TY - JOUR AU - Fryer,Roland G. AU - Heaton,Paul S. AU - Levitt,Steven D. AU - Murphy,Kevin M. TI - Measuring the Impact of Crack Cocaine JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11318 PY - 2005 Y2 - May 2005 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11318 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11318.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Roland G. Fryer, Jr Department of Economics Harvard University Littauer Center 208 Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-9592 Fax: 617/495-8570 E-Mail: rfryer@fas.harvard.edu Paul Heaton RAND Corporation 1776 Main St. P.O. Box 2138 Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 Tel: 310-393-0411x7526 Fax: 310-260-8156 E-Mail: pheaton@rand.org Steven D. Levitt Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773/834-1862 Fax: 773/702-8490 E-Mail: slevitt@midway.uchicago.edu Kevin M. Murphy Booth School of Business The University of Chicago 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773/702-7280 Fax: 773/834-3554 E-Mail: murphy@chicagoBooth.edu AB - 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%u2019s 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. ER -