creature of the law—an artifact of prohibition.  The government success in making cocaine exhorbitantly expensive simply forced the users to search for a more efficient way to use the drug. When they cooked up this smokeable version, they found they could get very high indeed on a tiny amount. Dealing in contraband always favors the method that puts the most bang in the cheapest package.  In the days of alcohol prohibition, this dictum led to the adulterated 190-proof synthetic hooch known as “White Lightning.”  It sometimes made you blind, sometimes made you crazy, but always got you high. White Lightning was the crack of the 1920s. Then as now, the First Class passengers stayed with the expensive stuff and left the swill for the deck hands.

Since the drug’s low cost made it available to the people who could least afford it, crack quickly became the blue-collar drug of choice. Here again, most of the users were white, but the only people who knew this were statisticians.^[33]  The inner city was the natural Wal-Mart for this new discount drug and the sudden increase in cash flow ignited violent turf wars. The nightly images of gang shootouts, street dealing, and urban chaos helped confirm America’s worst fears about the degeneracy of the urban masses.

At this critical juncture, the death of a single individual would take the drug war nuclear. On the night of June 18, 1986, Boston Celtics rookie Len Bias—a dazzling young black athlete on the brink of fame and fortune—died of heart failure from cocaine poisoning. This tragedy turned out to be larger than life because Bias was no ordinary hoop star. Unlike the dangerous and arrogant young street punks now flavoring the nightly news, here was a clean-cut kid from a religious family in search of the American dream. The fact that the dream was within his grasp when he was cut down made it all the more infuriating. If such a thing could happen to a Len Bias it could happen to anybody.  In the following month the networks aired seventy-four evening news segments about crack and cocaine,