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 Drug expert: 'Crack' born in San Francisco Bay Area in '74

 It was a failed attempt to copy something else

 Published: Aug. 19, 1996                                    [Other stories]

 BY GARY WEBB                                                Shadowy
 Mercury News Staff Writer                                   origins of
                                                             'crack'
 THOUGH MIAMI AND LOS ANGELES are commonly regarded as the   epidemic
 twin cradles of ''crack'' cocaine, the first                Role of
 government-financed study of cocaine smoking concluded      CIA-linked
 that it was actually born here, in the San Francisco Bay    agents a
 Area, in January 1974.                                      well-protected
                                                             secret until
 After comedian Richard Pryor nearly immolated himself       now
 during a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National
 Institute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald K.    San
 Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice. Siegel,   Francisco
 the first scientist to document crack's use in the United   agent
 States, traced the smoking habit back to 1930, when         thought she
 Colombians first started it.                                was onto
                                                             something
 Translation problem                                         big
                                                             Meneses'
 But what was being smoked south of the border -- a          trail was
 paste-like substance called basé (bah-SAY) -- was very      getting warm
 different from what Californians were putting in their      when her
 pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same    superiors
 thing: free base.                                           took her off
                                                             the case
 Basé 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 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 in an
 interview. ''They mispronounced it, misunderstood the
 Spanish, and thought (basé) was cocaine base.''

 Unintentional success

 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 basé. They were not. They were smoking
 something nobody on the planet had ever smoked before.''

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

 Study never published

 ''We were able to show to our satisfaction that they were
 directly responsible for distributing the habit
 throughout the United States. Wherever they were selling
 their kits, that's where we started getting the clinical
 reports,'' Siegel said. ''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.

 TUESDAY: The impact of the crack epidemic on the black
 community, and why justice hasn't been for all.

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