Dark Alliance

Dark Alliance
Author: Gary Webb
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1609802020

Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

Breaking the Chains of Cocaine

Breaking the Chains of Cocaine
Author: Oliver J. Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1992
Genre: Psychology
ISBN:

Addressing the problem of cocaine addiction, this book reviews the vicious stages of cocaine dependency from an African American perspective.

Behind the Eight Ball

Behind the Eight Ball
Author: Tanya Telfair Sharpe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1136423591

Inner-city black women open their hearts to share the pain of crack addiction and its consequences Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women documents an American tragedy that highlights the widening gap between social and economic classes. In their own words, poor black women—nameless, faceless, and marginalized by poverty—share the details of their lives before and after crack cocaine invaded their communities, each recalling the circumstances of her introduction to the drug and her first experience using sex to support her addiction. These candid interviews expose the socioeconomic changes in inner-city neighborhoods that created the perfect conditions for a crack stronghold; the crack cocaine economy's impact on the lives of inner-city residents; and the social and familial consequences of crack addiction among poor, black women. Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women places crack addiction, crack-related prostitution and its consequences, STDs, HIV, and pregnancy into the context of the larger social issues of inner-city poverty, race, gender, and class. This unique book reveals the sex-for-crack barter system as evidence of a long-term social exclusion and systemic racism that has worked to destroy the self-image of poor black American women. The women interviewed reflect this negative image, exchanging sex for crack on a regular basis to support their addictions at the risk-and reality-of unplanned pregnancies. “The baby I am carrying now, I don’t know who the father is. There are a few (men) that I had sex with around the time I got pregnant—that day. But which one it is, I don’t know who.” Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women examines: why poor black women addicted to crack are disproportionately at risk for sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, and unplanned pregnancies how the social and economic characteristics of poor black communities support crack distribution and consumption how crack use and the exchange of sex for crack damages struggling black families why the care of many children is entrusted to child welfare agencies how and why women are marginalized in the crack culture Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women is an insightful and enlightening look at the motivations behind the decision to risk illness, injury, disease, death, and pregnancy to support addiction.

The Big White Lie

The Big White Lie
Author: Michael Levine
Publisher:
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1994-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781560250845

A memoir by a former undercover DEA agent

Cocaine

Cocaine
Author: Joseph F. Spillane
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2000-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801862304

"Arguing that the underground drug culture had origins other than in federal prohibition, he concludes with some thoughts on what our early experience with legalization and prohibition can tell us as we face questions about drug policy today."--BOOK JACKET.

Crack

Crack
Author: David Farber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108425275

The crack cocaine years: from deviant globalization to the 'get money' culture of late twentieth-century America.

BLACK COCAINE AND COLORLESS BUTTERFLIES

BLACK COCAINE AND COLORLESS BUTTERFLIES
Author: Navah The Buddaphliii
Publisher: Navah the Buddaphliii
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2021-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781734610659

I would like to acknowledge those who inspired me to pick up a pen and create sound, a voice. Prince Rogers Nelson, who truly needs no introduction, was a genius in the eyes of millions. Consider "Purple Rain," what an abstract concept of reality. Let's just look at the title of the band, "The Revolution", What a powerful message. -I wanted to be just like him. Prince's "Controversy" album cover had the name Joni Mitchell on it. In the late 80's, we did not have Google. I had to know who she was. No one close to me knew. After a few years went by, I came to know she was a white singer, songwriter, and AMAZING. I went and bought all the albums I could find. My favorite album of hers is called "Court in Sparks'. She taught me I didn't have to be a painter to color the world, I could color with my words, vibrant hues, wild, and free. I've always been otherworldly, a bit of a transcendentalist, even as a child. The other children would make fun of me and most of them would call me a witch. Now that I'm all grown up, I see they were right. I am truly magical, especially with a pen in my hand. Poetry is the process of transformation for the one writing it. As I write, I encourage myself to look at everything in life as a constant change. I've enjoyed the ride on my own brain waves that inspire thought provoking concepts as I fall freely into the universe of imagination. After twenty years as a writer, I finally feel my time and effort is going to pay off. I am stepping out, taking a leap of faith in the title "Black Cocaine and Colorless Butterflies". Please understand, I am not promoting the use of cocaine. I am speaking figuratively about the black struggle I witnessed growing up in a poor, black, crack-cocaine drug infested community. Cocaine did not originate where I lived. The people outside of my community had to bring it there. We all have our demons and our struggles individually and collectively. The community needed a major transformation. I wanted to be a part of the transformation. I needed to see the drugs removed once and for all. I longed for the community to shed the weight of the black struggles and generational curses that plagued us. I was ready for us to morph into the butterflies we were meant to be as a collective, void of color. Poetry is my offering; it is my contribution to society.

5 Grams

5 Grams
Author: Dimitri A. Bogazianos
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814787010

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of “simply” possessing five grams of crack—the equivalent of a few sugar packets—had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. In this highly original work, Dimitri A. Bogazianos draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America’s War on Drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, Bogazianos shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the “rap game” and the “crack game." He argues that the symbolism of crack in rap’s stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine—although a drug long in decline—has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the U.S. today.

Black Silent Majority

Black Silent Majority
Author: Michael Javen Fortner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2015-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674743997

Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration. Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics. Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.