Name: "The Myths of Crack Cocaine" with Dr Carl Hart (from Joe Rogan Experience #469)
Uploaded: 2014-05-09T16:58:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video '"The Myths of Crack Cocaine" with Dr Carl Hart (from Joe Rogan Experience #469)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-05-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video '"The Myths of Crack Cocaine" with Dr Carl Hart (from Joe Rogan Experience #469)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-05-09. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Now, how did you get involved in this?
You started, you said, 24 years ago doing drug research on animals.
How did, what led you to want to go down this road?
So I was in, I tell the story in the book, and so I was in the Air Force back
in the 80s,
like you mentioned about crack cocaine.
So I was in the Air Force over in England, 86, 87, 88.
And crack cocaine was a big deal in the United States, as you point out.
And I grew up in the hood in Miami, and Miami was a cocaine capital in the
United States.
And so things that were happening in my community that were not good, high
unemployment, crime,
all of these kinds of things, I blamed crack cocaine for that.
And so I thought that if I go to school and get a degree in order to study
drugs,
the effects of drugs on the brain, I could solve the problems that faced my
community
or the problems that I thought were in the community, particularly those
related to drugs.
And so I began studying drugs as an undergraduate and then went on to graduate
school
to study drugs on the brains of animals and to try to figure out the neurobiological
mechanisms
that were responsible for addiction.
So you just got fascinated by this idea of fixing this issue that you saw in
your community,
and then you just fell into a rabbit hole.
Yeah.
So when I started, along my journey, my path, I actually got an education.
And, you know, so as James Baldwin said, you know, the paradox of education is
precisely this.
As one begins to become educated and conscious, one begins to question the
society in which he's being educated.
And that's what happened with me.
And so along the way, I discovered things like, hmm, the majority of people who
use these drugs are not addicted.
That was one thing I discovered.
I discovered that many of the things that we said about crack cocaine were just
simply not true,
like the whole crack baby myth.
And people said that when, that our generation should be prepared to have an
army of kids who couldn't learn
because of being exposed to crack cocaine.
That just simply wasn't true.
When all the data came out beginning in the mid-1990s, we realized that that
simply wasn't true.
Other things that I learned that just simply wasn't true, things like one hit
of crack cocaine, you're addicted.
Not true.
That crack cocaine was different from powder cocaine.
Not true.
All of these things I discovered along the way that they weren't true.
And not only that, I discovered that this wasn't new.
I went back to the early 1900s and saw the same sort of hysteria, mainly race-based
hysteria surrounding drugs,
occurred even then.
And so I thought, what's going on?
And then that helped me to be more critical about my issue.
Is there a difference in the effect of crack cocaine, the physical effect, and
cocaine and heroin?
So let's think about crack cocaine.
I mean, not heroin, rather.
Powder cocaine.
Powder cocaine.
Yeah, let's think about crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
Let's just think about the chemical structure.
The only difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine is that the powder
cocaine has this thing called the hydrochlorite salt attached to it.
That salt prevents it from being smoked.
Now, you can dissolve the powder cocaine in water and then shoot it in your arm.
And so you have the effects of cocaine, the onset of the effects within seconds.
The same is true with crack cocaine.
The effects are, onset of the effects are within seconds.
Now, the biological activity of cocaine is at the base.
Not that, so that hydrochlorite portion on the cocaine powder, on the powder
cocaine, has no biological activity.
Whereas, so that means that crack and powder are the same drug.
They are exactly the same drug.
The same effect, same drug.
Wow, so it's indistinguishable to the user.
Indistinguishable.
Now, why is it that they prepare it that way?
Like, what's the benefit of preparing it?
It's just so it delivers quicker?
Great question.
So, one of the things that you, you might recall Richard Pryor back in the days
when he got, he burnt, he burnt himself with smoking.
So, he was freebasing.
So, he was removing that hydrochlorite portion of the salt off of the cocaine
base so he could actually smoke it.
Now, he was using ether, which is highly flammable.
With crack cocaine, you don't, now you no longer need the ether.
You just mix it up with baking soda and water and the cocaine and you mix it up
and you get rid of that salt.
So, ether is no longer needed and it's not as dangerous.
So, that's one of the reasons that we have crack cocaine as a result of that.
And it also, it made it so you could sell them in unit doses to make the drug
appear to be cheaper.
Because you also might recall in the early 1980s, 1970s, you had to buy cocaine
powder in bulk and that made it more expensive.
Crack cocaine made it a lot more simple for people to buy it who didn't have
the kind of expendable income that was required before the mid-1980s.
So, essentially, they just brought it down to bite-sized portions.
That's right.
Exactly.
Rather than selling this whole six-pack or 12-pack, now you can sell one item,
one can or one bottle.
I want to talk more about this, but I should just clarify that Richard Pryor
changed his story as he got older and actually said that he tried to kill
himself.
He lit himself on fire, apparently.
I'm a huge Richard Pryor fan, and I know that that was originally what he had
said, that he got burnt doing freebass, but I think he changed his story later.
I actually worked with him a bunch of times right before he died.
It was a real honor.
He was a real special dude as far as stand-up comedians go.
Yeah, I'm with you.
But that style of freebass was a thing that we'd always associated with people
that were really, really fucked up.
Yeah.
Like, the guy's doing coke.
Oh, well, you know, he's probably going to mess up his life.
He's freebassing.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
He's gone, man.
He's bassing.
He's a bass head.
Yeah.
Right?
Bass head was the thing.
Before crack, it was bass heads.
Absolutely.
I describe a couple people in the book from my neighborhood who got into freebassing
in exactly the same way you just talked about.
Right.
Absolutely.
Now, everybody has this idea in their head that crime and that everything escalated
in the world changed when crack was introduced.
Is that a myth as well?
Yeah, it's a myth.
Well, let me clarify because on the one hand, so when crack hit the market, it
was first sort of talked about December 1984 in the L.A. Times, the first time
we heard a crack.
But it didn't become more widely known or available until maybe the mid-1985.
Now, once crack cocaine hit the markets, what happened was that people were
fighting over various new markets.
Whenever there are new illicit markets, yeah, you're going to get some violent
activity until the market settles down.
There are a number of things that people attribute to crack in terms of crime
and all of the sort of downfall of certain communities.
Unemployment.
They said that unemployment really rose as a result of crack cocaine being
around.
Now, 1982, the unemployment rate in this country was about 11 percent for white
folks, and it was double that for black people.
That was before crack, at least two, three years before crack even hit the
market.
Now, during the whole crack era, unemployment has never been as high as 1982.
That's number one.
People said things like, people from my community, crack cocaine was
responsible for these mothers, these grandmothers now raising new generations
of kids because their daughters were strung out on crack.
And so now they have to take care of these kids.
That simply wasn't true.
It certainly happened in my community, but it happened before crack cocaine was
ever on the market.
It certainly happened in my family long before crack cocaine ever hit the
market.
When we look at other communities, like particularly immigrant communities, if
you look at the Jewish community when they came over, the Eastern European Jews,
when they came over in the country, the early 1800s and so forth,
what you see is that you had a similar sort of phenomenon going on in those
kind of communities.
What's his name?
Irvin Howell, his great book, Land of Our Fathers, A Home of Our Fathers, he
kind of described all of these pathological behaviors that happened in that
community.
Many of those same behaviors were attributed to crack cocaine in black people
later.
But it's not – they were there long before crack cocaine was there, but crack
cocaine became the scapegoat.
That's a fascinating scapegoat because I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.
I really thought that there was a difference between the 1980s and the 1990s as
far as like when crack was introduced.
Boom, it took off.
It was sort of something that was just always discussed as like common fact.
Yeah, I know.
I bought into it too, and that's what drove me to pursue my education in the
way I did.
But as a result of pursuing that education, I discovered that it was not true.
So are these cultural myths the result of politicians, like political campaigns
who are trying to clean up the streets and they attribute it to certain issues?
Or is it something more widespread?
Is it the media just running with a narrative?
What is it?
How did it get started?
Well, there are multiple sort of factors and players involved.
So when we think about the politicians, for example, politicians, if crack
cocaine is the problem, never mind the fact that unemployment rates was out of
control before crack cocaine hit the market.
Unemployment was out of control.
A number of things were already problematic.
Now you have crack cocaine.
If you blame crack cocaine, it's really easy to simply say, we'll put more law
enforcement, we'll hire more cops, we'll put more efforts in controlling these
drugs.
A lot easier to say, we'll lock people up for selling these drugs, for using
these drugs.
In the process, what you do is you create jobs for a select group of people,
and then you don't have to deal with the real issues.
The real issues of unemployment, of deprivation, all of these things you don't
have to deal with.
But they're far more complicated.
And so politicians are happy to buy in.
Now, one of the things about crack cocaine is that we think about the law that
punishes or punishes crack cocaine 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine.
And the vast majority of people who got punished under these laws were black,
80, 85% of the people, even though they don't make up the majority of the users.
So people say things like, well, were those laws racist?
And the laws themselves weren't racist because the Congressional Black Caucus,
17 of the 21 members voted for these laws, for these laws that punish crack
cocaine 100 times more harshly.
But the point is, is that everyone bought into it.
Parents bought into it.
Because the parents, for the parents, what this meant is that you don't
actually have to educate your kids about this.
You just say that they're bad and stay away from it.
No education required.
Even scientists and treatment providers, they all bought into it because you
got a problem, we're going to solve your problem.
So we are needed and we are valued.
So you had all of these sort of constituencies from society benefiting from the
vilification or the scapegoating of crack cocaine.
All of those things came together nicely.
And then we think about the rappers.
They all came into the game, too, because it's like, I'm conscious.
I'm going to say that this is a problem in my community and I care about my
community and this is the way that I can show it.
So everybody had a stake in this sort of thing.
Wow.
That is absolutely fascinating.
You know, one of the things that I've talked to quite a few people about when
it comes to issues like real complex issues like drug addiction and violence
and poverty is that once you feed it with any organism, whether it's that
organism is law enforcement or that organism is education, whichever one you
feed is the one that's going to grow.
And once you feed the law enforcement one and you look at this really complex
situation, I think law enforcement is important.
But I think education is probably more important to avoid future law
enforcement.
Like the more, I think the more education we have, the more nuanced our ability
to raise children is, the more we understand, you know, that we're all in this
together, the less you're going to need law enforcement.
But when law enforcement becomes this machine that lobbies against the legalization
of certain drugs, which when you start looking at the data, there's only one
reason to do that.
And the only reason is that you're trying to stay alive.
You're trying to grow.
You're an organism.
You're trying to eat the sugar.
You're trying to keep going.
So you're creating more jobs by putting people in jail.
It's essentially, no one wants to look at it like this, but it's a form of
slavery.
I think we, in the house I live in, the film, Eugene Drecke's film, I think
that's the kind of analogy he was trying to draw in that film.
Absolutely.
So I think we get it.
I think a number of people get that.
That's exactly what it is.

"The Myths of Crack Cocaine" with Dr  Carl Hart (from Joe Rogan Experience #469)

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Now, how did you get involved in this?
You started, you said, 24 years ago doing drug research on animals.
How did, what led you to want to go down this road?
So I was in, I tell the story in the book, and so I was in the Air Force back
in the 80s,
like you mentioned about crack cocaine.
So I was in the Air Force over in England, 86, 87, 88.
And crack cocaine was a big deal in the United States, as you point out.
And I grew up in the hood in Miami, and Miami was a cocaine capital in the
United States.
And so things that were happening in my community that were not good, high
unemployment, crime,
all of these kinds of things, I blamed crack cocaine for that.
And so I thought that if I go to school and get a degree in order to study
drugs,
the effects of drugs on the brain, I could solve the problems that faced my
community
or the problems that I thought were in the community, particularly those
related to drugs.
And so I began studying drugs as an undergraduate and then went on to graduate
school
to study drugs on the brains of animals and to try to figure out the neurobiological
mechanisms
that were responsible for addiction.
So you just got fascinated by this idea of fixing this issue that you saw in
your community,
and then you just fell into a rabbit hole.
Yeah.
So when I started, along my journey, my path, I actually got an education.
And, you know, so as James Baldwin said, you know, the paradox of education is
precisely this.
As one begins to become educated and conscious, one begins to question the
society in which he's being educated.
And that's what happened with me.
And so along the way, I discovered things like, hmm, the majority of people who
use these drugs are not addicted.
That was one thing I discovered.
I discovered that many of the things that we said about crack cocaine were just
simply not true,
like the whole crack baby myth.
And people said that when, that our generation should be prepared to have an
army of kids who couldn't learn
because of being exposed to crack cocaine.
That just simply wasn't true.
When all the data came out beginning in the mid-1990s, we realized that that
simply wasn't true.
Other things that I learned that just simply wasn't true, things like one hit
of crack cocaine, you're addicted.
Not true.
That crack cocaine was different from powder cocaine.
Not true.
All of these things I discovered along the way that they weren't true.
And not only that, I discovered that this wasn't new.
I went back to the early 1900s and saw the same sort of hysteria, mainly race-based
hysteria surrounding drugs,
occurred even then.
And so I thought, what's going on?
And then that helped me to be more critical about my issue.
Is there a difference in the effect of crack cocaine, the physical effect, and
cocaine and heroin?
So let's think about crack cocaine.
I mean, not heroin, rather.
Powder cocaine.
Powder cocaine.
Yeah, let's think about crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
Let's just think about the chemical structure.
The only difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine is that the powder
cocaine has this thing called the hydrochlorite salt attached to it.
That salt prevents it from being smoked.
Now, you can dissolve the powder cocaine in water and then shoot it in your arm.
And so you have the effects of cocaine, the onset of the effects within seconds.
The same is true with crack cocaine.
The effects are, onset of the effects are within seconds.
Now, the biological activity of cocaine is at the base.
Not that, so that hydrochlorite portion on the cocaine powder, on the powder
cocaine, has no biological activity.
Whereas, so that means that crack and powder are the same drug.
They are exactly the same drug.
The same effect, same drug.
Wow, so it's indistinguishable to the user.
Indistinguishable.
Now, why is it that they prepare it that way?
Like, what's the benefit of preparing it?
It's just so it delivers quicker?
Great question.
So, one of the things that you, you might recall Richard Pryor back in the days
when he got, he burnt, he burnt himself with smoking.
So, he was freebasing.
So, he was removing that hydrochlorite portion of the salt off of the cocaine
base so he could actually smoke it.
Now, he was using ether, which is highly flammable.
With crack cocaine, you don't, now you no longer need the ether.
You just mix it up with baking soda and water and the cocaine and you mix it up
and you get rid of that salt.
So, ether is no longer needed and it's not as dangerous.
So, that's one of the reasons that we have crack cocaine as a result of that.
And it also, it made it so you could sell them in unit doses to make the drug
appear to be cheaper.
Because you also might recall in the early 1980s, 1970s, you had to buy cocaine
powder in bulk and that made it more expensive.
Crack cocaine made it a lot more simple for people to buy it who didn't have
the kind of expendable income that was required before the mid-1980s.
So, essentially, they just brought it down to bite-sized portions.
That's right.
Exactly.
Rather than selling this whole six-pack or 12-pack, now you can sell one item,
one can or one bottle.
I want to talk more about this, but I should just clarify that Richard Pryor
changed his story as he got older and actually said that he tried to kill
himself.
He lit himself on fire, apparently.
I'm a huge Richard Pryor fan, and I know that that was originally what he had
said, that he got burnt doing freebass, but I think he changed his story later.
I actually worked with him a bunch of times right before he died.
It was a real honor.
He was a real special dude as far as stand-up comedians go.
Yeah, I'm with you.
But that style of freebass was a thing that we'd always associated with people
that were really, really fucked up.
Yeah.
Like, the guy's doing coke.
Oh, well, you know, he's probably going to mess up his life.
He's freebassing.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
He's gone, man.
He's bassing.
He's a bass head.
Yeah.
Right?
Bass head was the thing.
Before crack, it was bass heads.
Absolutely.
I describe a couple people in the book from my neighborhood who got into freebassing
in exactly the same way you just talked about.
Right.
Absolutely.
Now, everybody has this idea in their head that crime and that everything escalated
in the world changed when crack was introduced.
Is that a myth as well?
Yeah, it's a myth.
Well, let me clarify because on the one hand, so when crack hit the market, it
was first sort of talked about December 1984 in the L.A. Times, the first time
we heard a crack.
But it didn't become more widely known or available until maybe the mid-1985.
Now, once crack cocaine hit the markets, what happened was that people were
fighting over various new markets.
Whenever there are new illicit markets, yeah, you're going to get some violent
activity until the market settles down.
There are a number of things that people attribute to crack in terms of crime
and all of the sort of downfall of certain communities.
Unemployment.
They said that unemployment really rose as a result of crack cocaine being
around.
Now, 1982, the unemployment rate in this country was about 11 percent for white
folks, and it was double that for black people.
That was before crack, at least two, three years before crack even hit the
market.
Now, during the whole crack era, unemployment has never been as high as 1982.
That's number one.
People said things like, people from my community, crack cocaine was
responsible for these mothers, these grandmothers now raising new generations
of kids because their daughters were strung out on crack.
And so now they have to take care of these kids.
That simply wasn't true.
It certainly happened in my community, but it happened before crack cocaine was
ever on the market.
It certainly happened in my family long before crack cocaine ever hit the
market.
When we look at other communities, like particularly immigrant communities, if
you look at the Jewish community when they came over, the Eastern European Jews,
when they came over in the country, the early 1800s and so forth,
what you see is that you had a similar sort of phenomenon going on in those
kind of communities.
What's his name?
Irvin Howell, his great book, Land of Our Fathers, A Home of Our Fathers, he
kind of described all of these pathological behaviors that happened in that
community.
Many of those same behaviors were attributed to crack cocaine in black people
later.
But it's not – they were there long before crack cocaine was there, but crack
cocaine became the scapegoat.
That's a fascinating scapegoat because I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.
I really thought that there was a difference between the 1980s and the 1990s as
far as like when crack was introduced.
Boom, it took off.
It was sort of something that was just always discussed as like common fact.
Yeah, I know.
I bought into it too, and that's what drove me to pursue my education in the
way I did.
But as a result of pursuing that education, I discovered that it was not true.
So are these cultural myths the result of politicians, like political campaigns
who are trying to clean up the streets and they attribute it to certain issues?
Or is it something more widespread?
Is it the media just running with a narrative?
What is it?
How did it get started?
Well, there are multiple sort of factors and players involved.
So when we think about the politicians, for example, politicians, if crack
cocaine is the problem, never mind the fact that unemployment rates was out of
control before crack cocaine hit the market.
Unemployment was out of control.
A number of things were already problematic.
Now you have crack cocaine.
If you blame crack cocaine, it's really easy to simply say, we'll put more law
enforcement, we'll hire more cops, we'll put more efforts in controlling these
drugs.
A lot easier to say, we'll lock people up for selling these drugs, for using
these drugs.
In the process, what you do is you create jobs for a select group of people,
and then you don't have to deal with the real issues.
The real issues of unemployment, of deprivation, all of these things you don't
have to deal with.
But they're far more complicated.
And so politicians are happy to buy in.
Now, one of the things about crack cocaine is that we think about the law that
punishes or punishes crack cocaine 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine.
And the vast majority of people who got punished under these laws were black,
80, 85% of the people, even though they don't make up the majority of the users.
So people say things like, well, were those laws racist?
And the laws themselves weren't racist because the Congressional Black Caucus,
17 of the 21 members voted for these laws, for these laws that punish crack
cocaine 100 times more harshly.
But the point is, is that everyone bought into it.
Parents bought into it.
Because the parents, for the parents, what this meant is that you don't
actually have to educate your kids about this.
You just say that they're bad and stay away from it.
No education required.
Even scientists and treatment providers, they all bought into it because you
got a problem, we're going to solve your problem.
So we are needed and we are valued.
So you had all of these sort of constituencies from society benefiting from the
vilification or the scapegoating of crack cocaine.
All of those things came together nicely.
And then we think about the rappers.
They all came into the game, too, because it's like, I'm conscious.
I'm going to say that this is a problem in my community and I care about my
community and this is the way that I can show it.
So everybody had a stake in this sort of thing.
Wow.
That is absolutely fascinating.
You know, one of the things that I've talked to quite a few people about when
it comes to issues like real complex issues like drug addiction and violence
and poverty is that once you feed it with any organism, whether it's that
organism is law enforcement or that org