Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vogelbon, and I've got a serious but important
Speaker 1: topic for you today. In October of seventeen, President Donald
Speaker 1: Trump declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency.
Speaker 1: In the White House ceremony, Trump said, nobody has seen
Speaker 1: anything like what's going on now, referring to the thousands
Speaker 1: of Americans overdosing every year from a class of narcotics
Speaker 1: that includes prescription painkillers, heroine, and fentanyl, which is a
Speaker 1: synthetic form of heroin. It's a serious problem and a
Speaker 1: sentiment echoed by well meaning public figures across the board.
Speaker 1: But the thing is, we have seen its like before.
Speaker 1: Back in the nine eighties and early nineties, the crack
Speaker 1: cocaine epidemic ravaged poor black communities across the country. When
Speaker 1: krack arrived in economically depressed urban areas, it proved both
Speaker 1: powerfully addicted and potentially lucrative. Violent turf wars erupted as
Speaker 1: dealers fought for control of the market, and the group
Speaker 1: of addiction caught many people. The guv mints response to
Speaker 1: the crack epidemic was to double down on the war
Speaker 1: on drugs, first declared by Richard Nixon in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: In nineteen six, Congress passed to the infamous one to
Speaker 1: one sentencing law, which treated possession of one gram of crack,
Speaker 1: not the sale, mind just possession, as the equivalent of
Speaker 1: possessing one hundred grams of powder cocaine. This was on
Speaker 1: top of a five year mandatory minimum sentence for first
Speaker 1: time possession of crack. Since black people accounted for eight
Speaker 1: of crack arrests, black communities were the hardest hit by
Speaker 1: the criminalization of crack, which sent young black men to
Speaker 1: prison at historic rates. The federal prison population swelled between
Speaker 1: the years five and two thousand, and two thirds of
Speaker 1: those convictions were for drug offenses. Studies have shown that
Speaker 1: although Blacks are no more likely than whites to use
Speaker 1: illegal drugs, there six to ten times more likely to
Speaker 1: be incarcerated for drug offenses. In contrast to the tough
Speaker 1: on crime response to the crack epidemic, which took its
Speaker 1: toll primarily on poor black unities, the government responds to
Speaker 1: the opioid crisis, in which more than pent of overdose
Speaker 1: victims are white, has been wildly different, particularly in the
Speaker 1: way that elected officials and law enforcement talk about addiction.
Speaker 1: Police departments across the country adopted treatment first policies that
Speaker 1: postponed or forwent criminal prosecution for opioid possession and diverted
Speaker 1: drug offenders to treatment programs. Police officers in the small
Speaker 1: town of Laconia, New Hampshire, a state hit particularly hard
Speaker 1: by overdose deaths, carry business cards that read the Laconia
Speaker 1: Police Department recognizes that substance misuse is a disease. We
Speaker 1: understand you can't fight this alone. One reason that most
Speaker 1: opioid addicts are white could be because they are more
Speaker 1: likely to be prescribed pain medication. One study showed that
Speaker 1: doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication for their
Speaker 1: black patients, believing falsely that they have higher pain thresholds.
Speaker 1: But we spoke with Eco Yanka, a law professor at
Speaker 1: Shiva University, who finds this treatment first rhetoric a little
Speaker 1: bitter sweet. He says that while it's heartening to see
Speaker 1: local law enforcement and elected officials talking about addicts as
Speaker 1: victims instead of moral degenerates, it's not like any of
Speaker 1: this is based on new information. He said. We spent
Speaker 1: two generations locking up young black men for any reason
Speaker 1: we could, in large part covered by the War on drugs,
Speaker 1: and then we have an explosion of addiction in the
Speaker 1: white community, and suddenly everyone starts reading all the science
Speaker 1: that's been around for two decades. Yanka is one of
Speaker 1: many voices calling out the clear racial divide between the
Speaker 1: hyper criminalization and moral outcry over crack addiction and the
Speaker 1: leniency and compassion shown towards opioid addiction. When pregnant black
Speaker 1: mothers became addicted to crack, it created a national panic
Speaker 1: over crack babies. Today, a baby is born addicted to
Speaker 1: opioids every nineteen minutes, but there's no parallel vilification of
Speaker 1: opioid moms. The crack baby panic of late nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: was sparked by one preliminary study of just twenty three
Speaker 1: infants and led to predictions that an entire generation would
Speaker 1: grow up sickly, brain damaged, and heavily dependent on social services.
Speaker 1: Longitudinal studies have since exposed the crack baby myth, showing
Speaker 1: that full term babies born to crack addicted mothers show
Speaker 1: no health differences compared to their peers. One of the
Speaker 1: key talking points of the presidential campaign was the economic
Speaker 1: toll of globalization on rural, mostly white communities, and how
Speaker 1: the ensuing joblessness and hopelessness helped to fuel the opioid crisis.
Speaker 1: We spoke with Maya Slavitts, a New York based journalist
Speaker 1: who has written extensively about addiction. They said, the reason
Speaker 1: we saw crack hit black neighborhoods the way it did
Speaker 1: in the eighties and nineties was because they had high
Speaker 1: unemployment levels and were hit hard by d industrialization, all
Speaker 1: the same things we're seeing in rural white communities now.
Speaker 1: Yanka says that plenty of sociologists and economists were making
Speaker 1: those connections back in the nineteen eighties, but their voices
Speaker 1: and data were drowned out by a media narrative that
Speaker 1: preferred to place the blame for the crack epidemic on
Speaker 1: negligent black mothers and absent black fathers. While we'd hope
Speaker 1: that the narrative surrounding today's opioid epidemic wouldn't change if
Speaker 1: its racial demograph were reversed, we can at least speak
Speaker 1: glad that some of the people facing addiction aren't going
Speaker 1: it alone, and that some of the programs being created
Speaker 1: will help all of our struggling citizens in the future.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Speaker 1: Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.