How the ‘Crack Baby’ Myth Criminalized Black Women and Destroyed Families

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy, director Stanley Nelson’s latest documentary, is both a reminder and an eye-opening account of the horrors of crack and the country’s push to criminalize Black people struggling with drug addiction. Streaming on Netflix, it covers a lot of ground. Drawing from anecdotes from the Black and Brown people impacted by the “war on drugs” and archival footage from the 1980s and ’90s, the doc illustrates the ties between Reagan’s White House to Nicaragua and how a party drug for the elite was…