I was so anxious that I started having heart palpitations. I lost 40lb because I could barely keep anything on my stomach. “My body completely rejected the process. “Writing is a process of making sense and making meaning so you sort of metabolise the information that you take in,” Ramsey, a journalist and author based in Los Angeles, says by phone during a trip to New York. After visiting the 10 cities hardest hit by crack and interviewing hundreds of former addicts, crime victims, community activists, ex-prisoners, journalists, police officers and politicians, he was manifesting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Ramsey came to realise that his illness was not due to “book jitters” or a mysterious medical condition. But he got it done: When Crack Was King is a panoramic social and political history of the crack cocaine epidemic that destroyed countless Black lives in the 1980s and 90s.
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