In 1986, if you turned on your television, or picked up a newspaper, you would learn that America was in the midst of an epidemic, a plague that threatened the very core of the nation. The nation was at war. Not against AIDS, but drugs. Most centrally—crack cocaine.

The shadow of the crack cocaine scare of the 80s and early 90s looms large not only over contemporary American culture, but also over the apparatus of mass incarceration in the United States. The institutionalized practices in policing and imprisonment that the crack cocaine panic set in motion persist despite the fact that many of the key claims that were used to fuel the scare—that crack was instantly addicting, compelled users to violent crime, and frequently resulted in user death or life-destruction—have since been effectively dismantled as socially constructed myths.¹ Even at the height of the scare, crack represented only a small percentage of total cocaine use, and it never became a popular or widely-used drug in the United States or elsewhere in the world.² Most scholars of the crack scare agree that the hysteria that captured the nation bore little relation to the reality of the phenomenon but was deeply shaped by both the contingent political moment and fundamental racial biases.³

What about this new drug sparked such public frenzy? In 1985, The New York Times ran its first story documenting the emergence of “crack,” capturing the public imagination. As the nation geared up for its 1986 midterm elections, a handful of national and local newspapers alone published over 1,000 articles documenting the ascendancy of this new form of smokeable cocaine in America’s inner cities.⁴ Concern rose exponentially as reporters and politicians alike described crack as “deadly”⁵ and “possibly the most addictive drug on Earth.”⁶ The use of the drug was widely characterized by the media and politicians as a “plague” threatening America and an “epidemic” spreading across the nation.⁷

The conceptual and rhetorical relationship between crack cocaine use and “plague” and “epidemic” was so strong in the second half of the 1980s that it’s difficult to describe the period of the crack-cocaine scare without using the phrase “crack cocaine epidemic.” The deployment of this language by the media was no accident; political leaders explicitly used analogy of plague to color crack use and sales as an infectious disease that threatened the health of the population. For example, in a July 1986 Senate hearing, “’Crack’ Cocaine,” the chairman, Senator William V. Roth Jr. said:

Senator Roth’s analogy to the Black Plague was misleading but powerful. It prefigured the rapid unleashing of state force. Following closely on the heels of the first reports of crack use in the media, federal, state, and local lawmakers rushed into action. The Democratic Congress passed the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act which increased federal sentences for mostly nonviolent drug offenses, established a mandatory minimum sentence for first-time crack possession, eliminated probation or parole for certain drug offenders, and perhaps most importantly allocated billions of dollars of funding for anti-drug enforcement efforts. In all—of the $3.9 billion allocated in 1986 to fight drugs, less than 10 percent went to treatment, education, and prevention.⁹ Simultaneously, state legislators began to impose their own draconian sentences for drug offenses.¹⁰ President Reagan, emboldened by the so-called epidemic at home, escalated international drug interdiction efforts by sending American troops to Bolivia.¹¹ The “War on Drugs,” first declared by President Nixon, had at last escalated into full-fledged campaigns both at home and abroad.

Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argues that by authorizing the War on Drugs, with its attendant funding priorities and changes in policing and judicial practices, the crack cocaine scare can be directly linked to the emergence of mass incarceration and the reproduction of a black underclass.¹² Because the crack scare came into being only after cocaine smoking had spread to lower-class, urban African-Americans and Latinos,¹³ the racial make-up of the users clearly contributed to the moralizing rhetoric and rapid, punitive political response in the public sphere. As anti-drug police forces focused their enforcement on street-level dealers and users, African-Americans were disproportionately arrested and incarcerated.¹⁴ This differential enforcement and incarceration rate continues today.

Crack cocaine was hardly the first, or last, drug or social problem to be characterized as an “epidemic” or “plague” by the mainstream media and by public officials. Today, we hear reports on the obesity epidemic, meth epidemic, prescription drug epidemic, and the gun violence epidemic. All of these “epidemics” differ in the mechanisms by which they threaten society, the extent to which they’ve been accepted as such in mainstream culture, and the level of state response to such alarms. Thus, it’s highly unlikely that the effects of the language of epidemic are uniform. However, given the massive machinery of state repression that accompanied that crack scare in the 1980s and 1990s, it’s worth asking: What symbolic work is being done in calling a social phenomenon an “epidemic”? What governmental response is being called for in such descriptions, what state actions does such rhetoric authorize?

I think there is good reason to believe that the language of science, biomedicine, and public health, distilled into two key terms—“plague” and “epidemic”—provided additional symbolic force to the “war” effort by appealing to another, fundamental mechanism of state power: that which allows repressive response to infectious disease threats. The language of plagues and epidemics has been used to characterize fluctuations in the use of nearly every drug throughout American history.

¹⁵ Scholars have criticized media description of drug epidemics as unwise, counter-productive for an actual epidemiological approach, and liable to provoke irrational political responses that are often repressive and unjust.¹⁶ But why does the language of “epidemic” and “plague” resonate so well with the American populace? And why was the language deployed so forcefully (even in comparison to proximate heroin, cocaine, and marijuana “epidemics”) to describe crack cocaine use in the 1980s?

In this sense, the crack cocaine epidemic becomes a near-perfect case of the excesses of state power; the mechanisms of war and the mechanisms of quarantine were deployed against a disenfranchised internal population that posed no actual threat to national security, or the health of the nation.

Priscilla Wald’s work on the “outbreak narrative” may provide some assistance in answering these questions. In Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Wald traces the symbolic power of the outbreak narrative through American history. Drawing on the archetypal story of Typhoid Mary, she details the way in which this narrative configures certain, often outsider, individuals as “carriers” who both suffer for, and represent the sins of the modern world.¹⁷ The narratives, she argues, are almost always mythical, but they carry strong emotional appeal, for “only war could inflict devastation on such a scale, but the violence of war could not rival the inescapability or level of destruction of the worst epidemics.”¹⁸

Building on George Rosen’s work on the history of public health,¹⁹ and Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower,²⁰ Wald also gestures towards the fundamental link between public health governance and repressive state powers. She writes, “Communicable disease is also the alibi for the governance mechanisms of the community, which must safeguard its charges against disease.”²¹ The apparatus of state protection of its population, at the expense of individual liberty, I would argue, is triggered in really two main instances—war and plague. In this sense, the crack cocaine epidemic becomes a near-perfect case of the excesses of state power; the mechanisms of war and the mechanisms of quarantine were deployed against a disenfranchised internal population that posed no actual threat to national security, or the health of the nation.

The question remains, however, of why the 1980s? Why crack? Some authors have argued that the construction of the epidemic was primarily used as a scapegoat for the larger, structural social problems that were facing the nation.²² Others have suggested that it primarily served to authorize the War on Drugs, and therefore to maintain racial hierarchies and class inequity in a post-Civil Rights era.²³ Any answer will necessarily be speculative, but thinking about the crack epidemic in the outbreak narrative framework Wald discusses helps.

In this case, the inner-city African American man became an archetypal carrier. Crack use was the infection, a dangerous one that turned its host into violent criminals. Sellers were knowingly spreading a plague, making money on the instant pleasures that the “disease” brought. Although mostly afflicting the already disenfranchised, the threat of spread to suburban areas—of the disease itself but also its violent effects—was used to garner support of the more powerful classes. Selling this narrative was easy; the urban poor were already despised. African-American male bodies were already feared by the white middle and upper classes. The plotline of outbreak would resonant easily with the public. And, finally, unleashing the punitive force of the state on those who were already excluded from mainstream economic production²⁴ was perhaps a more palatable “solution” to urban poverty than anything else.