Decoded

“Cocaine wasn’t new and neither was selling it. There had always been older dudes who grew their pinkie fingernails out to sniff coke. There were always down-low dealers who partied with their customers as they supplied them…. but for the most part doing coke was something that happened at private parties, something you might’ve of heard about but had never really seen.” (Jay-Z 18) Cocaine was a drug popular in the 80’s but was known to be very expensive. In the mid-1980 there became a smokable form of cocaine introduced to the world called crack. Crack was known as freebase cocaine in the 1970’s but required the ether to make. Freeway Ricky Ross was a drug dealer from Los Angeles who simplified the freebase process by using baking soda creating a hard substance called crack cocaine and spreading the world. Crack Cocaine is heated in a pipe, and can be either smoked or injected and gives a fast, intense high, while powder cocaine is snorted through the nose with a delayed and less intense high. Crack became peoples drug of choice because crack entered your system faster and was cheap as low as $2.50 a gram.

As crack cocaine became a terrible and rising epidemic, hip-hop was going with it. It was in the 1980s that crack cocaine and hip-hop became a foundation in urban communities. Hip hop started off in New York when they used to have block parties and people would start rapping over beats or someone beat boxing and the dance crave of breaking and b-boying where people would move to the beat. Sadly hip hop artist started glorifying the crack epidemic by calling themselves Kurtis Blow and Mellie Mel had a song called “white lines”. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five took a different approach to the crack epidemic with a song called “The Message” by saying “You'll admire all the number-book takers Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big money-makers Drivin' big cars, spendin' twenties and tens And you'll wanna grow up to be just like them, huh”. Also during the