Crack: Cocaïne, corruption et conspiration

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.

I was hoping to learn more about how this travesty was allowed to happen by the government. I felt this was avoided in favour of focusing on the suffering of the communities, sometimes movingly but sometimes gratuitously. It was covered but only very briefly. To have any hope of stopping things like this from happening in future, as many people as possible need to be aware of the institutions' and individuals' complicity in the supply of such huge quantities of the drug.

There was an effective critique of the approach of the media at the time to reporting the crisis but this was undermined by sometimes indulging in the same kind of 'depravity porn'. It gives a good insight into what it was like for the victims and as such I can't really give it a low score, but ultimately left me feeling deflated rather than fired up & angry (like I wanted!). I'd refer people to noam chomsky to properly understand why this whole thing actually happened.

It's blaming politicians, they just all happen to be white.

A lot of this is genuinely great. I particularly appreciated the openness of prior users and dealers discussing the impacts the drug had on their lives. Also, much of the background and history of why it became such a widely discussed and controversial issue was broken down with outstanding clarity.

I'm just a bit iffy on the conspiracy part, as alluded to in the title. It might well have been part of the whole package, but there's not as much evidence to back that kind of thing up, and it's not as striking as the segments that look at things like racism, crime, prostitution, and the media hysteria, because there are plenty more interview testimonies and stock footage to back that stuff up.

If the scope had been narrowed to focus on the truly impactful stuff, and the runtime ever so slightly extended to allow for some more detail in those areas, this could have been a great documentary.

As it stands, it's still better than most of the documentaries Netflix produces, and due to at least 80% of it being very compelling, I would still recommend it quite highly.

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.