Crack, a Rift in Society
Two Decades After Its Arrival, Menacing Drug Shows No Signs of Moving On

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 28, 2007; C01

If Crack had a face, what would it look like?

If Crack had a child, what would it name him?

If Crack drove a car, what kind of car would it be?

She was in court the other day in an orange jumpsuit, the woman who drove her Volvo station wagon into a crowd at a street festival in Anacostia. It was a horrible day, June 2. Scores of people injured, some seriously. No one killed. Police said she was high on crack. People in the crowd said she was laughing as she drove into the crowd, hitting at least 40 people. Not stopping for children. Laughing and driving even as a man clung to her windshield.

But there she was Wednesday, appearing in court at 9:37 a.m., her hands clamped in handcuffs, a chain around her waist. She looked tired. Her expression? It was hard to say. But she was not laughing. She sat quietly as her attorney, the prosecutor and the judge discussed the status of her case.

The spectator benches behind her were not crowded. No hordes of angry people. There were no television reporters. No politicians. Nobody in this courtroom called her what they call her in the neighborhood: "That lady who was high on crack who drove her car into a crowd."

The police chief said Tonya Bell, who is charged with aggravated assault, knowingly had been "smoking crack all day long" before plunging the Volvo into the crowd. A 7-year-old child was in the back seat as she drove. When asked to discuss Bell's case, her attorney, Daisy Bygrave, of the D.C. Public Defender Service, said, "I don't have a comment." The U.S. Attorney's Office would not comment further because there is an ongoing investigation.

By 9:43 a.m. the hearing was over and a deputy with black leather gloves touched Bell's left shoulder, motioning to her that it was time to get up and go back to jail.

Just as quietly as 30-year-old Bell had entered the courtroom, she disappeared.

And just as it has long been, the issue of crack cocaine had made its public appearance, then slid quietly away, leaving damage in its wake.

Even though you don't know her and she has not been convicted, there is something about this woman's story, which is intertwined with crack, that feels familiar. Because crack, we believe, is familiar.

It seeped into popular culture long ago, revealing something about itself and what it does to people. Remember Samuel L. Jackson, playing the crackhead Gator Purify in "Jungle Fever," doing the crack dance before his father shot him? And Halle Barry's not-so-pretty turn as a crack addict in the same film? Remember Michael Douglas in "Traffic," searching for his once-preppy daughter only to find her in a ghetto apartment, tricking for rock? We've heard Busta Rhymes sing about crack economics. We've read rapper 50 Cent's stories, in his autobiography, about cooking it. You don't have to "hit" it to know something about it, about its reach.

And now Tonya Bell's alleged drive through a crowded festival, "high on crack," puts a real face on the impact of crack, its insidious way of spreading through communities and culture, shaping life.

Crack made its debut in the Washington area in the 1980s. More than 20 years ago, long enough to be grown -- an adult. And it has remained, stayed entrenched long after the deadly crack wars of the '80s. Long after the crews have gone from some of the "hot spot" corners where condos are now rising. And though the skinny "crack babies" have grown, and the attention to it has died, crack -- tiny, cheap rocks of cooked cocaine -- has hung on, never really left.

It's just that the rest of us have turned away.

After the horror at the festival, you wonder about the long-term damage crack has done since the crack wars peaked in the city in 1991, when the murder rate set a record with 489 people killed. Wonder about crack itself, why it's even called by that name, which, if you didn't know better, sounds comical. The word crack means a split, a rasping voice, a sudden noise, a fracture, a moment, as in "the crack of dawn," a break of mental or emotional proportions.

"Over those 20 years, '87, '97, 2007, crack cocaine's status is the primary concern with respect to drugs in Washington," says Ron Strong, a supervisor of the National Drug Threat Assessment Unit, an agency within the Justice Department. "That really hasn't changed. It was the primary concern 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and still is today. For all the effort, it continues to have a strong grip on certain neighborhoods, and the local community is negatively affected by crack cocaine distribution and abuse."

It is a drug that has cost the city economically and socially, laying burdens on hospitals, child welfare systems and prisons, not to mention the violence associated with it.

The one light spot in the crack epidemic -- if you can call it light -- is that recent studies have shown there are really no crack babies. It had been said that the drug posed a physiological risk to children born to crack-addicted women, but now decades later, a report by Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrician at Boston University School of Medicine, states there is no "doomed generation or biologic underclass."

"There is no such thing as a crack baby," Frank says.

Recent studies have shown that children of mothers who used cocaine while they were pregnant do not have the massive abnormalities predicted in the 1980s. "There is no one syndrome," associated with prenatal crack cocaine use, Frank says. "It's not a good thing, but compared to alcohol, it is not the strong teratogen," which is something that negatively alters prenatal development. "Teratogen -- tera is derived from the Greek word for monster."

The damage to children because of neglect and other issues, though, is real and lasting. About 85 percent of the children placed in D.C.'s foster care system have parents who abuse drugs, says Charles L. Hall, chief medical officer for the Addiction, Prevention and Recovery Administration in the D.C. Department of Health. "Cocaine is the second most commonly abused drug in the District, with marijuana being the first."

Still, crack feels larger. It has become a force, a notorious character, an ominous presence, peeping in windows, ruling neighborhoods, squeezing triggers, turning boys into pushers, pimping women, scaring old people off their porches. Writing songs. Killing people. Becoming legend.

"Satan himself," says Regina James, a former advisory neighborhood commissioner, trying to name it, personify it.

As she talks, a cool breeze sweeps through the alcove of an office building on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast Washington, as if the street were acknowledging her comment. "Face all gunked in, no life, no hope. Despair. Skin falling off. The devil don't look pretty. At the beginning, it may look like a diva, but when you get hooked, you see it for what it is."

She says, "You have mothers who spend every dime. Spend their SSI checks on drugs. The children get shortchanged. It has really devastated the black community."

Terry Williams, 41, who just celebrated five years of recovery, sits on a bench on Martin Luther King Avenue describing crack: "That first high is what you are always chasing. You wind up going through your bank account, selling everything to get that first high. When you do crack cocaine, you forget who you are."

He pauses: "My best friend OD'd on crack cocaine."

On the avenue, you also find Vernial Batts, 53, a recovering crack addict and now a substance abuse counselor in Washington. "I got hooked during the years Rayful Edmonds was a celebrity figure in the '80s, when crack was rampant," Batts says. He would describe crack as euphoria. "It makes you feel superhuman. You feel you can do almost anything. It's like being on a roller coaster. You take a hit, then you come crashing down. You are already craving it, a mental craving. . . . Insatiable. One is too many, a thousand is not enough."

He calls crack an alien. "It alienates people. People become your enemy, whether by choice or force. People living productive lives don't want anything to do with you. You pose a threat. Crack addicts are always scheming, conniving, always planning how to get that next hit."

Canzada Twyman, executive director of Divine Exchange Ministries, a faith-based organization that works with drug prevention programs, is mystified by the drug and its hold on some people. "Crack cocaine has been outrageous, just unbelievable to the point that it boggles the mind," he says. "My question is, where in the world is it coming from? It is not coming from little African American kids. It is being transported and distributed to various communities. " The Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center says that cocaine distributed in D.C. is usually smuggled from Colombia to distribution centers in New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Los Angeles. It is then transported to the District in various ways, including cars, trains, even express mail.

There is a cycle to this pain. In his 1965 book "Manchild in the Promised Land," Claude Brown described how the arrival of heroin changed Harlem. "Drugs were killing just about everybody off in one way or another," Brown wrote. "It had taken over the neighborhood, the entire community. I didn't know of one family in Harlem with three or more kids between the ages of fourteen and nineteen in which at least one of them wasn't on drugs. This was just how it was. It was like a plague, and the plague usually afflicted the eldest child of every family, like the one of the firstborn with Pharaoh's people in the Bible. Sometimes, it was even worse than the biblical plague."

Then Brown lived to witness the impact of crack. Brown, who died in 2002, never finished his third book, which compared his childhood in Harlem with the experience of children who grew up during the crack epidemic. Crack, he told the Associated Press in 1986, was far worse, the reason for too many deaths.

Ronald Moten is a community activist in the District who has seen firsthand the spiritual deaths crack has left in its wake. It can be, he says, the worst father, the worst mother. "Just think if everybody in your neighborhood knows your mother is going around having sex for drugs. Think how that would make a person feel. It's a bad feeling. It's embarrassing. If a child is embarrassed, neglected or mistreated, they tend to become violent if it is not addressed."

Moten got kicked out of school in the 11th grade. When he lost his job, he started selling crack. "I went from making $150 a week to $100,000 in six months," he says. "You couldn't tell me nothing until I lost everything."

He was arrested. "During that period I was incarcerated, my father got on drugs. My mother got on crack, as well. My mother is still battling with it. I always tried to figure out: Why my parents? Then I thought of all the people I sold drugs to. How it affected their parents. Nothing compares to parents on crack."

If Moten could rename the drug, he says he would call it "facade," because it is an imposing face that conceals something evil. "It looks good. It makes you think it will get you where you want to go," he says. "It is something you chase for the rest of your life, and you never get it. It makes you do something you would never do before in your life: kill, steal, prostitute, forget about your children, sell your children. It makes you lose all moral principles you would have as a human being."

Or maybe make you laugh as you drive your car through a crowd.