Crack that was

In November , the State Department Bulletin reported that an estimated 70 tons of cocaine was being smuggled into the country. Furthermore, there were a number of traffickers who dealt in quantities far greater than did Ross' organization during this period. In March , two tons of cocaine were seized at the Miami Airport. In May , the Associated Press reported the arrest of members of a ring in southern California and Miami that smuggled a ton of cocaine in just the prior year.

In September , Alan Mobley pleaded guilty to smuggling two tons of cocaine a year to the West Coast for a cocaine ring run out of Orange County, California. In , Harold Rosenthal was convicted in federal court of bringing five tons of cocaine into the country during a month period. Cocaine was a status drug for the wealthy in the late s and early s. It was not widely used in South Central Los Angeles in , principally because it was not affordable to many drug users.

Phencyclidine PCP was still prevalent in that era. Nonetheless, the Mercury News ' assertion that cocaine was not available in South Central Los Angeles before Blandon began selling to Ross is inaccurate, or at least hyperbolic. First, cocaine was apparently present in South Central Los Angeles before Ross even began to sell it. In October , the Los Angeles Times published a story recounting Thomas "Tootie" Reese's claim that he was introduced to freebasing in He soon learned how to make crack and became a substantial drug dealer in the black community in Los Angeles.

And Reese was not the only South Central dealer selling cocaine. When the OIG interviewed Ross, we asked whether others were dealing cocaine in the early days of his organization. Ross stated that there were "a few people I used to hear about," and he named several. As Ross' operation grew, he had other South Central dealers to contend with. Perhaps the most successful of these was Brian Bennett, also known as "Waterhead Bo.

As discussed below, Bennett is believed to be responsible for a large, multi-state cocaine operation in the mids. Law enforcement wiretaps that intercepted communications related to Bennett's operation indicate that, in one month in , Bennett purchased just under 1, kilos of cocaine from a Colombian source. Ross was also not the first crack dealer in South Central Los Angeles.

Others taught him about crack cocaine. Ross told the OIG that he first learned to "rock up" cocaine powder so that it was suitable for smoking from Stefan Moore, and told LASD investigators that he learned from "watching different people in the neighborhood," including Michael McLaurin and a "pimp named Martin.

It is also worthy of note that Ross has never claimed that Blandon, or any other Nicaraguan, taught him how to make crack cocaine. Ross has specifically denied in both his interview with the OIG and in trial testimony that Blandon taught him how to cook crack. The Mercury News ' contention that Blandon was a prime factor in the growth of cocaine in South Central Los Angeles appears to be based in part on the low per-kilo prices that Blandon was able to provide to Ross, which enabled Ross to buy cocaine in large quantities.

However, cocaine prices dropped throughout the s as a result of activity by South American drug cartels. During the s, cocaine producers in South America -- particularly Colombia -- increased production of cocaine. Cocaine is a commodity whose prices follow the same basic economic rules of supply and demand that apply to most products: when supply is abundant, prices fall; when there is scarcity, prices rise.

When huge seizures have no effect on street prices, it indicates that a large supply is still in circulation. The drop in the price of cocaine, despite increased seizures and purer product, suggests that the amount of cocaine in the United States grew steadily throughout the s.

The wholesale market became flooded with cocaine and the price of cocaine dropped dramatically as a result of a glut. In sum, anyone with a Colombian source could have taken advantage of the glut on the supply side.

In , the DEA began investigating Mario Ernesto Villabona Alvarez, a Colombian drug source, and soon discovered that Brian Bennett, who became one of the largest traffickers in Los Angeles, was one of his customers. During an intercepted telephone conversation in April between Villabona and an individual in Cali, Colombia, Villabona was given an accounting of money owed by Bennett for and cocaine deliveries.

At the time of his arrest, the Bennett-Villabona drug organization was selling approximately a ton of cocaine per week, according to law enforcement sources quoted in news coverage about the arrest. McCarver alone was buying thousands of kilos of cocaine. Nevertheless, it is apparent that other South Central drug dealers forged ties to Colombian dealers without the assistance of Blandon or any other Nicaraguans associated with the Contras.

If Ross was indeed the first to establish a connection to Colombia, others followed closely in his wake. It should also be noted that the prices at which Villabona sold cocaine to Bennett reflected the drop in cocaine prices that occurred during the s in Los Angeles and across the country.

We believe this occurred in The Villabona conversation suggests that Blandon was simply charging Ross prevailing rates for cocaine, not fantastically discounted rates as was alleged by the Mercury News. But, contrary to the suggestion of the Mercury News , there is no evidence that they were singularly or primarily responsible for it.

First, the timing of Ross' ascension as a cocaine dealer makes it improbable that he was a pivotal factor in the explosive growth of cocaine in South Central Los Angeles. It appears that sometime between and , crack became a concern among law enforcement and medical health experts in South Central Los Angeles. Los Angeles Police Detective Ben Gonzalez of the South Bureau juvenile narcotics division reported that juveniles were arrested on cocaine-related charges from January to November In contrast, 34 were arrested during all of An interview with a year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department who spent the early s working in South Central Los Angeles revealed a similar story.

Detective Richard Ginelli became a supervisor of the South Bureau's narcotics squads in He recalled that PCP was still prevalent then and, while crack cocaine may have existed, it did not have a significant presence. Detective Ginelli recalled that starting in he began seeing "rock" cocaine with greater frequency, although it had not yet become a significant problem. Detective Alfonse Kotero, who was an LAPD policeman on the streets of South Central in , also recalled hearing about rock cocaine for the first time in During or , he recalled receiving training on rock cocaine during roll call and recalled hearing that there was freebase that was created with cocaine and rum.

Press accounts also set South Central Los Angeles' crack crisis as beginning in or about The press did not begin reporting on the issue of crack cocaine until , but those articles suggested that the mounting crack problem had existed prior to that time.

According to OIG estimates, Ross began dealing small quantities of cocaine in and did not graduate to larger quantities until mid to late By the time Ross' operation reached its peak -- in , according to Ross -- crack was prevalent in South Central Los Angeles, and many other dealers were vying for a share of the lucrative market. Thus, by the time Ross was buying and selling cocaine in large quantities, the crack crisis was well underway in South Central Los Angeles.

But I wouldn't have been Freeway Rick. Blandon was certainly a major supplier, but there were plenty of others. Ross was an ambitious entrepreneur who thrived in optimal market conditions: the Colombian cocaine glut had reduced cocaine prices, and crack was well-suited for cheap, easy production and simple, ready-to-use distribution.

But crack's effects and affordability made it extremely popular among drug users and accessible to the poor. These factors were more responsible than anything else for the rise of crack cocaine. And they were not a creation of Ricky Ross, Danilo Blandon, or any other individual. The Mercury News series suggested that Ross and Blandon were responsible for the spread of crack cocaine across the country.

This claim is dubious and may be discounted for several reasons. First, it presupposes that crack first appeared in Los Angeles and spread nationwide from there. Drug experts still do not agree on the path charted by crack across the country.

Some do indeed believe that crack was created on the West Coast. Klein reported during an OIG interview that his review of Los Angeles police reports indicated the seizure of rock-like narcotic substances in glassine bags that were identified as cocaine. These, in all likelihood, were crack cocaine. Moreover, a researcher in the area of cocaine use, Dr.

However, many believe that crack was created independently on the East Coast. One theory posits that crack developed on the East Coast as the result of coca paste smoking. In the early s, drug users rediscovered cocaine just as heroin waned in popularity. At the same time, a new method of administering cocaine was becoming popular outside of the United States. A coca paste smoking epidemic erupted in Peru and the Bahamas during the s and early s.

Some social scientists believe that cocaine abuse in Peru and the Caribbean in the late s presaged the United States' coming crack cocaine problem and may have been the precipitating event. During the s in Peru -- a cocaine producing country -- General F.

Raul Jeri, M. Jeri found an urban pattern of cocaine abuse among smokers of coca paste. Smokers were reportedly becoming so obsessed with their smoking that they suffered from malnutrition and ill health and resorted to crime to obtain the drug. Robert Byck of Yale University expressed alarm at the phenomenon and urged "the Federal Government to engage in an educational campaign to prevent a drug abuse epidemic" in the United States.

In later testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations on July 15, , after the crack cocaine crisis had begun here, Dr. Byck would proclaim that "[t]oday we are in the midst of the predicted epidemic. Just on the heels of the Peruvian crisis was the outbreak of a similar phenomenon in the Bahamas. The cocaine base smoking epidemic in the Bahamas was even more widely reported among social scientists in the United States than the phenomenon in Peru.

It represented the first documented nationwide epidemic of freebase cocaine abuse outside of a producer nation. A well respected medical journal, The Lancet , reported that beginning in , the number of admissions for cocaine abuse to Bahamian psychiatric hospitals increased dramatically: from none in , to 69 in , and to in A DEA report identified the substance that was being smoked in the Bahamas as "crack. James Inciardi, a researcher in the area of illicit drugs, has written several articles on the onset of cocaine base smoking in the Bahamas.

He has asserted that the Bahamian coca paste epidemic was caused by the Colombian government's successful attempt to restrict the sale of ether used to convert coca paste into cocaine hydrochloride in anticipation that it would reduce the domestic production of cocaine hydrochloride.

Instead, according to Dr. Inciardi, cocaine producers began shipping unprocessed coca paste to Caribbean and Central American countries in lieu of cocaine hydrochloride.

Inciardi reports that in , coca paste smoking was popular in the Caribbean. According to Dr. Inciardi, immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, and locations along the Leeward and Windward Islands introduced the prototype for crack to Caribbean inner-city populations in Miami and New York. Inciardi claimed that coca paste may have been a prototype for crack used in the United States. Although it is not possible to pinpoint a single inventor of crack, it is likely that one of the earliest appearances of crack was in the Caribbean, especially the Bahamas.

From the Caribbean, crack made one of its earliest entries in the United States in Miami sometime in the early s. Around the same time, a similar product called "rock" cocaine began making its appearance in Los Angeles; whether the Los Angeles version of crack had its source in the Caribbean, or represented a simultaneous discovery by a local drug chemist, is not clear.

Another theory posits that crack cocaine was an outgrowth of experimentation with freebasing cocaine, a method of administering cocaine that was particularly popular on the West Coast in the s and early s, and coca paste smoking. Ronald Siegel, a researcher now at UCLA who for two decades researched freebasing practices, has documented crack and freebasing practices. Siegel believes that crack cocaine was imported to the United States in the early s by United States cocaine smugglers who observed coca paste smoking while in South America.

A drug trafficker who was interviewed by Dr. Siegel in reported his experience with coca paste: "[S]moking base is incredibly euphoric, just like shooting it [intravenously]. We don't want too many people knowing about it because it will get out of hand.

It's incredibly addicting. But you need a lot of coke to make it, so only dealers will probably do it. Siegel, a mis-translation related to coca paste may have resulted in the unintended creation of freebase.

Siegel was told by an interviewee who was a drug trafficker that in January he told a chemist about smoking "base. The chemist, who reportedly thought that the interviewee was referring to the chemical "base" form of cocaine hydrochloride, attempted to recreate what he thought the interviewee had described, cocaine hydrochloride converted to a base state.

The chemist used baking soda and ether in the conversion process. Siegel believes that chemist may have created something that never had been manufactured before. Siegel stated in an interview with the OIG, if there was a "Johnny Appleseed of crack," it was that chemist.

In sum, there is no consensus on how crack was invented or how it spread. However, the fact that it existed in cities on the East Coast in the early s at the same time it did in Los Angeles undermines the theory that the presence of crack everywhere is an outgrowth of crack in Los Angeles.

For example, a survey taken in by Dr. Inciardi of crack users in Miami determined that 28 percent had heard of crack as early as November Number Percent November - December 70 A further weakness in the claim that Ross and Blandon are responsible for the spread of crack nationwide is Ross' inconsistent accounts of his distribution networks across the country.

Save Word. Definition of crack Entry 1 of 3. Definition of crack Entry 2 of 3. Definition of crack Entry 3 of 3. Examples of crack in a Sentence Verb The hailstones were big enough to crack some windows.

He cracked his collarbone in a skiing accident. The mirror cracked when she dropped it. Workers cracked the large rock into three pieces so it could be moved. The bird cracked the seed on a tree branch. Someone cracked him over the head with a beer bottle. The baby cracked her chin pretty hard when she fell. He fell and cracked his elbow on the ice. Noun The crack runs all the way from the top of the wall to the bottom.

I could see them through the crack in the doorway. Light came through the cracks in the walls of the barn. Adjective The company has a crack sales force. Huriash, sun-sentinel. Roustan, sun-sentinel. First Known Use of crack Verb before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at intransitive sense 1 Noun 14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a Adjective , in the meaning defined above.

Learn More About crack. Time Traveler for crack The first known use of crack was before the 12th century See more words from the same century. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. That's Dope: 5 Drug Words Gone Top 10 Words of the '80s. Style: MLA. More Definitions for crack. English Language Learners Definition of crack Entry 1 of 3. Kids Definition of crack Entry 1 of 3. Kids Definition of crack Entry 2 of 3.