Measuring Crack Cocaine and Its Impact

Abstract

Numerous social indicators turned negative for Blacks in the 1980s and rebounded a decade later. We explore whether crack cocaine explains these patterns. Absent a direct measure, we construct a crack prevalence index using multiple proxies. Our index reproduces spatial and temporal patterns described in ethnographic accounts of the crack epidemic. It explains much of the 1980s rise in Black youth homicide and more moderate increases in adverse birth outcomes. Although our index remains high through the 1990s, crack's deleterious social impact fades. Changes over time in behavior, crack markets, and the user population may have mitigated crack's damaging impacts. (JEL K42, J15, I30)

Should anyone be riding to glory on the now-descending limb of the crack-cocaine epidemic curve in the United States?

“…We conclude our ‘short communication’ by describing a challenge for future research on crack-cocaine epidemiology, including a need to synthesize these new NSDUH estimates with material from other data sources, possibly along lines recently sketched by Fryer and colleagues (2013) for the epidemic years before 2002. Against this background NSDUH evidence on the descending limb of the US crack-cocaine epidemic curve and the concurrent increase in difficulty to obtain crack among ‘at risk susceptibles’ in US communities-at-large, we see no good evidence of markedly increased perceptions of harmfulness nor treatment- or incarceration-induced reductions in mean duration of use.…”

Bringing Crime Trends Back into Criminology: A Critical Assessment of the Literature and a Blueprint for Future Inquiry

“…Nonetheless, the predominant pattern based on official and victimization data is that, with the exception of the relatively brief spike in violence among adolescents and young adults during the late 1980s and early 1990s, rates of property crime and violence have been declining in the United States since at least the early 1980s, with especially large declines observed during the 1990s. Despite a consensus that the surge in violence among young people during the late 1980s was strongly linked to the proliferation of crack cocaine in many urban areas (Baumer et al 1998, Blumstein 1995, Fryer et al 2013, Ousey & Lee 2004, reasons for the widespread and very large decreases that have been observed for all age groups since the early 1990s and the decline among older adults that started a decade earlier remain highly elusive. A key reason, we suggest, is the absence of a coherent conceptual framework for the study of crime rate changes over time that is linked to the wider literature on the theoretical and empirical foundations of crime and social control.…”

Do Female Officers Improve Law Enforcement Quality? Effects on Crime Reporting and Domestic Violence Escalation

“…The concern here is that MSAs with more homicides or that are more affected by the crack epidemic are less likely to hire female officers and also have lower crime reporting rates for assaults and domestic violence. Column 4 shows the stability of our main estimates in a model that includes the current period non-intimate partner homicide rate and the Fryer et al (2013) city-level index for the crack cocaine epidemic in that year.…”

“…The estimates in Column 3 are from our preferred specification, which includes the contemporaneous controls in Z j,t : the county's non-intimate partner homicide rate (similar to Aizer 2010) and the (state-level) crack cocaine index (Fryer et al 2013) to account for county-specific changes in overall violent crime rates.…”