By the late 1980s, crack had the nation in a panic. Murder, death, instant addiction, crack crews, crack kingpins, crackheads, crack whores, crack babies. Crack, the mass media roared, was everywhere. Those stalwart scholars of America’s engagement with crack cocaine, Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, argue that “the period from 1986 to 1992 was in many ways the most intense drug scare of the twentieth century.” They have a strong case.

The media told quite a few whoppers about crack cocaine during that period, feeding the American public’s wildest fears with terrifying, if often untrue or exaggerated, tales of ever-widening drug devastation. America’s newsweeklies, especially Time and Newsweek, helped lead the charge, sometimes into hysteria, and in those pre-Internet days, these newsweeklies had a lot of reach – some 20 million people, most of them middle-class voters, read Time at its peak.