Crack: Cocaine, Corruption, & Conspiracy Parent Guide

The 1980s – Ronald Reagan, economic uncertainty, and cocaine. In its powdered form, cocaine is a drug for the wealthy, taken by users as diverse as stockbrokers and writers at SNL. But in that form, cocaine is well out of the reach of the poor – until the advent of crack. Crack, or freebase, is a cheaper form of cocaine which is smoked rather than snorted. And it takes off in America’s inner cities, turning communities into economic circles of dealers and users. But as more and more cocaine flows into the country and the price continues to drop, crack-cocaine turns into an epidemic – and it’s not a problem anyone in power has much interest in solving for now.

The crack epidemic is not a simple issue. The ins and outs of responsibility for the failure in confronting the spread of crack involve a lot of factors: communities, individuals, politics, and foreign policy. Everything from Reaganomics to Iran/Contra has a part to play, and it’s not easy to follow some of the threads in a story this complex. Thankfully, director Stanley Nelson does a remarkable job of taking a huge issue and breaking it down into simpler, more digestible pieces. Taken as a whole, they provide a surprisingly nuanced understanding of a multifaceted problem: individually, they provide personal insight into smaller contributors to the issue.

Obviously, there are going to be some content concerns in a documentary about crack-cocaine. People are seen making, using, and selling crack, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are related conversations about prostitution and violence, none of which are graphic – just graphic enough to be strongly discouraging. There’s also surprisingly limited profanity, although probably too much for highly sensitive viewers.

So I wouldn’t recommend showing this to your 9-year old, but I’d cautiously say that anyone 14 and above could probably benefit from watching this documentary. It isn’t always pleasant viewing, but it is compelling and significant. The problems of the past have a way of shaping the problems of the present, and however much we’d like to avoid them, I don’t think that’s an option here. The impacts of this story on our understanding of the prison industrial system, political procedures, corruption, the current opioid epidemic, and militarized policing are important reminders that these modern issues were not born in a vacuum. Pretending otherwise isn’t going to get anything done.