ABSTRACT
Crack coverage favored modes of exclusion enforced by the three P’s of the hard sector of the drug control establishment—police, prosecution and prison. Instead of the compassionate tone laced with the hope of recovery that had typified response to cocaine in the early part of the decade, the crack crisis helped promote a new racist backlash that justified the symbolic criminalization of a generation of black youth. A threatening place of assembly and enterprise, the crack house was often depicted as territory in which the entrepreneurial spirit and the ideology of consumerism are pushed beyond the limits of decency, good taste and social and moral control. The vilification of the crack house as a sinister place of assembly has, of course, justified the most brutal and excessive of armed responses by the forces of decency and control. The percentage of cocaine stories featuring clandestine footage rises over the course of the 1980s.
