I was going to guess '80s too (crack cocaine).

EDITED to remove unfounded speculation.

If it was meant to stay in the black communities, that didn't work out to well.
It was rampant in upper circles as well. Disco halls were plum full of the stuff as was Aspen, Co.

Showed how it came full circle.

They did not give a shit where the cocaine ended up.

It was part of Iran Contra, but not until the Clinton years did the CIA essentially say the Kerry report was correct. Kerry, a then very junior senator, got a SFRC subcommittee that investigated terrorism and international drug running. That committee was one of the earliest to look at the drug and gun running that had started earlier. Kerry became a Senator in 1985 and he started this investigation in 1986. He continued until a plane crash proved the gun running he was investigating, stonewalled by the Regan and later Bush administrations. At that point, Iran Contra became a major scandal and there was a large Congressional investigation that did not include a very junior Senator, though he was called in to question many people who had already lied to his committee. It was for lying to him on his or the big committee that led to indictments of people like Oliver North and Elliot Abrahms. Incidentally GHWB pardoned them at the advice of Bill Barr.

As to the 1960s, I do not think cocaine was the big drug problem.

I think there was a SC rules the the immunity couldn't be rescinded to prosecute those who, for all intents and purposes, the masterminds of the crime. I think that is why Congress will no offer it to anyone, they were too free with it in the past.

Quaaludes, speed (remember Black Mollies in the back of Rollingstone?) and crank were big in the 1970s, cocaine was 1980s.

That might be why many of the indictments were for lying to him. He had been an outstanding prosecutor in MA before he was lt governor then senator. There were 5 people indicted, who needed pardons.

Loopholes that allow these kind of architects of evil exist?

Oliver North and Elliot Abrahms are two more of these miscreants.

That's when all the crack babies were born
and we teachers had to deal with them later.

Born on drugs: Predictions about crack babies didn’t come true, offering hope for opioid era

https://www.centerforhealthjournalism.org/fellowships/projects/born-drugs-predictions-about-crack-babies-didn-t-come-true-offering-hope-opioid

Crack Babies: Twenty Years Later

During the 80's and 90's, the nation's health specialists panicked over the growing number of so-called "crack babies" — children exposed to crack cocaine in utero. These children were said to be doomed to lives of physical and mental disability. But, 20 years later, many of the children who were perceived to be "at-risk" are proving the predictions wrong as young adults. Host Michel Martin speaks to Mary Barr, an activist who is vocal about her own drug abuse during pregnancy, and Nisa Beceriklisoy, her daughter. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Carl Bell, a clinical professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126478643

I taught in a community ravaged by crack in the late 1990s when the fist crack babies were making it into the junior highs and high schools.

Those kids were different from, but similar to fetal alcohol syndrome, kids. Whether that was because of being hooked in utero, their life situations as youth growing up around drugs, family instability, or something else, I cannot statistically or definitively say. But they were often shorter fused, less impulse control, struggled with even simple directions that had more than one step at a time, more violent, and a slew of other problems.

Again, impossible to separate out the post birth contributors form the prebirth contributors but I can tell you that they were definitely more difficult than the rest of the students.

This is the kind of talk that lead to harsh crack cocaine laws even though it is chemically similar to powder cocaine which was used by the upper class in night clubs in the 70s.

----

No. The myth of the “crack baby” has persisted for decades, but studies have consistently concluded that pre-natal exposure to crack cocaine, which happens when a woman smokes crack cocaine while pregnant, has little or no effect on the long-term development of a child.

Exposure to cocaine (powder or crack) can slow fetal growth but the development of the brain and body catches up as these children grow up. It has not, as widely thought in the 80s and 90s, produced “joyless” or “unmanageable” children.

Poverty and the harms and stresses associated with it have a more significant impact on the physical and emotional development of a child than pre-natal exposure to cocaine. Children from nurturing and cognitively stimulating environments perform better, regardless of cocaine exposure.

https://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-facts/cocaine/pregnancy-crack-babies

I'm surprised teachers wouldn't be better informed on this. You never heard of "coke babies".

and I remember the so-called Crack epidemic and the drive-by shootings and gang wars. Crack cocaine was cheap. It really was a little bit scary to live in Los Angeles at the time.

But the irony is that much more expensive cocaine powder was inundating the film industry. I don't know where all that cocaine was coming from. Before John Belushi's death, there was even this idea that cocaine wasn't all that harmful. But it continued to be used after Belushi's death. Over time, after a few more overdoses and suicides and some extremely poor judgment demonstrated by filmmakers and studio execs, studios woke up and began to try to rehab some of their key people. Some people became more discreet about using it. Anyway, I don't think the expensive stuff came from the CIA. One city, two drug stories.

People, who could afford it, were demanding higher highs, which then really drives the addiction.

An excellent book about the timeline of crack is "Land of opportunity: one family's quest for the American dream in the age of crack"
(Land of Opportunity used to be Arkansas' Motto; Changed to The Natural State)

What is really funny, is I used to work with a guy who knew the people in the book, who are from Marianna, AR. It's about the Chamber Brothers, who were living in Detroit, who saw an opportunity with this new way of processing cocaine, which really cheapened the price. This happened after the collapse of the car companies, so the brothers took advantage of being able to buy duplex's and apartment buildings for next to nothing and set it where the lower floors had the cheapest crack and prostitutes, rising in pricing on the upper floors.

All the executives were people they grew up with in Marianna, which is why it went on for so long and no one talked. Thing is, if it had been a legitimate business, the brothers would be billionaires by now. They were brilliant businessmen. Every weekend they would bring lawn bags full money back to Ark., buried the money somewhere, best estimates were $50 million in mid-eighties. Feds never found it.

They should have gotten out of prison in the early 2000's but have fallen off the radar, probably bought an island somewhere and are living their HEA.

New Jack City is loosely based on their story.

They probably paid to silence the authorities and politicians.

Look up the original Air America in Laos.

1980s

The CIA (Cocaine in America) dumped enough to bring the price down to where it was affordable to lower income neighborhoods.
Look up Michael Ruppert also

Really good show that details the CIA's role in bringing tens of thousands of kilos of cocaine to Los Angeles in order to covertly fund Reagan's war in Central America.

It coincided with the invention of crack as a method of free basing cocaine. This brought the price down to $5, $10, or $20 and made crack available to lower income areas. Before that cocaine was a rich man's drug exclusively, after crack the drug ravaged the inner city for decades.

Now it's since been proven that crack is no more or less addictive than powder cocaine, but it was the price point that made it more dangerous. This provided fuel for the War on Drugs that is still burning today.

During the Reagan reign. Crack cocaine became more addictive than pure coke. Look at how the British Empire controlled Chinese tea supplies to learn where the model for this came from.

It originally came in matchboxes and was really awful compared to what we get today. I didn''t see much coke around until the mid 70's. Soon it became rampant and wasn't connected to black folks, in my experience, the way weed was at first in FL. The coke mainly came through Mexico and on down to distributors here of all races. If there was dumping in the black community, I didn't see it here or in CA during those years. Could have been other communities where this happened, though.

late 60's and early 70's to undermine the Black Panther movement to build community. COINTELPRO was the secret organization Hoover created meant to undermine the Panthers and the anti-war movement as well.