factories on the West Side that people, when you got out of school, could go work at, or the steel mills, or the army would take you.  Now all these factories are closed. The army is gonna quit recruiting inside Chicago come this year.  Dope dealing is probably the only growth industry inside Chicago.”

There is another insidious fault line in the rules that works against African Americans, and that is the legal distinction between crack and powdered cocaine.  Chemically, the two compounds are identical except that crack has been mixed with sodium bicarbonate. The process is so simple that any fifth-grader with a little cocaine and a can of baking soda can cook up a supply on the kitchen stove. But when the sodium and carbon atoms bond with the cocaine hydrochloride, the substance becomes infinitely more powerful, at least in the eyes of the law.

When the media discovered crack in 1985, it led to a feeding frenzy that whipped the country into a state of panic.^[8]  Congress, with a proud history of draconian drug laws, pushed through some of the most draconian yet. Today, when the kitchen chemist mixes sodium bicarbonate with cocaine, he is simultaneously increasing his potential prison exposure by several orders of magnitude. Say you start with a fifth of an ounce of coke—the weight of  a couple of copper pennies. If you’re caught with that amount of powder (or even ten times that amount of powder) you’re probably risking a few weeks in jail. But the minute you combine that fifth of an ounce with two cents worth of baking soda, you’re looking at a mandatory minimum five years without parole.

The cocaine itself is no more powerful than it was before, but combining it with baking soda causes the end product to vaporize at a lower temperature, and that means you can smoke it. Inhaling these cocaine fumes gets you considerably higher than snorting the equivalent amount of powder. The impact on the brain is instantaneous—an immediate, maximum upper. The exact same effect used to be achieved by rock stars in the 1970s