Working Paper: NBER ID: w11318
Authors: Roland G. Fryer Jr.; Paul S. Heaton; Steven D. Levitt; Kevin M. Murphy
Abstract: A wide range of social indicators turned sharply negative for Blacks in the late 1980s and began to rebound roughly a decade later. We explore whether the rise and fall of crack cocaine can explain these patterns. Absent a direct measure of crack cocaine's prevalence, we construct an index based on a range of indirect proxies (cocaine arrests, cocaine-related emergency room visits, cocaine-induced drug deaths, crack mentions in newspapers, and DEA drug busts). The crack index we construct reproduces many of the spatial and temporal patterns described in ethnographic and popular accounts of the crack epidemic. We find that our measure of crack can explain much of the rise in Black youth homicides, as well as more moderate increases in a wide range of adverse birth outcomes for Blacks in the 1980s. Although our crack index remains high through the 1990s, the deleterious social impact of crack fades. One interpretation of this result is that changes over time in behavior, crack markets, and the crack using population mitigated the damaging impacts of crack. Our analysis suggests that the greatest social costs of crack have been associated with the prohibition-related violence, rather than drug use per se.
Keywords: crack cocaine; homicide; birth outcomes; social indicators; black youth
JEL Codes: J00
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| crack index (C43) | homicide victimizations among black males aged 14-17 (K42) |
| crack index (C43) | homicide victimizations among black males aged 18-24 (J17) |
| crack index (C43) | homicide victimizations among black males aged 25 and over (J17) |
| crack index (C43) | black low birth weight babies (J13) |
| crack index (C43) | fetal death rates (J13) |
| crack index (C43) | child mortality (J13) |
| crack index (C43) | unwed births (J12) |
| crack prevalence (K42) | violence (D74) |
| establishment of property rights among drug dealers (P14) | decoupling of crack use and violence (K42) |