In 1972, a drug aficionado could stop by his local “head shop” and pick up a copy of The Gourmet Cokebook: A Complete Guide to Cocaine, published anonymously by the aptly named White Mountain Press. In it, he could find a simple recipe for cooking up a batch of crack. It was easy: Mix equal parts of powder cocaine and baking soda in a pot, add water, boil, let cool, and then break the hardened, desiccated mass into small pieces – rocks – suitable for smoking. Smoked cocaine, the cokehead learned, produced a more intense, if shorter-lived, high than snorted cocaine. Smoked cocaine goes straight into the lungs, where it is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream, from whence it zooms into the smoker’s brain; physiologically speaking, this is a much more efficient and effective process than snorting cocaine. Nasal membranes just cannot compete with the lungs for getting the drug to where it counts.

The crack industry was, no doubt, a tough trade. Most dealers had to harden their hearts to the harm they were doing to people they knew, to the communities in which they lived. Going to prison, for a while, maybe forever, was a part of the business model. Crack dealers got shot and they killed each other. People died at age eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-five.

But the rewards of success in the industry were just as real. Hand-to-hand sellers sported the latest footwear, wrapped themselves in gold, and partook of a brotherhood that gave them a sense of belonging and allegiance too rare in their atomized world. Many were young men who saw no mainstream way to reveal their talent or courage to the women in their neighborhoods or to the wider society in which they struggled to survive with dignity. On the streets, other options presented themselves in the hard world these young men made.

By the late 1980s, crack had the nation in a panic. Murder, death, instant addiction, crack crews, crack kingpins, crackheads, crack whores, crack babies. Crack, the mass media roared, was everywhere. Those stalwart scholars of America’s engagement with crack cocaine, Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, argue that “the period from 1986 to 1992 was in many ways the most intense drug scare of the twentieth century.” They have a strong case.

The media told quite a few whoppers about crack cocaine during that period, feeding the American public’s wildest fears with terrifying, if often untrue or exaggerated, tales of ever-widening drug devastation. America’s newsweeklies, especially Time and Newsweek, helped lead the charge, sometimes into hysteria, and in those pre-Internet days, these newsweeklies had a lot of reach – some 20 million people, most of them middle-class voters, read Time at its peak.

A black man who had served almost a decade in the penitentiary came home to the South Side of Chicago in the mid-1980s. He watched young men – at first just a few – set up shop on the corners in his neighborhood. They were selling crack cocaine.

He was tempted – to buy, to sell – but he steered clear. Still, he understood the draw. From his own younger days and from his years in prison, he knew the men who organized the operations that moved the product from wholesale purchase to hand-to-hand sale. In his estimation, these were righteous men, men whose names he did not discuss, knowing full well what it would mean if he used their names with the wrong people. These were men that, he understood, “had to make their choices.

In Philadelphia, a city that arguably had more crack users, per capita, than any other, a dealer mused about his clientele: “The girls like ‘the girl’ [crack], the boys like ‘the girl’ … That glass dick [the crack pipe]. They puffin’ away for the genie in the glass bottle. Ha-heh.” By 1991, more than four million people had smoked crack. Whites made up the majority of those people. Even though pretty much every mass media story and politicians’ claim emphasized the addictive power of crack, the vast majority of people who smoked crack did not become addicted to the drug. Most smoked recreationally, rarely, or they tried it once or maybe a few times and then stopped. But the biggest consumers, the people the crack crews depended on for their profits, those were the addicts, the people, as the Philly crack dealer put it, who put their lives in the hands of the “genie in the glass bottle.”

The crack market began to break in the mid 1990s. Dealers noticed that fewer new customers were showing up at the drug corners. In New York City, business started to slow as early as mid 1991.

Willie T., a Harlem dealer, worried about the downturn. He had started as a small-scale crack operator in 1988 with two partners and $200 in cash. Almost immediately, he was netting a solid $1,000 a week. He was able to take weekends off and could keep a low profile. But by May 1991 his profits had dropped to as little as $300 a week. He told a New York Times reporter, “It’s real slow now … instead of ten buyers, there might be three.” The good news, from his perspective, was that his old customers still bought as much crack as they could afford. But new customers were hard to come by.

Without a steady supply of cocaine there is no crack. Without the global war on cocaine, the crack trade would be neither so profitable nor so punishing. Thus to understand crack, it helps to first understand cocaine, how that drug went from widely available pharmaceutical marvel to illicit and glamorous narcotic. First comes cocaine, then comes crack.

Not that long ago, cocaine was just another thing a person could buy. It was legal in the United States and pretty much everywhere else. It was cheap. It was made by a small group of major pharmaceutical houses. And while cocaine was sold in powder form it also was a critical ingredient in medicinal syrups, patent medicine elixirs, and, to use an anachronistic term, energy drinks. Procurement of powder cocaine or a cocaine-infused consumer product took no more than a walk to a corner store.