baby-food bottles. Then he decided that it was just too time-consuming to fill all these bottles. By now he was selling Rock in quantities too big for any of them anyway. He industrialised the process.

In the end I was using big pots, industrial pots. Like ... forty or fifty gallons [150-190 litres]. Two guys would have to pick it up. And we'd put in thirty, forty, fifty keys [kilograms of coke] at a time. I had two little guys and they'd be cutting and dumping in the cocaine. And another guy, he'd have a big box of baking soda ... he'd dump in the baking soda and we pour the water in there and get a spoon, a big spoon - my partner said it looked like a boat oar - and start stirring. And you put a mask on, or you get high when you do it.
Since Ross had now hit the top of the cocaine food chain, he was buying in his supply directly from the people who were trafficking it. Not only was it cheap but it was pure. One kilogram of cocaine would produce one kilogram - possibly a little bit more if it picked up some baking soda - of Ready Rock. Thus Ross's technique would yield him, after a good couple of hours heating the mixture over one of his industrial stoves, one solid lump of crack weighing 30-50 kilograms. Sometimes it was white, sometimes yellow, sometimes pea-coloured. No one was concerned about the colour. They were worrying about the next stage: how to cut up this manhole-cover sized chunk of freebase.
They used to hit it with an axe. Ross laughed:

Yeah! An axe! Cut it into chunks - bang! - and when you cut it it just splits, like that, ching! And then you got another guy with a scale and he's, like, 'Such-and-such wants ten keys' - put it in a plastic bag. We had sports bags, Nike bags and stuff. Put it in there with their initials on it. Drop it in the car. Next morning, everybody meet at the breakfast spot, pick the money up and tell them where to pick the drugs up at.
Ross had a firm grasp of market economics. Not only did he build around himself a hierarchy that enabled him to supply others lower down the chain, but he also established an inspired technique to deal with competitors.

If I heard somebody [I didn't know] was selling it, I would go out and recruit them. Because they weren't getting it as cheap as me: they didn't have the buying power I had. It was always cheaper around me. I would go out and recruit ... 1 would go out to different gang members and show them how to do it and maybe give them a start. I might give them eight ounces, ten ounces [225-280 grams]: 'Here.' So they went out and sold it. And then they loved me.
New recruits would invariably end up coming back for more supplies. By dealing with Ross they were getting the cheapest Rock around. Of course, as he got new recruits, he needed more cocaine and had the money to buy increasing quantities - further lowering the price. By 1982 Ross was the largest cocaine dealer in South Central, shifting 15 kilos a week. By 1983, the market for cocaine powder had collapsed completely: everybody wanted Ready Rock. Ross cooked it up for them. By 1984 he was getting through 50 kilos a week. When he had started up, a kilo of cocaine went at the wholesale price of $25,000. At his peak, Ross was buying in such bulk that he was getting it for $9,500. Even allowing for the fact that he was supplying the suppliers rather than dealing on the street, he could make $100,000-200,000 profit per day. Some days he would go through 1 or 2 million dollars' worth of cocaine.
As had happened in the Bahamas a couple of years earlier, the amount of cocaine available led to a plummet in its price, rendering it more accessible to people who had previously not been able to afford it. 'When 1 started getting involved with cocaine,' he says, 'no blacks were involved with it. It was still a white-echelon drug. They felt they couldn't afford it. Black people couldn't afford it. One of the things that I felt I did was I made it affordable for minorities - blacks, mostly - in my neighbourhood.'
The demographic of cocaine use changed. From being a rich man's drug, it became everyone's drug. In this way freebase cocaine spread up the West Coast.
Of course, it wasn't long before Ross's activities reached the ears of the police. Which was why I was talking to him in this weird white room with the electronically controlled, bulletproof doors. Ross's story was doubly tragic: while he was busy making his fortune and his product was wrecking the lives of countless Americans, he was also writing his own arrest warrant. It was sad, really, because, if he had worked in almost any other commodity with even half the success that he had enjoyed in the cocaine industry, he would be an all-American hero by now. The way I saw it, the fact that he was dealing in cocaine did not detract from the fact that he was a capitalist, a trader, in an already busy market, who happened to have the vision to see the way things could be and the nerve to go out there and act on it.
It was exactly the same vision that had made other Americans -Nelson Rockefeller, Asa Griggs Candler and Bill Gates - rich establishment figures. But the industry in which he chose to immerse himself was illegal and, as such, he was just another black drug dealer in jail.
I asked Ross how he felt about selling crack. Didn't he feel guilty?

Not at the time. I sold to my own kid's mother. I gave it to her. She was addicted but there was no physical - nothing was wrong. When she got high she just went and got high, went to sit in the corner on the couch and watch TV like everybody else. There wasn't no effects like I would have associated with PCP. With PCP people might take their clothes off, go and sit in a tree, run down the street naked. But with cocaine none of this stuff happened. So to me cocaine was just a thing where people had fun and spent their money.
As he talked, I tried to work out what to make of him. I'd interviewed a few criminals in my time, including some of the more famous ones. I'd also been warned that Ross was seriously charismatic. But he really took the biscuit. I had never seen a better example of the American Dream in action. I'll admit it: although I didn't approve of what Ross had done, I had to admire it. By the end of the interview, I was won over. I completely forgot to take any photographs. We shook hands and I was ushered back into the stainless-steel lift and passed back through the metal detectors. As Ross was marched back to his cell I signed myself out in the visitor logbook and wandered back out into the sunshine.
When I got back to England I took a recording of the interview home and played it to my parents. Despite the occasional expletive, they were won over, too. 'What a nice man,' said my mother. My father thought it was terrible that Ross could have been a tennis pro - if only he had been taught to read: Tragic, the way things like that happen to people.' My aunt, who had popped by on the off chance that there might be a cup of tea going and then become embroiled in Ross's story, thought that we should invite him over to tea. 'Do you think he'd come?' she asked. I explained that he was serving a long jail sentence in the United States. 'Perhaps when he's released?' she said. Perhaps. Perhaps.
I wasn't surprised that they fell for him. Frankly, if he ran for office, I'd vote for him.
While Ross was busy turning the West Coast cocaine market on its head, Ready Rock was spreading on the East Coast, too: it made the leap from the Bahamas to the Caribbean communities in Florida, and then to other states, notably New York. Initially, police and DEA agents were baffled. They found weird bits of evidence obviously involved in drug taking: broken glass pipes, wire meshes. Coke cans with holes poked in them. They didn't know what they were, or what they were for. Dealers stopped on the street would turn out to be empty-handed: it was easy to drop a couple of rocks of freebase when you saw the police arriving, and it was virtually indistinguishable from bits of stone on the road.
In 1983 the LA press began picking up scraps of information about 'rock houses' in South Central, but columns covering them were buried deep inside the papers and no one paid much attention. At the end of 1984 the drug made its debut in a national US newspaper when the Los Angeles Times reported: SOUTH CENTRAL COCAINE SALES EXPLODE INTO $25 ROCKS. The Washington Post picked this story up but noted that 'Rock' was a Californian drug: the story was dropped.
Then, one Sunday in November 1985 the New York Times printed an article that was to change everything. The piece, by a journalist called Donna Boundy, covered a cocaine-abuse treatment centre:

PROGRAMME FOR COCAINE ABUSE UNDERWAY
Three teenagers have sought treatment already this year ... for cocaine dependence resulting from the use of a new form of the drug called 'crack', or rock-like pieces of prepared freebase (concentrated) cocaine.
New York Times, 17 November 1985
There it was: the magic name, 'crack'. Following Richard Pryor's accident, freebase cocaine was no longer news. 'Crack' sounded like a new drug altogether. It was much more newsworthy. Two weeks later the story was picked up again. This time it was judged sufficiently interesting to merit a place on the front page. A NEW, PURIFIED, FORM OF COCAINE CAUSES ALARM AS ABUSE INCREASES, ran the headline. The article reported on the prevalence of 'crack houses' in Harlem, estimating that they were generating $500,000 per day. It quoted a Dr Arnold Washton of Regent Hospital on East 61st Street, who predicted an epidemic of crack use, and another healthcare worker who referred to 'crack' as 'the most powerful drug we've ever seen'.
Despite the fact that the only new thing about 'crack' was its name, the New York Times thought it was a sensation. It was new. It was dangerous. Its name sounded Bad. The drug story of the century started to roll.
By May 1986 crack was all over America's front pages. It hit television the same month, when CBS's Harold Dow interviewed a senior DEA agent:

Dow: This is it! This drug is so powerful that it will empty the money from your pockets, make you sell the watch off your wrist, the clothes off your back ...
DEA agent (Robert Stutman): ... or kill your mother!
tit. Cracked Coverage, Reeves and Campbell, 1994
Hype surrounding the drug was sensational. In June Newsweek ran a cover story on crack entitled AN INFERNO OF CRAVING, DEALING AND DESPAIR. Inside, in an open letter to readers, editor, Richard Smith, warned that 'an epidemic is abroad in America, as pervasive and dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times', and pledged that the magazine would cover the crack scourge as aggressively as 'the struggle for civil rights, the war in Vietnam and the fall of the Nixon presidency'. It was, he wrote, 'an authentic national crisis'. Time magazine called crack 'the issue of the year'. By the end of 1986, Time and Newsweek had run five cover stories on the drug each. But the biggest media event involving cocaine was to take place just two days after Newsweek hit the stands.

 

[johnboy]

On 17 June 1986, Len Bias was one of the most feted men in America. The 22-year-old University of Maryland sports star was selected as the National Basketball Association's second overall draft pick. He was going to play for the Boston Celtics - the previous year's ' NBA champions. The night of the 18th, after a whistle-stop publicity tour to pose for the press, he returned to his college to celebrate with friends. By the next morning he was dead. 'Cocaine poisoning', recorded the coroner. American sports fans were appalled. That a young, healthy athlete could die as a result of cocaine use sent shock waves through American society. In the time it took the news to break, cocaine's champagne image was gone. The lesson of Bias' death,' reported Newsweek 'is that cocaine kills.'
The article was titled COCAINE is A LOADED GUN. 'In life,' writes Dan Baum in his study of the War on Drugs, Smoke and Mirrors, 'Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he would become the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs.'
Bias's death coincided perfectly with the arrival of the 'new' drug, crack. Although there was no evidence of it, the public immediately decided that it was crack that had killed him. By the end of the month, concerned parents and civic leaders were organising 'take back the streets' marches across the country. In July, ABC News broke new ground by sending a cameraman to accompany a police raid on a crack house. The footage was so exciting that camera crews from all over the world began asking whether they, too, could accompany crack busts. Federal authorities acquiesced and the result was a swathe of news reports consisting of jerky footage of heavily armed action men in bulletproof jackets and balaclavas battering their way through armour-plated doors.
Two months after the first crack-house footage aired, another TV landmark took place. On 2 September 1986, viewers tuned into CBS to hear a sombre Dan Rather (CBS's news anchor) announce: Tonight, CBS takes you to the streets, to the war zone, for an unusual two hours of hands-on horror.' The programme was 48 Hours on Crack Street, and, with a plug like that it attracted a total of 15 million viewers - one of the highest viewing figures for any documentary in US history. Three days after 48 Hours aired, NBC followed with its own version, Cocaine Country, and this, too, did well. It rapidly became clear that crack led to increased ratings. Three years after 48 Hours, when CBS commissioners noticed a slump in documentary ratings, they would commission a sequel, Return to Crack Street, to boost them.
By September Time was running another crack cover story: a picture of a death's head bearing the legend: DRUGS: THE ENEMY WITHIN. Many made fun of the journal's apparent change of heart, contrasting this cover with one they had run just five years earlier - at the height of cocaine's glamorous phase - referring to it as 'the all-American drug' and warning that it made you 'alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer ... instead, drive, sparkle, energy.'
The day before Time hit the newsstands, Ronald and Nancy Reagan made an unprecedented appeal to the American public, exhorting them to take part in a 'national crusade' against narcotics abuse. 'Our country needs you to be clear-eyed and clear-minded,' said Nancy. 'Say yes to your life. And, when it comes to alcohol and drugs, just say no.' As a piece of PR it was wonderful. As a means of stopping anyone from taking cocaine it was a waste of time. The 'Just Say No' campaign, derived from a phrase in a NIDA educational film when an elementary schoolchild was asked what he would do if he was offered drugs, was perhaps useful for young children. It was not suitable for cocaine users. Yet it was to become one of the best-recalled features of the Reagan presidency.
In the midst of all the crack hype, those closest to the drug, the DEA, realised that the press were going overboard. OK, there was crack around, they admitted, but there wasn't that much of it. In fact, outside certain regions of Miami, Los Angeles and New York, there wasn't any at all. The rest was hype. In August they tried to pour water on the flames:

Crack is currently the subject of considerable media attention. The result has been a distortion of the public perception of the extent of crack use as compared to other drugs ... crack presently appears to be a secondary rather than primary problem in most areas.
at. 'Beyond Cocaine, Basuco, Crack and Other Products', James A Inciardi, Contemporary Drug Problems, Fall 1987
As early as the summer of 1986 the DEA had been concerned about the over-hyping of crack. Special Agent Robert O'Leary told News week, 'We are very concerned about a market being developed because of all the publicity. We feel it's being accelerated by media hype.' These warnings were studiously ignored: crack as a 'secondary problem' wasn't particularly exciting. A crack deluge, meanwhile, was much more promising. No one wanted to believe the truth: that crack was simply regular cocaine that could be smoked; that it had been around for at least a decade. The story continued to run.
The DEA were not the only ones to realise that the 'crack epidemic' sensation was not all it seemed. Back at UCLA, Professor Ron Siegel was appalled at the coverage. The press reported crack as a 'new' drug that had taken over in record time. Siegel, who had been researching freebase for over thirteen years, knew that it was anything but new. He recalled for me his reaction to the first crack broadcasts:

Dan Rather's researcher rang me up and asked, 'Have you heard about crack?' I said no, because 1 never had. 'What is it?' She said, 'It's a new form of cocaine that you smoke.' And I said, 'Well, this sounds like freebase and we've been researching that for a long time. We've logged about a hundred and twenty street names for it - perhaps "crack" is a new one.' She just said, 'It's obvious that you've never heard of it' - and hung up. That night on the news, there was Dan Rather, saying crack was a new form of cocaine and it was smokable. I couldn't fucking believe it.
Ricky Ross, at the time South Central's largest dealer, was likewise baffled: 'When 1 first heard of crack, I was, like, "Man, I wonder what they got in that stuff." And then I get down to the courtroom and they're, like, "That was crack cocaine you had." "No it wasn't! It was cocaine! I didn't put no crack in there
In their efforts to portray the drug as a larger-than-life scourge, the media adopted a number of tactics. The first was the straight lie. The most famous crack myth emerged in Newsweek:

There is no such thing as recreational use of crack,' said Arnold Washton (director of the 1-800-COCAINE hotline) - 'it is almost instantaneous addiction.'
Newsweek, 17 March 1986
This was a bit of a porky. Cocaine is an extremely dangerous drug. It has a high potential for addiction, especially when smoked. But no one could ever argue - reasonably - that it is instantly addictive. Nothing is instantly addictive. Yet this story would emerge again and again.

 

[phase_dancer]

One of the habits of freebasers is that they start looking at the floor all the time, looking for spare little bits of freebase.
hee hee so very true. In my observations this seems to happen frequently with basers. Years ago, after a serious session (is there any other kind with crack?) an otherwise very conservative friend, who had but one weakness – base - started picking bits off the floor and examining them carefully in case they may have been rock. In meeting the absolute seriousness of his bulging eyed gaze, I said it would be very unlikely a bit got over there, some 15 meters from the operation. He didn't seem to hear, and kept searching for the tiniest grain that may have been dropped or flicked from delicate hands...just on the off chance you know.
Next morning the guy competed in his first triathlon...and came 8th!
It would seem Ross played a big part in kicking off the ghetto trade in crack. Altogether a great read, thanks for scanning JB.

 

[Mr. Horse]

Its fascinating how the different mediums of communication feed off each other. The media gets a tiny glimpse of something they see as a rating winner. They air an "expose on the evil of crack", then the public are outraged. "Why wont anyone think of the children etc..." Then the government gets wind and sees that by supporting this "just say no" campaign, and appealing to the general public (good, honest people) their support will grow. If the government is backing this epidemic, then it MUST be happening, so then the media feeds off that and goes crazy. Meanwhile all of this is completely fake and being blown out of proportion.
What astounds me, is that these people being sucked in by all the hype arn't questioning anything. They simply accept, then cry foul. Free world my arse, I can't believe the amazing propaganda that American's are fed, its truly astounding. There should be some sort of watch dog that actually CHECK FACTS, to see whether what these people are being told is in fact real or not.
Freeway Rick sounds like a charmer. Would be interesting to find a video or some pictures... i'll go hunting now
(thanks for that jb, really insightful!)

 

[johnboy]

Actually it was the detailing of the media's frenzy that prompted me to scan all this in, as it is a text book example of how the media operates in regard to drug scares. Creating myths from nothing, all to sell some more advertising. Don't get me started on the whole "crack baby" thing. People still believe they existed. Then again people still think Captain Cook discovered Australia...

 

[redrum]

fantastic JB - would love to hear about the crack baby saga? Whats the name of the book called?

 

[johnboy]

"Cocaine" by Dominic Streatfeild