The vast majority—75 percent—of crack cocaine users are white or Hispanic. But nearly 85 percent of people in federal prison for crack offenses are black.
The prison was picturesque, and not just for a prison. Situated on acres of wooded land near Eagle River in Anchorage, this wood-beamed building with large, unbarred picture windows was nothing like prison in what the Alaskans called the Lower 48. There were only around thirty-five women in my section, and I had a tiny room of my own and carried my own keys. The guards dressed in regular clothes, not uniforms. We ate from the Alaskan land, a nutritious diet of salmon and bison and vegetables—nothing like the unrecognizable meal trays I’d later face in the California prison system. While I served my time, I took classes and earned my GED.
As I came to know fellow inmates, I got glimpses of occupation: how the U.S. government had bulldozed into Alaska, imposing on the land and the native communities. If the Eskimos didn’t cooperate, they were incarcerated. I met many natives imprisoned for practicing generations-old customs, such as trapping, hunting, and fishing. The motto on the Alaska license plate, “The Last Frontier,” now seemed sadly ironic. But little did I realize that, when I would return to my own community of South L.A., I’d witness the government doing the same bulldozing there—dominating and exploiting and locking up everyone in sight.
I wrote letters to Toni; sometimes she wrote back. Every week I phoned, but the conversations were curt. Any call from prison was a strained call. I never knew what to say. How do you stay involved when you’re locked away, when the system is designed to make you irrelevant, no matter if you are a parent? In many ways, it was easier emotionally to remain out of touch with the outside world, and that’s what a lot of people did.
Though Toni was detached on the phone, in her life she was all-in. Excelling in her honors courses, she was chosen for a summer program to live on campus at California State Polytechnic University and take college classes. She made it clear to me, though, that none of her friends’ parents were in prison. I was a blight on her life, a life to which I could hardly relate.
My brothers weren’t setting any stellar examples either. “Everybody’s a drughead or jailbird,” Toni said, matter-of-factly. My mother’s house had become headquarters for all sorts of my brothers’ entrepreneurial activity, and Toni was unfazed when colorful characters of the underworld showed up at all hours. Some pulled up in Rolls-Royces and Maseratis, others in smoke-puffing buckets. Some were dressed in Armani, others smelled like they lived on the street.
Even the police showing up no longer ruffled Toni. She and some friends from her fancy school were playing video games one afternoon when police pounded on the door looking for one of the Burton boys. Toni knew the drill: she squared herself in the doorway to prevent them from entering. “Do you have a warrant?” she asked. “No? Then I can’t let you in. I’m a minor, and I’m the only one home.” With that, she locked the door and went back to the video game, her classmates’ eyeballs ready to pop. She advised, “Don’t go home and tell your parents any of this.”
One time Toni stood by as my mother answered the door to the police. Again, they were looking for one of my brothers, but they pointed to Toni and said she better watch it too, that she had a smart mouth on her. I figured if Toni had made it to her teenage years and the police were only on her about her smart mouth, she was doing quite all right.
Often, I thought Toni sounded lonely. But what I didn’t know was that, in a way, my brothers’ and my incarceration lifted a weight from her. She’d been shouldering the pressures of her academic life plus worrying about all of us, and now she no longer had to feel responsible for everyone else in the family. She could replace the shame and embarrassment of us with peace, quiet, and normalcy.
My sentence was reduced to a year, and toward the end I received a letter from Toni saying if I missed her high school graduation, she’d never speak to me again. It was her way of telling me not to screw this up, that when I got out, I needed to stay clean and get myself home.
I returned to Los Angeles in time for Toni’s prom, then her graduation. On top of that, she’d earned a scholarship in math to UCLA. My daughter was going to a university. How prideful I felt sitting there in the bleachers of Granada Hills, watching her in a cap and gown. But it also made me feel even more down on myself, acutely reminding me of all I could’ve done, what I could’ve been. I was still messed up. In prison, the drugs had been removed but my depression hadn’t. I was still grieving—and searching for relief any way I could get it.
During the year I’d been in Alaska, there’d been a major shift in South L.A.: lots of people were all about small, white chalky rocks. You could buy these rocks, wrapped in tin foil or stacked in small glass vials, on most every corner in my community. You lit them and smoked them, and it hit you fast and hard. I’d never seen this drug before—and neither had the police. Crack had come to town mysteriously and seemingly overnight. One day it didn’t exist, the next it did. Like a biblical plague of locusts, like Hitchcock’s The Birds, crack swarmed out of nowhere straight into South Central and ravaged the place.
Derived from cocaine, crack was easier to transport, easier to use—and dirt cheap. While an ounce of powder cocaine was around $2,600, an ounce of crack was $800, and you could find a single rock of crack on any street corner in South L.A. for five bucks. But the thing about crack—that very important thing no one realized until too late—was that your first hit was one too many, and after that, no amount was enough. One of the most addictive drugs in the world, crack took you hostage, and then it made you rabid.
But where was all this crack coming from? And why was it so cheap that any kid in my neighborhood who, just a year earlier, would’ve spent pocket cash on a hamburger and milkshake or, at worst, on some weed, was instead buying crack? None of us knew the bigger picture—and, I’d come to learn, that was by design.
More than a decade would pass before a San Jose Mercury News reporter, Gary Webb, reported a bizarre and devastating link between a CIA cover-up and the explosion of crack cocaine in South L.A. According to Webb, the sale of crack in my neighborhood was funding a war three thousand miles away by, astonishingly, arming the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The way it worked, he explained, was that the CIA facilitated massive amounts of cocaine to be flown into Los Angeles, with the same planes returning to Nicaragua stocked with weapons.
Webb pointed to a primary kingpin: a Contra enjoying political asylum in California. And his biggest customer: a young black man from South Central L.A., Ricky Ross. I’d never met Ross; few people had, because he kept a low, hardly flashy profile. A high school tennis star, Ross’s college scholarship vanished when recruiters discovered he could barely read. But he found a new path when one of his teachers introduced him to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer. Though illiterate, Ross wasn’t lacking in ingenuity. Swearing off drugs and alcohol himself, he streamlined the mass production of cocaine into crack. And made a fortune. One of his biggest challenges became trying to hide his newfound wealth from his unsuspecting mother, so he became a philanthropist of sorts, outfitting neighborhood parks and renovating his mom’s church—beautifying the same community his crack was destroying. He put cash in real estate and bought a hotel near the 110 called Freeway Motor Inn, earning him the moniker Freeway Ricky Ross, which was what I knew him by.
When demand grew too high to handle, Ross enlisted his boyhood friends from the neighborhood—who happened to be members of the Crips gang—to be his “distributors.” Suddenly flush with cash, the Crips invested in automatic weapons, which were also, conveniently, supplied by the Contras. Soon, the rival Bloods gang began distributing crack too, creating the perfect shit-storm. In the blink of an eye, Los Angeles became the crack and gang violence capital of the world.
It didn’t take long before the Crips and the Bloods sold to gangs in other cities, swiftly helping crack terrorize its way into poor black neighborhoods across the country.
The twisted irony is that while Reagan’s CIA was flagging into the U.S. planes carrying tons of cocaine, the president and first lady were all over the airwaves ranting about the War on Drugs. Nancy implored, “Just say no,” and Ronald declared drugs a threat to national security—which was also a call to militarize law enforcement. He vowed to hire more prosecutors, though he said nothing about public defenders. And he crowed about being in “hot pursuit” of drug traffickers, evoking the words of black boxer Joe Louis, “They can run, but they can’t hide.”
But the Contra kingpins didn’t have to hide; they were living the American Dream in plain sight.
One simple way to stop an overflow is to shut off the faucet. But a Department of Justice Inspector General’s report would later reveal that, although the whereabouts of Freeway Ricky Ross’s major Nicaraguan drug supplier were known and tracked, the kingpin wasn’t arrested. Unlike Ross, who eventually was sentenced to life without parole (though released on appeal after thirteen years, thanks in large part to Webb’s reporting). And unlike just about everyone I knew from my community who’d done drug-related time. Same, too, with the massive lockup of my generation in impoverished minority communities across the United States.
The Reagans waved the American flag, but this wasn’t, in actuality, a war on drugs. It was a war on people: black people. We were sold down the river by the government—yet again.
In my neighborhood, it was like the police were lying in wait. Waiting for you to have a taillight out, or to roll through a stop, so they could search you for drugs. The government had my community, like the natives in Alaska, under siege.
It was hook ’em and book ’em. Even first-time drug offenders faced mandatory minimum prison sentences—sometimes for just marijuana. But police were always hoping to hit the crack jackpot. If you were found with just one $5 rock in your possession, you were prosecuted far more harshly than if you had greater amounts of any other drug, including powdered cocaine. It was as though cocaine—the rich person’s drug—was benign, and crack—the poor person’s drug—was a grenade. Someone arrested for crack would need to have a hundred times more cocaine on them to be prosecuted to the same degree, even though the two drugs were pharmacologically the same.
At first, to me, crack seemed weird and strange, and I didn’t like it. But in the act of consuming it, my pain was replaced with a silence more profound than anything I had ever experienced. The escape it brought was instantaneous. When it was over, I yearned for it again.
And again. And again. And again. And again.
Until I lost my ability to separate myself from it. It didn’t matter what my mother said, or how my daughter looked at me. Crack made nothing else matter.