Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy

How much money did the Reagan-Bush-Clinton administrations spend on medical treatment for crack addicts, compared to the money spent on criminalizing them and expanding the prison system? It is one of the questions that this film tries to answer, which offers an extensive, but not particularly deep, chronicle of the "war on drugs." The result is interesting, more for the questions it raises than for the answers it offers.

Good archive footage, interviews and soundtrack, but also a grim reminder of the unwinnable and iniquitous War on Drugs.

I find it shocking how many people are denying the huge involvment of the US government into the crack cocaine epidemic during the eighties and even labeling it as a cheap conspiracy theory.

There was an official committee report lead by John Kerry in 1985.

"The report found that "the Contra drug links included... Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."

You can google it in a couple of minutes.

The documentery is great and way above the usual Netflix cheap thrills shows.

This documentary is a welcome telling of the history of the crack cocaine epidemic that tries to look behind the obvious violence and misery towards the bigger picture.

Other reviewers appear to have taken objection to more uncomfortable truths - police corruption, inner cities destroyed by Reaganomics, CIA complicity etc - and I can only assume this is because these facts are threatening to their world view.

Admittedly, the film at times seems confused about its thesis but, f you think Nancy Reagan's 'Just Say No' campaign was an adequate response to the horrors that crack visited on already impoverished African-American communities or that Ronald Reagan really made America 'great again', then this documentary is not for you.

If you think that government drug policy has for decades been a hypocritical disaster and that the war on drugs' has achieved nothing except to give self serving politicians a convenient slogan to parrot, then you will probably find it an interesting, if not revelatory, account of a shameful, and still unfinished, chapter in our history.

An unflinching study of the '80s inner-city crack epidemic; how a government could manufacture a drug crisis, ignore those suffering and then lock up the addicts when crime skyrocketed. Basically the same response to the AIDS epidemic with the added secret sauce of authoritarianism.

As infuriating as this story is, I loved hearing from these people, and it reframed the problem from a sociological perspective. These communities didn't ask for substance abuse, and they sure as hell didn't deserve punitive measures. Corruption blazed through police departments while medical personnel sold out their patients to law enforcement. Black women were uniquely targeted here, vilified in popular culture and subjected to harsher punishment. Households were destroyed and neighborhoods decimated. Reagan's indifference gave way to Biden's crime bill, and prisons were summarily filled so that white people could sleep easier. It was systemic failure all the way down.

Just like "LA92", I knew this was going to be good and that I'd probably be pissed, it's just the extent that surprised me. It's a sucker-punch but for all of the right reasons, and I'd recommend this in a heartbeat; it's comprehensive, insightful and brutally honest.