focused almost exclusively on the urban street scene, and though the vast majority of drug users have always been white, the people doing drugs on TV were now black and Hispanic. When a couple of researchers from the University of Michigan spotted this phenomenon, they started digging through the archives and discovered that from 1985 onward, the number of whites shown using cocaine dropped by sixty percent, and blacks rose by the same amount. “During the Reagan era, the cocaine problem as defined by the network news became increasingly associated with people of color.”^[30]  A lot of people thought this smacked of conspiracy.  The picture fit too perfectly with the administration’s argument that the inner-city was a sink hole of vice unworthy of assistance. The truth was probably simpler: television likes action and the action was in the streets. It was a good gig for everyone involved.  The lawmen looked heroic, and the news crews were into the hottest combat story since Vietnam.^[31] 

Sixty years earlier, the dawn of commercial radio had given Captain Richmond Hobson a national canvas for his vivid images of the Drug User as Vampire.  Now television would provide the country with an eye-popping view of the vampire in action, and he would turn out to be a black teenager.

The media made one other jolting discovery in 1985. That winter for the first time, crack cocaine hit the front page of the New York Times.^[32] Although this smokeable form of the drug had been around a while, it didn’t become a sensation until somebody realized the stuff was so powerful it could be sold by the toke.  A single hit could go for as little as two bucks. This put the drug within reach of the average eighth grader, and in spite of its scary reputation, it was suddenly everywhere.

As the politicians fulminated about who was responsible for this disaster they might well have taken a look in the mirror.  Crack cocaine was not so much a creature of pharmacology as a