“I’ve been all over the country and have interviewed hundreds of people whose lives were touched by crack, but never have I met a ‘crackhead,’” Donovan X. Ramsey writes toward the end of his first ...

One of the most confounding legacies of the crack epidemic is that everyone has heard of crack — we all think we know what we need to know — but few of us actually understand it. That’s not an ...

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan X. Ramsey (2023, One World Press, 427 pp., $30 HB) Black journalist Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the ...

In his new nonfiction book, When Crack Was King, Donovan X. Ramsey explores how the crack cocaine epidemic of the '80s and '90s shaped people, neighborhoods and entire communities, particularly for ...

In When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era, veteran journalist Donovan X. Ramsey shrewdly disrupts a harmful narrative surrounding the crack epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s. The ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? In When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era ...

Stay on top of what’s happening in the Bay Area with essential Bay Area news stories, sent to your inbox every weekday. The Bay Bay Area-raised host Ericka Cruz Guevarra brings you context and ...

On Sept. 5, 1989, President George H.W. Bush appeared on live television to discuss what he called the nation's "gravest domestic threat." Sitting at his desk in the oval office, Bush held up a bag of ...

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, in the United States, we know how the opioid epidemic and the fentanyl crisis are literally major killers. But perhaps we’ve forgotten one that ...

Donovan X. Ramsey explains how documenting the history of the drug war is a “community project” and looks back on 1990s rap music's anti-crack hits. Donovan X. Ramsey(Photo by Antonio M. Johnson) In ...