In the City, Pot Helps Addicts Kick Crack

When four people were shot in a robbery at a marijuana dealer's apartment above New York's Carnegie Deli this summer, many newspapers, including the New York Times saw it as an occasion to tut tut that, as the Times' headlined it, "Violent Crimes Undercut Marijuana's Mellow Image."

Far less attention (in fact, no Times coverage at all) was given to a Justice Department study released just a month later which found that amongst young people getting arrested, marijuana use has increased in direct parallel with the decline of crack -- a phenomenon that also tracks perfectly the dramatic fall in violent crime seen in the 1990's.

Contrary to The Times' notion that pot has become a new cause of violence, this data suggests just the opposite. It also implies that the on-going crackdown on marijuana use may ultimately be counter-productive -- and could help reverse an unusual, spontaneous trend in which younger kids saw and disliked what hard drugs had done to their parents and older siblings and turned to pot instead.

Though many people believe marijuana law enforcement has eased -- unbelievably, former President Clinton told Rolling Stone he thought that "most small amounts of marijuana have been decriminalized" -- there were more marijuana arrests during the Clinton administration than under any previous President. Pot arrests nearly doubled between 1980 and 1999. And 88% of these arrests -- over 40% of all drug arrests in the U.S. -- are for marijuana possession, not sales.

As in most of the drug war, the burden has fallen disproportionately on minority youth. Though African Americans make up just 12% of the population (and 13% of drug users), 38% of those arrested for drug offenses and 59% of those convicted are black, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

But, say ethnographers, it was black and Latino youth themselves who spurred the end of the crack epidemic and the precipitous fall in violent crime that followed. Ric Curtis, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College in New York City has studied street patterns of drug use for decades.

"There are several lines of evidence [for the idea that minority youth began substituting pot for crack]," says Curtis. "The ethnographic evidence dates back to 1988."

"Back then, a lot of young black crack dealers in Flatbush were switching from smoking crack from glass stems to smoking "woolah" joints." he says. These were developed by West Indians, who would roll marijuana joints in a tobacco leaf and sprinkle some crack into the mix. The leaves were purchased at smokeshops for $1 each.

When a crackdown on headshops began, these leaves became hard to get. To replace them, says Curtis, Rastas began to buy Philly blunt cigars and put crack as well as marijuana inside.

"They did that to wean themselves off the stem," he says. "For lack of a better word, smoking weed blunted the desire to keep chasing that pipe. The dealers were telling us they did this because otherwise they would smoke up all their money."

Finding it an effective way of kicking crack, the dealers gradually reduced the amount of cocaine in their blunts until they became pure pot and tobacco. Then, says Curtis, they "began dogging their partners and friends for [continuing to smoke] crack." Though dealers still made their money from crackheads, no one wanted their sisters, girlfriends or other family members as customers.

33-year-old Awilda, a Brooklyn resident who requested that only her first name be revealed, is one of the former crack users who found marijuana helpful in stopping the pipe. While in jail for a crack-related assault, she swore on the Bible that she would never go back to that drug. When she found herself using it again, she decided to try weed instead. "It made me forget the crack," she says. "It's been four years since I smoked it and I have no more desire for it. I like blunts better."