When Crack Was King

Crack cocaine is a highly addictive stimulant made by processing powdered cocaine with baking soda or ammonia. Crack appears as small, off-white, or yellowish rocks, delivering a rapid and intense high.

Crack is heated and smoked. It is so named because it makes a cracking or popping sound when heated. Crack, the most potent form in which cocaine appears, is also the riskiest. It is between 75% and 100% pure, far stronger and more potent than regular cocaine.

In When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era, veteran journalist Donovan X. Ramsey shrewdly disrupts a harmful narrative surrounding the crack epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s. The ...

When Crack Was King 3

NEW YORK (AP) — A comprehensive new biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, a memoir on family by the prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and an exploration of the crack epidemic of the ...

LAist: 'When Crack Was King' follows four people who lived through the drug epidemic

'When Crack Was King' follows four people who lived through the drug epidemic

When Crack Was King 6

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan X. Ramsey (2023, One World Press, 427 pp., $30 HB) Black journalist Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the ...

When Crack Was King 7

In “When Crack Was King,” Donovan X. Ramsey offers a fresh history of the epidemic that gripped minority communities, inflamed media coverage and led to draconian drug laws. A man selling crack on ...

When Crack Was King 8

Donovan Ramsey discusses his book "When Crack Was King." Life in the United States was blighted by the crack epidemic of the 1980s, which devastated communities and defined a generation. "When Crack ...