Tran­scripts from Gary Webb’s orig­i­nal San Jose Mer­cury News series.

August 22, 1996
Crack was born dur­ing 1974 in S.F. Bay Area
by Gary Webb
San Jose Mer­cury News

Though Miami and Los Ange­les are com­monly regarded as the twin cra­dles of crack, the first government-financed study of cocaine smok­ing con­cluded that it was actu­ally born in the Bay Area in Jan­u­ary 1974.

After come­dian Richard Pryor nearly immo­lated him­self dur­ing a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National Insti­tute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice.

Siegel, the first sci­en­tist to doc­u­ment crack’s use in the United States, traced the smok­ing habit back to 1930, when Colom­bians first started it.

But what was being smoked south of the bor­der — a paste-like sub­stance called BASE (bah-SAY) — was very dif­fer­ent from what Cal­i­for­ni­ans were putting in their pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same thing: free base.

BASE was a crude, toxics-laden pre­cur­sor to cocaine pow­der. On the other hand, free base (which later became known as crack or rock) was cocaine pow­der that had been reverse-engineered to make it smokable.

When San Fran­cisco Bay Area deal­ers tried recre­at­ing the drug they’d seen in South Amer­ica, Siegel learned, they’d screwed up.

“When they looked it up in the Merck Man­ual, they saw cocaine base and thought, well, yeah, this is it,” Siegel, a nation­ally known drug researcher, said. “They mis­pro­nounced it, mis­un­der­stood the Span­ish, and thought (BASE) was cocaine base.”

The base described in the organic-chemistry hand­book was cocaine pow­der sep­a­rated from its salts, a process eas­ily done with boil­ing water and bak­ing soda.

It was an imme­di­ate, if unin­ten­tional, hit.

“They were wowed by it,” Siegel said. “They thought they were smok­ing BASE. They were not. They were smok­ing some­thing nobody on the planet had ever smoked before.”

Using the sales records of sev­eral major drug-paraphernalia com­pa­nies, Siegel cor­re­lated crack’s pub­lic appear­ance with the appear­ance of base-making kits and glass pipes for smok­ing it. The sales records zeroed in on the Bay Area.

“We were able to show to our sat­is­fac­tion that they were directly respon­si­ble for dis­trib­ut­ing the habit through­out the United States,” Siegel said.

“Wher­ever they were sell­ing their kits, that’s where we started get­ting the clin­i­cal reports. It all started in North­ern California.”

His ground­break­ing study was never pub­lished by the gov­ern­ment, pur­port­edly for bud­getary reasons.

Siegel, who said he grew con­cerned that the infor­ma­tion would not be made avail­able to other researchers, pub­lished it him­self in an obscure med­ical jour­nal in late 1982.