Hour by hour crack: The plague feeds on junkies and cops, hookers and babies—and all of us. It’s another nation in our midst, and the misery is getting worse. (1988, November 28). Newsweek.

OVERVIEW

Let us consider Detroit, the city in which a Little League team had to fold this summer because the players were too busy selling crack to play baseball. We will start with a public-relations executive named Richard Mosely, who lives in a neighborhood of middle- and lower-middle-class houses in northwest Detroit. A year ago Mosely bought a second house nearby as an investment. Before anyone moved in, addicts tore a window frame out of the wall thinking Mosely might have left some tools inside.

On the streets now, teenage prostitutes solicit him for as little as $12. To go out for a six-pack is to run a gantlet of ragged men whose desperation is as obvious as it is incomprehensible to a person fortunate enough not to share it. Mosely relates:

They’ll stand outside the store and beg for a quarter to get a sandwich. But when I offer to buy them a sandwich, they say, ‘That’s all right.’ I bought one guy a sandwich and he took it back in the store and tried to sell it back to the owner.

These are the two Americas. No other line you can draw is as trenchant as this. On the one side, people of normal human appetites, for food and sex and creature comforts; on the other, those who crave only the roar and crackle of their own neurons, whipped into a frenzy of synthetic euphoria.

The Crack Nation. It is in our midst, but not a part of us; our laws barely touch it on its progress through our jails and hospitals, on its way to our morgues. Its residents are largely poor and black, but also white and middle class; and a stockbroker who is also a crack addict has far more in common with lowlifes cadging quarters outside the 7-Eleven than he does with the client sitting across the desk. He has more money, though perhaps not for long.

This article describes what a team of Newsweek reporters found when they spent two days in "the Crack Nation on street corners, in courtrooms, and hospital nurseries. It is probably in the nursery that our hearts are most deeply touched by this new plague."

"Detroit, Monday noon. Dr. Robert Welch, a perinatalogist at Hutzel Hospital, examines...a pair of twin girls born to 33-year-old ‘Judy Young.’ Judy is described by her social worker as a sometime prostitute, heroin and crack addict. She has four other children, all living with relatives. Her story follows:

Judy was about eight months pregnant when she first came to Hutzel, having had no prenatal care up to that time. She was put on methadone, and her urine tests showed she was keeping off heroin. But the cocaine levels in the babies’ urine suggested that Judy smoked crack just before coming in for her Caesarean-section delivery.

Both newborns were unusually cranky and suffered severe diarrhea, characteristic of crack babies. According to Resident Janet Snider:

They wouldn’t feed. They were very jittery, flailing their fists back and forth.

Baby-A, the sicker and at 3-pounds the smaller of the twins, is sedated with twice-daily doses of laudanum, which keeps her asleep almost constantly. When awakened, she cries, with the thin yelp of a puppy, and waves her tiny frail arms in angry jerks.

The mother has not been to see the girls since her own discharge from the hospital...two weeks ago. Neither has she named them...But she told the doctors that she wants to keep these children, and has been busy preparing to bring them home.

IMPLICATIONS

1. The Straight Nation cannot hide or ignore The Hooked Nation. One sentence from this article stands out: The plague feeds on junkies and cops, prostitutes, babies—and all of us. The full dimensions of this problem cannot be adequately attacked until we admit that the nation itself is hooked—on things, on money, and on pleasure.
2. Some have called drugs the Third-World’s "nuclear threat" over the U.S. A more thoughtful analysis sees drug abuse and the international drug trade as America’s new "Vietnam." There is no single solution. Drying up the demand and treating the victims must accompany apprehending and prosecuting the dealers.
3. Articles like this can be springboards for discussions that provoke reflection and self-determination among young people. Relationships with leaders who know and care about such issues are necessary resources.