Drugs: Spread of crack: coke for the poor

Over the past 25 years, crack has become the most commonly used street drug in Frankfurt. In the last two or three years, Berlin and many other large cities with established drug scenes have followed suit. As in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel, other major German cities are now also confronted with open crack consumption on certain streets. Sales and consumption often take place near relevant parks and train stations. As openly as the consequences of crack consumption are now noticeable on certain streets, we know very little about the developments and mechanisms of the market behind them.

What is crack?

Crack is smokable cocaine. Tibor Harrach, pharmacist and employee of the Berlin drug checking project, explains the chemical nature of the drug to “nd.DieWoche”: “Cocaine comes in two forms that can be easily converted into one another. Cocaine hydrochloride is a water-soluble salt and can be snorted or injected. The uncharged cocaine base dissolves in organic solvents and is insoluble in water. In this form, cocaine is found in crack and can be smoked. Crack is made from cocaine by heating cocaine hydrochloride in the presence of a basic substance, usually baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). The drug therefore consists of the cocaine base, cocaine decomposition products, the remains of the basic substance and the impurities that were present in the cocaine from which crack was made.

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The single consumption unit, the smokable crack stone, is very cheap due to the small quantity, has an immediate effect and quickly becomes addictive due to the strong but very short high. That’s why crack users are “always after the stone,” as a crack addict describes it in an interview for the first major study on crack in Germany. This addictive pressure creates a consumption dynamic that cannot be absorbed by the existing drug help institutions – to the detriment of the neighborhoods where the consumption takes place, but above all for the crack users themselves. The users become neglected because only the The thought of the next crack stone determines life. Elementary things like eating, drinking and sleeping, on the other hand, become irrelevant, as do personal hygiene and clothing – which makes crack users easy to identify. Crack addiction creates a psychological dependency that cannot currently be substituted, unlike heroin addiction.

Black box drug market

Recently, crack reporting has emerged as a new journalistic topic. First the regional newspapers in the affected cities, then the major media formats, wrote headlines like “What crack is doing to Germany” (“Spiegel”). The articles were generally structured in the same way: journalists go to the relevant places where crack and heroin consumption occurs together with homelessness, describe the dystopian scene and let some severely addicts have their say. Afterwards, people from social work and those responsible from the authorities are interviewed, who openly admit that they have no solutions. The audience is left with a perplexed, eerie feeling. What is not discussed in these articles is how the drug market actually works and what social conditions gave rise to the much-vaunted crack “epidemic”.

The head of the Berlin addiction support organization Vista, Nina Pritszens, describes the drug market in an interview as unregulated and difficult to understand. »You only look at what you can see: either at the people who consume substances, or at customs and police and what they confiscate. Both only show small excerpts. Nobody really knows what the entire market looks like or what strategies are being pursued there. Unlike legal drugs such as alcohol, tobacco or addictive medications, public shareholder reports and business balance sheets cannot be looked into when it comes to illegal drugs. Capitalists – including drug dealers – generally don’t like transparency, especially not when they go to jail for their trade.

So we know little about the nature of the illegal drug market and therefore about the question of why crack is so rampant in major cities here now and not five or ten years ago. Who and based on what business considerations made the decision to offer cocaine to the more well-off in the crack version? Should your own sales be increased or is demand fueled by increasing homelessness?

An indication that the increase in crack consumption in Germany is a sign of overproduction and sales crisis could be the degree of purity of cocaine. Tibor Harrach reports that in 2023 an average content of 78.5 percent cocaine hydrochloride was found in 178 cocaine samples. By 2021, the German Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (DBDD) has shown the active ingredient content of the narcotics seized by police and customs in its REITOX reports: In 2021, it was 86.7 percent cocaine hydrochloride for cocaine from street trade. In 1995/96, according to drug checking by Eve & Rave eV in Berlin, the average cocaine content was still 50 percent.

Counterinsurgency drug

When looking at the motherland of crack, the USA, it is also noticeable that crack spread there in poor black communities from the mid-1980s onwards, when there was too much of the “white gold”. For the city of Los Angeles, journalist Gary Webb was able to prove in his publication “Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion” that large quantities of cocaine were delivered under the eyes of the CIA by supporters of anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua , who used it to finance their war against the left-wing Sandinista government. This incident was officially admitted years later and went down in history as the “Contra Affair”.

At that time, the US presidential couple Nancy and Ronald Reagan had already declared the “War on Drugs,” which was also directed against the domestic black population and created the largest prison system in the world. Sanho Tree from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, director of the Drug Policy Project there since 1998, summarizes the years of “crack hysteria” for “nd.DieWoche”: “The most important lesson about crack in the USA has to do with the interaction of sensationalist journalism, opportunistic politicians (including Democrats), and strict minimum sentencing laws, and how they fueled the explosion of the prison industrial complex. The crack hysteria has made the criminal justice system significantly more racist, even though many white people also use crack. “The War on Crack has done more harm to Black communities than the drugs themselves, and the damage continued for a generation after crack disappeared from the headlines.”

With cocaine, the countries of northern South America have a world market product that, after decades of the “War on Drugs”, is probably even because of This continues to provide many people with a comparatively good income, be it in production, distribution or sales. Some even became rich and powerful. Why should that change after decades just because a German interior minister promised a little development aid and a few contact officials in South America in February? Cocaine consumption is a reality, whether in football stadiums, in the office, in the bar toilet – or as the impoverishment drug crack in certain streets of major German cities. In order to change something here, a completely different drug policy would be needed beyond illegalization and criminalization.

Fabian Kunow works at the educational association »Helle Panke e. V. – Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Berlin” with left-wing metropolitan politics.
Am 6. June 20247 p.m., the panel discussion will take place in Hellen Panke (Kopenhagener Straße 9, 10437 Berlin). »Crack Wave in Berlin: What we can learn from the history and experiences of the ›Motherland of Crack‹« instead of. On the podium are Astrid Leicht (Fixpunkt eV), Niklas Schrader (MdA – Die Linke Berlin), and Sanho Tree (Institute for Policy Studies in Washington) joining in from the USA.