For a brief moment in the 1980s, crack cocaine entered into the national consciousness as an "epidemic." Though it began to retreat from the general public’s radar around the early 1990s, certain cities continued to endure the effects of a crack epidemic that would last well into the early 2000s. Miami was one of these cities, and the world of the late-1980s Miami crack epidemic is the setting of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, an adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.
Just like the fragile world that Juan and Little live in, the Miami of the late 1980s was deeply colored, and significantly damaged, by crack. Crack, a smokable form of cocaine, grew in popularity because of its immediate euphoric effect, cheap cost, and highly addictive nature (“Crack Epidemic”). Even by 1999, forty-five percent of men arrested in Miami had cocaine in their systems. Most of these men were black, a reality consistent with the fact that most men arrested at the time were black (“Miami’s Vice”). Even so, crack ravaged African-American communities in greater numbers than Latino or white ones (“Crack Epidemic”).
Both Jenkins and McCraney had firsthand experience with such a world, having grown up within blocks from each other in Liberty City, the epicenter of Miami’s crack scene, at the height of the drug’s popularity. Jenkins and McCraney also both had mothers who fell victim to addiction (“In 1980s Miami”).
As the epidemic wore on, the drug’s target audience began to change shape. Teenagers became one of crack’s newest demographics, smoking “geek joints” that contained a mixture of marijuana and crack. According to the Up Front drug information center in Miami, by the late 90s, three to five percent of all adolescents there had used crack.
Throughout the 90s, Miami continued to be one of America’s poorest cities—the fourth-poorest by 1999, in fact. Experts concluded that poverty, resulting from high unemployment rates, combined with proximity to the South American countries from which cocaine originated, contributed to Miami’s vulnerability to higher than average rates of crack usage (“Miami’s Vice”).
Today, even as crack has diffused from inner cities to the American suburbs, rates of crack abuse in America have lowered across the board. That said, crack continues to be a problem, particularly amongst drug users under 18 (“Crack Cocaine Statistics”).
