Black people crack

Though Meneses denies it, Blandon said they trafficked in cocaine to raise money for the contra cause. According to the series, Blandon was ""the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California''--distributing thousands of kilos of Colombian cocaine to black dealers like Ricky Ross.

Casey, was covertly supporting the war in Nicaragua during the early '80s. That Casey was willing to flout the law is beyond dispute; his obsession with the Sandinistas later led to the Iran-contra scandal. Webb, citing an array of previously secret reports and sources, suggests that the CIA must have been aware of the Nicaraguan connection, which reportedly included shipments aboard Salvadoran Air Force planes to an unnamed U.

But pardon me while I take the time to giggle. Measuring Aging in the Skull The shape of the skull changes with age due to a process known as resorption that results in loss of bone mass. Glabellar angle The angle of the top of the bridge of the nose increases. Frontozygomatic junction The arch of the upper cheekbone narrows.

Orbital width The eye socket gets wider. Piriform width The nasal cavity widens. Maxillary angle The angle of the cheekbone decreases. Published June 12, Elizabeth Wellington Email. She attended parties, drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and started to smoke cocaine freebase. It was , and her life was fun and carefree. In contrast, Joyce was greatly displeased with this turn of events and would routinely fight with Ricochet, verbally and physically.

At 21, Ricochet became romantically involved with John, who had just returned from jail to live with his mother in the apartment above Joyce's. Ricochet and John had a daughter together, Fruitloops.

John was a heroin addict and mostly hustled to support his habit. He was also very violent. So, he rather be in there. It's his second home. That's what his mother said. Joyce got an apartment in a senior citizen building, which left Ricochet and her children homeless. They spent nine months in a shelter, until they were placed in one of Harlem's high-rise, low-income projects. Many homeless women with children turned to the shelter system for temporary housing.

In conjunction with this emergency service, the New York Department of Housing attempted to place all homeless families in apartments. However, given housing shortages the demand for these placements out-stripped the supply.

Families often waited for months and even years for run-down apartments, most often in housing projects. Given their lack of income and lack of discipline in paying rent and bills, many families did not remain in their units for long.

Once Ricochet set up her own household, there was a steady parade of boyfriends and other shorter-term relationships. Ricochet was spending even less time with her children and more time with her crack habit. But the stamps, I used to always, you know, take the stamps and buy food. I always bought food. She didn't feed me for like two days. After a few years, Ricochet lost the apartment for not paying the rent and the family moved back in with Joyce.

At the height of the Crack Era in , Ricochet began to support her habit through prostitution. The father of her next daughter, Shena, was a one-night stand. Two years later, Ricochet obtained an apartment in the projects. There, she met Bill. He was a very violent man. Like Ricochet, he was heavily involved with crack. Bill was living with his mother at that time. When Bill came to the house, everyone was afraid. He stole money from Tushay and Fruitloops whenever he could.

Bill and Ricochet had a son, Timothy. Then the housing cycle continued. Ricochet was evicted from her apartment again, moved her family into a shelter, and eventually obtained another apartment. Tushay resented her mother's boyfriends continually invading her home and her private life.

Some tried to act like a father. Many threatened her with violence. Some wanted to have sex with her. In response, Tushay learned to run away from home and stay with a friend for a while as a reprieve from her mother, the boyfriends and school.

Far from protecting her daughters from sexual advances, Ricochet would encourage her daughters to prostitute. But when they did, I wanted some of the money for the drugs, and I know that. I had to talk about that [years later while in drug treatment]. I said that's how fucked I was. BCW removed them from the household and placed them in foster care.

Ricochet was able to get them back by pleading that they were wild and she was trying to control them. However, she quickly lost custody of them again. In , Ricochet met George. Like so many of her previous boyfriends, George was intensely violent.

As a young man, George had shot a man while robbing a supermarket, and served 13 years for the offense. Ricochet met him soon after he got out. Crack cocaine was their common interest and shared passion. Ricochet was soon pregnant, but George beat her so badly that she had a miscarriage. After another particularly violent domestic incident, George was arrested and returned to prison.

Meanwhile, Ricochet was pregnant again. Later, she realized that George had knowingly infected her with HIV. When the next baby, Zena, was born, she was HIV positive. The hospital would not release her into Ricochet's custody. Ricochet had Zena placed in kin foster care with one of her mother's nieces, Willie Mae. In , Ricochet also placed her next son, Vernon Jr.

By the end of , all of Ricochet's children had been removed from her household, including her two oldest daughters. However, Tushay and Fruitloops continually ran away from the foster homes and institutions in which they were placed. Eventually, BCW grew tired of continually searching for them, and they returned home to Ricochet's apartment. In due course, Ricochet was again evicted from her apartment.

This time, however she did not have any children in her care so she was not eligible for subsidized housing. Instead of living in one place, she shuttled between the apartments maintained by Tushay, Fruitloops, Joyce, and Victor, a senior citizen in Joyce's apartment building with whom she smoked crack.

As of , Fruitloops was maintaining an apartment provided by welfare. This household served as the primary residence for 15 people, Fruitloops, her four children, her long-term boyfriend Patrick who stayed about half time and was legally married to someone else , Ricochet and her current boyfriend Brian, Tushay and her five children. During the s and s, Ricochet was primarily a crack-using sex worker. Most of the time, her family did not have an apartment of its own.

According to Census Bureau definitions, her family would be variously categorized over time as a multi-generational single household with varying household heads , as members of multiple households, or as members of no household. Ricochet's experiences illustrate the devastation that prevails when the responsible parent is caught up in her own personal concerns. Men regularly circulated through Ricochet's household between periods of jail and prison.

Children attended school sporadically, if at all. Food was often not available. Lights and water went off regularly because of unpaid bills. In a sense, Ricochet's household can be viewed as caught in a whirlwind, moving about, bumping up against hard circumstances and sending children off in various directions.

In contrast, Willie Mae's household seemed like a relatively safe haven. In the inner city, however, stable residence does not alone ensure a wholesome environment for child development as illustrated by Island's story.

Island Bersini chose her pseudonym because she was born in the Islands. This label also conveniently describes her family role, as an island, a possible haven in stormy times. Like Willie Mae, she accepted care of numerous children. As a kin foster care provider, She held legal and personal responsibility for them. Her home provided a constant address, food, and a place to sleep. However, it did not shield children from the hardships of poverty nor the broader ravages of the Crack Era.

Crack-related problems had a wide reach in the inner city. Originally, field staff selected some poor households in inner-city neighborhoods as a comparison group because the household heads reported that no one in the family used drugs.

However, in-depth interviewing eventually revealed significant drug use, especially crack, in virtually all the households included in the study. It was a quiet day in the neighborhood. Usually, there were people hanging out near Island's apartment building day and night, mostly teenagers, most of them involved in some type of hustle.

This activity flowed like a stream from the street into the lobby of the building. They used the lobby for dice games and drug selling. Young prostitutes used the scene as a convenient spot to turn a quick trick.

Essentially, the activities of the park, street, and lobby continued its flow right into Island's apartment.

Island tolerated high levels of drug use and violence in her household. It became a favorite place for drug-using family members to visit. Island's apartment usually teemed with people, their lives and their noises.

Today it was serene, eerily calm as if we were in the eye of a storm. Everyone was out except Island. Even still, the apartment felt crowded with boxes and furniture and everyone's things. Amidst the clutter, Island Bersini, age 62, sat cross-legged with a cup of tea in her hand. Her biological parents were never married and their relationship didn't last. Island never knew her mother, never knew the circumstances of her birth, never knew why her mother abandoned her and disappeared from her life.

Island's father had a common-law relationship with another woman who became Island's stepmother and the leading influence in her early life. The stepmother already had five children of her own. So, Island became the youngest of six. When she was four, her father died. Within a year, Island's stepmother decided to move the family to New York in search of a better life. As a temporary measure, they moved in with the stepmother's sister, who was raising five children of her own.

The arrangement became permanent and the 11 kids grew up together. Island remembered how her stepmother worked long hours as a domestic. Island dutifully did most of the daily housework, washing clothes, washing dishes and overall cleaning. As a child, Island felt no one really cared for her and yearned for the day she would have her own family. At age 18, she was introduced to Jim, who had just gotten out of prison. After a short courtship, they married. In , they had a daughter, Sonya, and in , their son, Ross, was born.

Jim worked hard delivering coal during the week. However, on the weekend he drank heavily, argued, and physically abused Island. She had Jim arrested and established her own household.

Two years later, Jim was hit by a car and killed. After Jim's death, Island took responsibility for everyone in the family who needed help. Many of Island's siblings or in-laws fell into criminal activity or drug addiction. As a result, their children needed to be raised by others, sometimes only temporarily but often permanently, as one thing led to another.

In time, Island became the prominent caregiver of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of her generation, sometimes with foster care support and often without such support. Alas, Island's love of family, apartment space, and food were not enough. Blandon and Meneses were said to have used their drug trafficking profits to help fund the Contra army's war effort.

Stories had previously been written about the Contras' alleged ties to drug trafficking. For example, on December 20, , an Associated Press article claimed that three Contra groups "engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua. However, the Mercury News series contained -- or at least many readers interpreted it to contain -- a new sensational claim: that the CIA and other agencies of the United States government were responsible for the crack epidemic that ravaged black communities across the country.

The newspaper articles suggested that the United States government had protected Blandon and Meneses from prosecution and either knowingly permitted them to peddle massive quantities of cocaine to the black residents of South Central Los Angeles or turned a blind eye to such activity. The Mercury News later proclaimed that the article did not make these allegations. The news media picked up on the Mercury News series' insinuation and made it explicit in coverage of the series.

Critics and commentators would later debate whether the Mercury News articles in fact accused the United States government of being responsible for the nation's crack cocaine epidemic.

In an October 2, , Washington Post article, Gary Webb, the reporter who wrote the Dark Alliance series, asserted that the article had not claimed that the CIA knew about Blandon's drug trafficking. The Washington Post article quoted Webb as saying, "We've never pretended otherwise.

This doesn't prove the CIA targeted black communities. It doesn't say this was ordered by the CIA.. Essentially, our trail stopped at the door of the CIA.

They wouldn't return my phone calls. It's been a very subtle disinformation campaign to try to tell people that these stories don't say what they say. Or that they say something else, other than what we said. So people can say, well, there's no evidence of this, you know.

You say, well, this story doesn't prove that top CIA officials knew about it. Well, since the stories never said they did, of course they don't. According to The Washington Post , Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos stated that he was troubled by the interpretive leap many people made about the article's claims of CIA involvement in the growth of crack cocaine. Ceppos was quoted as saying, "Certainly talk radio in a lot of cities has made the leap.

We've tried to correct it wherever we could. People [have been] repeating the error again and again and again. Rather than stating:. For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.

Central Intelligence Agency. The Mercury News published a three-part series in late August that detailed how a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles in the s, sending some of the millions in profits to the Contras.

The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that conclusion. Regardless of the intent of the Mercury News , the accusation of government involvement in the crack epidemic had taken root. This dramatic interpretation of the series continued to build with ferocious velocity, especially in black communities, as the Mercury News story attracted the attention of newspapers across the country.

Throughout September , the Dark Alliance series was published in one newspaper after another: the Raleigh News and Observer ran the articles on September 1, ; the Denver Post published them on September 13, ; the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran them on September 15, ; and so on. While many other newspapers did not publish the Dark Alliance series, they carried stories about the sensation created by the series' claims.

The story garnered further exposure from television and radio talk show appearances by Gary Webb. Ricky Ross' attorney, Alan Fenster, also made several appearances on television shows to assert that the government, not his client, was responsible for cocaine dealing in South Central Los Angeles.

Many African-American leaders were particularly troubled by the articles, mindful of the frequency with which young black men were being incarcerated for drug offenses. If the Mercury News was right, it appeared that the same government that was arresting so many black men had played a role in creating the drug crisis that precipitated their arrest. This point was emphasized by the Mercury News ' Dark Alliance series, which included articles entitled, "War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans; Contras case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.