freeway crack in the system documentary stream

But to his delight, rather than being thrown in jail, he was let go – the cops, it turns out, were on the dealers’ payroll. Corey Pegues, a former dealer, describes how in the early years of crack, he was once caught by the police with over 300 vials on his person. And when it was, it was over-policed,” Nelson says. “Part of the crack epidemic was caused by the fact that for so much of the time, the selling of crack in black communities was not policed. It pervaded so many different parts of people’s lives,” Nelson remembers. I remember people would have removable steering wheels so that your car would be harder to steal. “Crack hit people that hadn’t been caught up in other drugs,” Nelson says, referring to its impact on women, and in particular mothers, many of whom would lose or surrender custody of their children. Meanwhile crack continued to invade and tear apart the homes of the most vulnerable. This surge of wealth into the hands of a few dealers unprotected and unsupervised by the law led to armed disputes between competing factions that transformed neighborhoods into literal war zones.

“It was like a gold rush that hit the hood,” remembers Styles. A McDonald’s recruitment video from the time loses its inspirational edge when you find out that pay was only $3.25 an hour. Former dealers like Samson Styles and “Freeway Ricky” Donell Ross explain how the appeal of selling crack was rooted in a capitalistic, dog-eat-dog reality, and opened up an easy way for young men like themselves to make the kind of money they had only ever dreamed of. Yet in places like LA, New York and Washington DC people were lining up, or even coming in from the suburbs and waiting drive-in style, to get their fix. “You couldn’t go to a white neighborhood that I know of anywhere in the country and see people openly selling crack,” Nelson explains. The wildly addictive drug was transformative, particularly for those communities inhabited by African Americans struggling to break the cycle of poverty. By 1984, it had found its way into inner-city, working-class communities in the form of crack rock, a stronger form of cocaine sheared of its salt content that induced short, intense highs when smoked. As a result, supply and demand boomed, and prices fell. Movies like Scarface and scandals like Richard Pryor’s fiery freebasing mishap brought the drug into popular consciousness. Crack begins by explaining the rise of powder cocaine, an expensive party drug that connoted power, money and glamour. He details the events of over a decade like an epic saga, and accentuates his collage of interviews and archival footage with popular hip-hop music that directly spoke to, or was influenced by, the crack era.

In the documentary, Nelson traces the story of crack and its victims with a myth-busting approach.

Freeway crack in the system documentary stream