Several factors intensified the problem of violent crime, especially in the inner cities. One was a shift in drug use. During the 1960s marijuana had become commonly available, especially on college campuses; this was followed by cocaine, which was far more powerful and addictive but so expensive that few could afford it.
During the 1980s growers of coca leaves in Peru and Bolivia greatly expanded production. Drug traffickers in Colombia devised sophisticated systems to transport cocaine to the United States. The price of cocaine dropped from $120 an ounce in 1981 to $50 in 1988.
Still more important was the proliferation of a cocaine-based compound called “crack” because it crackled when smoked. Crack was sold in $10 vials. Many users found that it gave an intense spasm of pleasure that overrode all other desires.
The lucrative crack trade led to bitter turf wars in the inner cities; dealers hired neighborhood youths, organized them into gangs, armed them with automatic weapons, and told them to drive competitors away. The term “drive-by shooting” entered the vocabulary. A survey of Los Angeles county in the early 1990s found that more than
150,000 young people belonged to 1,000 gangs. Violence had become a fact of life. In 1985, before crack had seized hold of the inner city, there were 147 murders in Washington, DC; in 1991, the figure skyrocketed to 482.
Black on black murder had become a significant cause of death for African Americans in their twenties. In 1988 Monsta’ Kody Scott, who at age eleven pumped shotgun blasts into rival gang members, returned after prison to his Los Angeles neighborhood. He was horrified: Gangs no longer merely shot their rivals but sprayed them with automatic weapons, seventy-five rounds to a clip, or blew them away with small rockets. By 2010, 30 percent of African American men in their twenties were in prison, or on probation or parole. The recurrent refrain of rap performers—that America was a prison—had become, for many, an everyday reality.
World History
