User reviews

I'm confused because as someone said, this was on HBO, i remember it pretty well.

I used to attend meeting at the Miracle Club in west palm beach when this was filmed. I wasn't there when it was filmed but i have met several of the people they did film. I haven't watched it recently but i do remember they spoke to one young man and his family and I remember that boy from several meetings. I hope he got well. This was a rough place (west palm beach) at the time. I didn't smoke crack but almost everyone i knew did. You met people from every walk of life at the Miracles Club. I made several life long friends there.

Cocaine was the famous drug of the '80s. It was assumed that every Hollywood celebrity and every Wall Street stock broker was using it. Drawing less attention was crack, a cheap form of cocaine that devastated entire communities. Vince DiPersio's and Bill Guttentag's "Crack USA: County Under Siege" focuses on some youths in West Palm Beach, Florida, who got hooked on the stuff. Some truly nasty stories.

The point is that a drug epidemic doesn't just affect the "other"; it ends up affecting everyone. I might add that we now have the opioid epidemic (notice how when it primarily affects white people it gets treated as a medical issue, but when it primarily affects black people they get labeled "addicts"?). There is simply no such thing as a drug-free society.

The documentary is available on YouTube.

Seems like I cant find a copy of this documentary anywhere. HBO.com has no clue what I am talking about. Little did I know at 14 seeing this documentary that I would soon be hanging with 3 of those kids that were featured on that documentary. I grew up in West Palm Beach Florida. And a few years later was the girlfriend of the kid who watched a girl have a seizure from doing crack and instead of helping her. He robbed her and left her there. That same kid turned me onto the evil substance when I was 18 years old. I would really like to find a copy of this documentary. It is very important for me to see again where I went wrong in my life. And why I missed the signs of a life about to go tragically in the wrong direction. That video marks the beginning of many years of substance abuse for me. And a few people in the video who played a part in introducing me to it.

This was a great documentary. But people should realize that everything that goes on in any community will eventually leak over into other communities. People would say; "Oh that only goes on in the black or Hispanic community". This is America! We may not all be of the same race, creed or religion but we're all Americans. When Black people scream out the white community HAS to listen! Blacks & Hispanics have been telling whites for years about police abuse, until "Rampart" in Los Angeles no one was listening. If you take care of EVERY community you take care of the country.