Summary:
Discusses the prevalence of crack cocaine in the United States. Describes the effect of crack abuse on neighborhoods and individuals.
What looks like your neighborhood abandoned house with poor lightning, boarded up windows and doors and overgrown bushes, might just be your community's biggest crack or drug house. These vacant or condemned houses used for criminal activity are all over the United States, primarily in the southeastern parts. However watch out, police departments and neighborhoods around the nation are putting their foot down to crack and houses that sell it. Are you ready to take initiative?
Crack is made from powered cocaine and is sold in rock form. The crack rocks are crystallized in the cooking process and are yellow and tasteless. The drug produces an intense and almost immediate high. Smoking crack allows doses of cocaine to reach the brain within seconds and effects begin within minutes. Leading us to experience a combination of abnormal strength feeling, poor impulse control and delusions.
America's outlook of crack cocaine is identified with poor blacks and Hispanics. Crack houses, crack dealers, crack whores and crack babies sum up everything a white person fears about the "ghetto lifestyle," along with the media and government. Shamelessly to manipulate and amplify the racists connection between black and crack. Hundreds of crack users die annually but not all of them fit into the stereotypically profile. Truth is, today in your middle class neighborhood sweet and innocent teenage Susie and Bobby might be out on the weekends smoking crack with their friends as a regular thing. Along with drinking alcohol and smoking pot.
The crimes that come along with crack dealers, users and other drug utilizers are horrendous. Murders, rape, abuse, assault, driving accidents and robbery are just some associated with crack, and any other drug. Owners of drug houses or who deal are often victims of personally robbery, and cant report it to the police due to the illegal activity their involved with. Who wants to wake up to a gun in their face, and watch all of their "hard earned" possessions be stolen?
So how do we determine if that crummy house around the corner is selling crack? Police departments around the US are trying to reduce the number of crackhouses, apartment units, motel rooms and other properties that engage in illegal drug trafficking and promote crime with in a neighborhood. There are many suspicions that can alert you; frequent visits at all hours, expensive cars in low-income neighborhoods, and visitors who stay for only a short period of time. Other indications include; adults or young adults posing as lookouts, action of specific signal, a porch light on meaning "business is being conducted," houses appearing to be fortified to prevent police entry and shades or blinds being drawn though the house is occupied.
Police and other partners feel it best the only way to target local crack houses is to organize groups of neighbors. Police encourage tactics such as; harassing people entering and leaving the house, getting tenants evicted, and shutting off water or electricity. These plans may work to get rid of a crack house but unfortunately the crack and it's dealers don't just disappear they migrate somewhere else. So as police officers around the nation try to crack down on crack houses and get they out of business, neighbors stand by in disgust and disbelief remembering crack kills.
This is the complete article, containing 544 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
