Donovan Ramsey on When Crack Was King
\u201cWhen people think of the crack epidemic, they think of crime,\u201d the journalist Donovan X. Ramsey tells David Remnick. \u201cBut they don\u2019t necessarily know the ways that it impacted the most vulnerable\u2014the ways that it changed the lives of people who sold it, who were addicted to it, who loved people who sold it or were addicted to it.\u201d Ramsey\u2019s new book, \u201cWhen Crack Was King: A People\u2019s History of a Misunderstood Era,\u201d weaves the stories of four people who survived the epidemic into a historical analysis of how crack led to the erosion of dozens of American cities\u2014but also of how the crack epidemic eventually ended. \u201cI didn't know what life was like before crack,\u201d Ramsey, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987, says. \u201cI wanted to understand the ways that it shaped our society.\u201d