‘Crack Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy’ Review: Netflix Doc Is All Complaints and Contradictions

Stanley Nelson’s Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy, which was released this week on Netflix, is a documentary version of click-whoring. This thing is only 89-minutes long. You’re in. You’re out. This from the same Netflix that has already spent some 1,200 minutes trying to free a murderer in Wisconsin.

Priorities, I guess.

This dishonest mess pretends to be a no-holds-barred examination of all the issues revolving around the crack cocaine crisis of the 80s and 90s. But it’s really just an empty exercise in shallow woketardery, which means that, like all woketardery, it’s a farcical jumble of complaints and contradictions and lies.

  • Race: check.
  • Women treated worse than men: check.
  • Criminal justice: check.
  • Evil Reagan: check.
  • It’s all the CIA’s fault: check.
  • Wealth disparity: check.
  • Fake news: check.
  • Yawn: check.

According to the documentary, the crack epidemic was everyone’s fault, except of course for the actual crack dealers (who are interviewed and mythologized as victims/capitalists) and the users.

Hey, after seeing what the FBI did to lead a coup against President Trump, I am more than ready to believe the CIA looked the other way to allow cocaine to be flown into our country. But it’s on this point where this wildly stupid documentary hits us with one of its biggest and most shameless contradictions.

Get this…

Over and over we’re told that a whole lot more white people used crack than black people. In fact, we’re told that more than two-thirds of all the crack sold in the U.S. was sold to white people… But then we’re told that the CIA allowing cocaine into the country was a racist plot against black people.

Whuh?

If that many more white people were using crack than black people (and I see no reason not to believe that), how was the CIA involved in a racist plot? Was the racist plot against white people?

You see what I mean? This garbage documentary wants it both ways…

  • More white people than black people used crack!
  • Crack is racist!

Pick one, y’all.

My favorite contradiction is how the first half of the doc attacks the police for not doing enough about the crack epidemic, and the second half complaining about all the policing. Once again, this garbage documentary wants it both ways…

  • Where the hell are the police!?
  • Why are all these police here!?

This doc is such a piece of garbage, we’re told something like You couldn’t get a Cuban cigar into the country in the 1980s, but you could get cocaine in.

And then were shown a clip from the 1987 movie Wall Street where the star of the movie … smokes … Cuban … cigars.

Good heavens, Cuban cigars were all over the place in the 80s.

Hey, no question America did a lot of things wrong during the crack epidemic…

Based on one small study, our fake media spread tons of lies about “crack babies,” horseshit like this. We definitely focused too much on prison and not enough on recovery. And when a former crack addict, one of the people interviewed who spent time in prison,  points out how when it’s black people using crack, everyone talks prison, and when it’s white people abusing opioids, everyone talks recovery, that’s just a fact.

This documentary is so bad, former Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is the voice of reason. When he’s confronted with his own demands and votes for heavy police action and sentencing against crack dealers and users, and the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine, he explains it this way…

The thinking at the time was that crack was being used more openly in the black community, and cocaine was a secret drug that middle class people used that didn’t hurt anybody. They weren’t mugging. They weren’t killing. They weren’t robbing. The whole idea was to concentrate on where the most damage to society was.

That is exactly what the thinking was (my now-wife and I lived in Milwaukee’s inner-city in the mid-80s and can testify to this). The crackdown on crack had nothing to do with race and everything to do with desperate people in black neighborhoods demanding something be done after years of being robbed and mugged, after years of being prisoners in their own homes.

So, yeah, white people in Connecticut might have been buying and dealing and smoking a whole lot more crack than black people, but it was the black community being most ravaged.

With the benefit of hindsight, Rangel goes on to call what happened “overkill,” and he’s not wrong, but that was the only moment of moral clarity throughout… The only moment where I felt I learned something, as opposed to being TOLD something.

And I’m sorry, but despite what this documentary tries to tell you, dealers and users do indeed bear an awful lot of responsibility for what happened. No one forced anyone to take drugs and no one forced anyone to deal drugs. Let’s not forget (and it would have been nice for the documentary to remind of this) that an OVERWHELMING percentage of black people did not use or deal crack.

Hey, the CIA could stroll up to my front door today and hand me a bag of crack. That doesn’t mean I’m going to use it or sell it to my neighbors. Most of us wouldn’t.

The documentary also lies about little things. The Carter Recession inherited by Ronald Reagan is blamed on Reagan, and his miraculous economic recovery, which lasted some 20 years, is ignored.

FACTS: Between 1980 and 1989, household income exploded by ten percent. Unemployment collapsed from 10.8 percent to 5.4 percent. Inflation (the cruelest tax on the poor) fell from 11.8 percent to just 4.7 percent. Federal tax revenues nearly doubled.

So, yeah, maybe the same corrupt federal government that just tried to execute a coup against Trump did allow cocaine into the country. But that’s a story that deserves more than 89-minutes surrounded by  a flurry of lies and fake news.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

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