Detroit — Crack cocaine hit Detroit like a bomb 40 years ago, destroying families, straining law enforcement and causing paradigm shifts in the criminal justice system and popular culture.
The crack explosion in the mid-1980s spawned millionaire kingpins who waged violent turf wars, along with countless small-time dealers and addicts. The epidemic led to strict laws that swelled the prison population in Michigan and nationwide, while music industry and Hollywood icons built careers rapping about the dope game and the violence surrounding it.
While crack remains easily available, it’s not the drug of choice for most users now, according to law enforcement and survey data. Pills, heroin and other “downers” — often laced with fentanyl — have supplanted crack as the top-selling drug nationwide and locally, with methamphetamine entering the Detroit market in large quantities for the first time this year, according to Detroit police officials.
On Jan. 5, 1986, The Detroit News published a front-page article headlined, “Addictive new ‘crack’ cocaine sweeps Detroit.” Federal authorities said they had heard reports of the drug surfacing in Detroit sometime in 1984 or early 1985, with its popularity spreading rapidly during the summer of 1985.
In 1987, with turf wars raging as gangs jockeyed for position in the lucrative new drug market, Detroit recorded its highest-ever homicide rate of 63.5 per 100,000 residents. A 1989 report by the U.S. Attorney’s Office found Detroit, which at the time was the nation’s sixth-largest city in population, ranked first in the United States in crack cocaine abuse.
The 1991 movie “New Jack City,” in which a band of crack dealers commandeer an apartment complex called “The Carter,” was based on the real-life takeover of the 52-unit Broadmoor Apartments on Detroit’s east side by the Chambers Brothers gang, the organization that’s credited with introducing crack to Detroit.
The era known as the crack epidemic, which lasted from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, was the result of multiple economic and social factors, according to Wayne State University sociology professor Khari Brown, who said the drug had a particularly devastating impact on Detroit.
“Crack hit cities like Detroit just as deindustrialization was happening across America,” Brown said. “The factories all shut down just as Black people were starting to benefit from the Civil Rights Movement. Just when the Black community was starting to get a foothold, and starting to get those good factory jobs they’d previously been shut out of, companies started shipping jobs to other countries or mechanizing.
“While this is happening, crack enters the community, and it’s highly addictive, creating a lot of addicts, and giving people who have no jobs an opportunity to make a lot of money fast,” Brown said. “At the same time, culturally, you have rap music that’s encouraging young African American males to sell drugs, telling them that it’s cool to join gangs, and shoot people up and go to jail. At the peak period when crack was in the streets, you had gangsta rap, which was a matter of art imitating life, and life imitating art.”
The crack problem wasn’t confined to Detroit or African Americans, said Steve Dolunt, a former Detroit police assistant chief who began his career in 1985.
“We’d arrest a ton of people from the suburbs,” said Dolunt, who retired in 2017. “White males, White females. A lot of truck drivers would stop for hookers and smoke rocks with them. We had doctors from St. John’s Hospital (on Detroit’s east side); they’d get off work and stop for a quick rock. The crack epidemic hit everyone; it wasn’t just Detroit, although that’s where most people came to get it.
“It was like a factory — a lot of the crack houses had slots in the door; people would just go up, put their money in and get their rock.”
Dolunt said when he was a young officer patrolling the city’s west side, the Chambers Brothers gang controlled the Jeffries Projects.
“It was just like ‘New Jack City’ — maybe the movie was exaggerated a little, but the Chambers Brothers did take over whole floors of those high-rises,” he said. “I felt sorry for the old people who had to live there, or the people who were just trying to raise families. But they were scared to say anything to us, so if we didn’t catch these guys actually selling dope, there wasn’t much we could do.”
‘Like nothing before’
Illegal narcotics still flood Detroit and other communities, urban and rural.
Fentanyl overdoses have resulted in thousands of deaths, while addiction to heroin and other drugs continues to cause heartache and destroy lives — but crack created a unique set of problems, said Ray Winans, a former member of the Head Bangers Seven Mile Bloods gang who sold crack for years, starting as a child.
“There were drugs on the street before crack, but when crack hit, it blew up like nothing before,” said Winans, who at age 14 killed a crack addict by bludgeoning him on the head with a hammer.
Winans was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison until his 18th birthday. Upon his release, he continued selling crack, which landed him in and out of jail and prison until he quit in 2009.
“Crack is the drug that took the backbone of the Black community, the Black woman, out of the home,” said Winans, who mentors gang members and drug dealers as part of his Detroit Friends and Family Community Violence Intervention program. “When a woman would be hooked on heroin, that was a physical high, and a lot of them when they had kids, or had something else happen to wake them up, they’d get themselves together and get clean.
“But crack is a psychological drug; you get that first high that’s better than anything you ever felt in your life, and you keep trying to chase that,” Winans said. “When I sold crack, I’d see women selling their bodies — willing to sell their children — for a rock. People sold their souls for crack. It destroyed the Black community.”
Hot new product
Crack cocaine first turned up in 1981 in Los Angeles, San Diego and Houston, and by 1985 it was widely available in Detroit and other cities across the United States, according to the U.S. Office of Justice Programs 1985-86 National Narcotics Intelligence Report.
By July 1986, crack had permeated Detroit’s neighborhoods, prompting federal authorities in the city to launch a telephone line, 800-NO-CRACK, for tipsters to turn in crack dealers for reward money. In 1987, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized 1,260 pounds of cocaine in Detroit, up from 55 pounds two years earlier, according to The Detroit News archives.
Before crack was introduced, freebasing cocaine had been a habit attributed to the rich and famous, with comedian Richard Pryor making headlines after burning himself while freebasing in 1980. But while freebasing is a dangerous, expensive process that usually involves using highly flammable and expensive ether, crack is usually cut with safe, inexpensive baking soda. It’s an affordable, easily made product that reportedly gives users an initial euphoric high they often spend years trying to recapture.
Drugs had caused problems in Detroit for decades, with The News devoting a full page of its Sept. 20, 1873, edition to a story about the city’s opium scourge. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, heroin and other drugs ravaged many Detroit families and neighborhoods.
But no illegal drug has ever had such an immediate and widespread impact, said Scott Burnstein, a Detroit crime historian and founder of the website The Gangster Report.
“There’s never been a narcotic that went from zero to a thousand like crack did — it was a total game-changer,” Burnstein said. “A lot of it was the low price and the nature of the high. … There was a huge demand for it, and it opened the floodgates for the era when anyone could become a drug kingpin.”
Burnstein said gangs like the Chambers Brothers and Young Boys Incorporated recruited children to sell drugs for them.
“There’d be kids selling drugs on school playgrounds; people would walk right up and buy,” Bernstein said. “The gangs figured the police weren’t going to look on the playgrounds.”
Lighter penalties for minors also made them attractive as foot soldiers for drug dealers, said Dolunt, the former Detroit assistant police chief.
“You’d arrest some kid, and he’d be back on the street in a few hours,” he said.
Winans said he often raked in $2,000 or more per day selling crack as a kid. While he said he was allowed to keep only a small fraction of the proceeds, he felt rich.
“I’m 14 years old making $300 a day — that’s a lot of money for a 14-year-old,” Winans said.
The Rev. W.J. Rideout of All God’s People Church in Detroit, said crack had a “devastating” effect on his family.
“I had several siblings who were addicted to crack, and one sibling who sold it,” said Rideout, a community activist who grew up in Detroit. “It caused me to want to become a drug counselor and try to help people whose lives were being destroyed by crack. Thank God my family all made it out. Crack took a lot of people from us, though.”
Tough laws
With crack destroying urban communities, legislators began calling for harsher drug penalties.
In 1994, with support from the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known as “the Crime Bill,” which is the largest federal crime legislation ever enacted. The law expanded the federal death penalty to include drug offenses and added the “Three Strikes, You’re Out” rule, which meant a third conviction for a serious or violent felony often led to life in prison.
The U.S. prison population soared from 330,000 inmates in 1980 to 773,000 in 1990 to 1.4 million in 2000, with a peak of 1.6 million in 2006. Michigan, which had about 15,0000 inmates in 1980, saw its prison population jump to about 34,000 by 1990, with a high of 51,554 prisoners in March 2007.
“During the 1980s and ’90s, all the wheels of criminal justice and politics were focused on crack,” Michigan State University criminal justice professor Steven Chermak said. “What usually drives criminal justice policy is, something bad will come along that captures the imagination of the public, whether it’s a new drug or a high-profile case, and there’s an urgency to do something about it. We saw in the 1980s and ’90s where drugs became the focal point, and it contributed to the extraordinary growth in the prison population.”
The recent trend in the criminal justice system has been toward lighter penalties for nonviolent drug offenders, with Detroit’s 36th District Court among the agencies that have overhauled their bond and sentencing policies. Michigan’s prison population has declined since March 2007 to 32,778 inmates by the end of 2024, according to the state Department of Corrections.
But Chermak said the pendulum could swing back toward harsher punishment.
“Absolutely, it could happen again,” he said. “We’ve always had social problems that get constructed into something more significant, and the system is forced to respond.”
‘The residue’
Crack is still being bought and sold in Detroit, but it’s not the problem it once was, said Detroit Police Cmdr. Anthony O’Rourke, the commanding officer of the department’s Organized Crime Bureau.
“Crack is still around, but we’ve mainly been dealing with the opioid crisis for the past few years and the deaths associated with fentanyl,” O’Rourke said.
O’Rourke said police are monitoring a recent unusual trend: Methamphetamine seizures by weight as of April 15 were up 1,000% over the same period in 2024. While individual raids have netted large quantities of the drug, there hasn’t been a noticeable uptick in user arrests, he said.
“So far 2025, we’ve seized over 98 kilos of meth, 6.5 kilos of cocaine and over 6.5 of fentanyl — that tells you where the supply is headed,” O’Rourke said. “Meth hasn’t been in Detroit in large numbers before, but I think we’re going to see a transition where meth takes over as the predominant drug.”
The problems police encounter dealing with crack and meth users are different than with opioid addicts, he said.
“The opioid users usually only harm themselves; they usually just want to lay down and take a nap,” O’Rourke said. “But crack makes people really high — and it’s even worse with meth.”
Winans said while crack is still the same addictive drug it was when it was the scourge of Detroit, rappers and tougher laws for selling the drug are partially responsible for the change in habits.
“You have big artists who make it sound cool to be popping Percocets; cool to pop (Xanax),” Winans said. “You listen to some of these rappers, and drill music (a rap subgenre), and they all talk about it, doing drugs. It’s the same thing as gangsta rap back in the day, only they’re pushing this crap on the younger generation.
“Plus, they have those federal laws that are tougher on crack dealers,” Winans said. “A lot of people don’t think it’s worth the risk selling crack. … A lot of these kids look at crack as something old people smoke.”
Wayne State’s Brown said the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s could have contributed to cocaine being replaced as the drug of choice in American inner cities.
“There were allegations made that the CIA had worked with right-wing groups that sold cocaine in the United States to fund their wars against communists,” Brown said. “The CIA investigated themselves, and their findings were that the allegations weren’t true.
“But I can only see patterns, and I see America in the 1980s fighting a Cold War in Latin America, and during this period when they were working with right-wing groups like the Contras to destabilize leftist governments, some of these groups were using cocaine sales to subsidize their wars against the communists,” he added. “And during this time, cocaine suddenly starts flooding American inner cities.
“Then, after the USSR falls (in 1991), and there’s no reason for the U.S. to subsidize these right-wing groups, cocaine starts to slow down,” Brown said. “There were congressional hearings, and a lot of questions were asked about the possible connection between the Cold War and the crack epidemic, although nothing was ever proven. Still, that is the pattern I see.”
Whatever forces drove the crack epidemic, Winans said Detroiters are still reeling from the impact the drug made when it was introduced to the city 40 years ago.
“There were so many crackhead moms, so many Black kids raised by their grandparents, no fathers in the home … and now, those kids grew up,” Winans said. “And they’re having their own kids.
“We haven’t been able to recover from the crack epidemic. We’re still dealing with the residue.”
ghunter@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2134
@GeorgeHunter_DN
