THE MYTH OF THE CRACKHEAD
DONOVAN X. RAMSEY
As I am a child of the ‘90s, “crackhead” has been around my entire life. In fact, it predates me. It was a go-to insult when I was growing up—so-and-so was “acting like a crackhead,” “yo mama” was a crackhead. The word was everywhere in the culture, as were stories of crack addicts behaving badly.
We made “crackhead” a slur because we were scared. That’s what children do, I think, when they’re in search of power over things that frighten them; they reduce them to words, bite-size things that can be spat out at a moment’s notice.
I hardly ever saw Michelle, who lived just a few doors down the block from my family. I don’t actually remember ever meeting her, but I was definitely afraid of her.
My mom would drag our house phone room to room by its long white cord and talk at length with her friends. On more than one occasion, I overheard her complaining about Michelle from Down the Street.
Michelle had too many strange people going in and out of her house, I heard. It was all just “so sad,” my mom would say with a slow shake of her head. She would move on to other topics but my imagination stayed fixed on Michelle and what might be going on just a few feet away.
I was sitting on our front porch with my older sister one Sunday afternoon when a van pulled up and parked right in front of Michelle’s place. Out of it came an older woman and a little girl, each resembling our mysterious neighbor in her own way.
Because my sister knew everything, I asked her who the strangers were. “Duh! That’s Michelle’s family,” she said; the girl was Michelle’s daughter. “Why don’t she live with her mom?” I asked. My sister shrugged her shoulders and answered, “I don’t know. Probably because Michelle is a crackhead.”
I learned then that there was a real person behind every “crackhead.” Like me, they had moms. They could even be moms. The revelation left me gobsmacked. I would return to it whenever I heard mention of Michelle from Down the Street. It was then, I think, that I started to hate the word “crackhead.”
Those feelings were cemented years later when I sat down with the rest of the country to watch Whitney Houston refute claims that she was one. That was just how powerful “crackhead” became—it swallowed up even the best of us, not just the Michelles of the world.
It’s seared into my memory—a raspy-voiced and gaunt Houston sitting opposite Diane Sawyer. The singer is dressed entirely in white and holding a picture of herself that she’s been handed by the interviewer.
“That’s not just thin,” Sawyer insists with a squint. “Anorexia? Bulimia?” Whitney, incredulous, shakes her head. “No way.” Then Sawyer gets to the reason she’s really there, why we’re all watching. She reads from what we’re made to believe is a headline copied to the sheet of paper in her hand: “Whitney Dying, Crack Rehab Fails.”
Houston leans in and uses her left hand to punctuate the point. “First of all, let’s get one thing straight: Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight. We don’t do that. Crack is wack.”
Sawyer continued to ask if Houston indulged in alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or pills, and Houston admitted she’d done all “at times.” Crack, though? Any question the pop superstar used that substance, in particular, was settled by the simple logic that Houston was too wealthy to enjoy something so low-class.
The singer would say that her drug of choice had been marijuana laced with “base,” short for “freebase.” Neither she nor Oprah seemed aware that “freebase” and “crack” are different names for the same substance: smokable cocaine.
The flurry of recent film projects exploring Houston’s life is evidence of our desire to understand how she got to that point. We seem unsatisfied with the conclusion that a human being so beautiful, so gifted and successful, could be undone by crack.
But Houston’s addiction was not merely a matter of her personal failings. It was a high profile case of an illness made in the cauldron of American culture: the crack epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
She had all the demographic indicators for someone who would use crack cocaine. She came into her adulthood in the ‘80s. She was Black and a woman. She was from a big American city, one that limped through the riots of the late ‘60s, white flight, deindustrialization and the economic deprivation that came with it. Those facts did not determine Houston’s drug use but they almost certainly created a path for it, for her and countless others.
My fascination with the “others” led me to a career in journalism, to covering the criminal legal system, and ultimately to writing a book about the crack epidemic.1 That work has taken me all across the country to cities hard hit by the epidemic.
I’ve been to L.A., Oakland, New York, Baltimore, Philly, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, and Newark, Houston’s hometown. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people whose lives were touched by crack but never have I met a “crackhead.”
The addicts and former addicts I’ve met were dealers who thought they’d have just one hit, party girls who stayed at the party a little too long, men and women who simply started experimenting with drugs in the wrong decade. Their stories had been buried by that word. Only traces remain today.
We live now in a post-crack era. Rates of crack use in most cities hit their peak, plateaued, and started to decline soon after. Researchers are reluctant to declare an end to any epidemic but first-time crack users are now few and far between.
There are, for sure, individuals still using the substance in America today, but they’re a small cohort of mostly veteran users, with fewer and fewer people opting for the drug each year. Researchers believe millennials like me are to thank for crack’s end—for our choices in youth and our invention of the “crackhead.”
According to an article in the Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, “Since the early 1990s, inner-city youths have been purposefully avoiding crack and heroin, having seen the devastation these drugs brought into the lives of older community members.”2
“They considered ‘crackhead’ a dirty word and even took to abusing crackheads,” noted another report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice. “Such a change in attitude among youths heralded the beginning of the decline phase of the crack epidemic.”
To that end, the “crackhead” served its purpose. It warded young people like me away from hard drugs. It scared us sufficiently, but at what cost? What did we lose in the process?
Despite all she contributed throughout her short life, Whitney Houston has been denigrated in death. Her fall from “superstar” to “crackhead” has been fodder for jokes on shows like Family Guy and MADtv. In 2018, six years after her death, rapper Pusha T went so far as to use a photo of Houston’s drug-riddled bathroom to decorate his album.
Then there’s my old neighbor Michelle. I wonder often what became of her. I like to imagine that she left the neighborhood for treatment. She got clean and moved into a big house with her daughter, who can’t remember a time when they weren’t attached at the hip.
Years of covering the criminal legal system tell me that outcome is unlikely, though. It’s more probable that she was criminalized for her addiction and gobbled up by the system. If Michelle is alive today and clean, she probably lives with the residue of the epidemic—a criminal record, chronic illness, trauma, guilt, and shame.
For her sake and the sake of so many others, it’s time that we purge “crackhead” from the lexicon. It’s grotesque, a prime example of language that obscures more than it reveals. It ends conversations instead of starting them. And in a country struggling to make amends for its crack-era sins, that’s something we can’t afford.
It’s time we begin the difficult work of excavating the real stories of the individuals, families, and communities who were swept up in the crack epidemic. That begins, I think, with putting “crackhead” to rest. After all, it’s not addicts that should have ever been the object of our fears, but the forces that create them.
1. Ramsey’s book When Crack Was King is due in fall 2021.
2. Dunlap, Eloise et al. “The Severely-Distressed African American Family in the Crack Era: Empowerment is not Enough,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 33, no. 1 (2006): 115–139.
RAMSEY