Nyree was vulnerable, honest, and authentic in her story. She wants to be a voice for those who had the same struggles and for those who are still struggling today. This book is not written from a “got it all together” perspective. Nyree truly believes that struggles are created to make you and not break you. Sharing her story has helped her to become free in her identity. For every person that has had a rocky childhood, this book is for you. To every misfit and misunderstood person, Nyree desires for you to read this book because she wants you to know that you are not alone.

"How 'Bout That For a Crack Baby" depicts the journey of a young man born in Detroit with drugs in his system, and engulfed in an environment with drug lords, poverty, thieves, death, loneliness, and a lack of guidance. Shawn's man- child journey against the odds led him to two degrees, accolades, awards, and recognition...but most of all, service to ensure that many with similar life circumstances would have a pathway to success. His book is at once descriptive and prescriptive as Shawn uses his amazing life trajectory to inject how to maximize the promise of mentorship - solutions that he has personally employed with great success impacting the lives of black and brown boys in Detroit and across the nation.

It took Philip a while to drop the nick name Filthy Phil, given to him by the cruel kids at his elementary school. You see, his mother was a Crack Head, but he was the one who had to suffer the consequences for her actions. However, when a less than ideal opportunity came knocking down Philip's door, literally; he had no choice but to take it, which ultimately changes his status from poverty stricken to ghetto fabulous. Yet since he was only eight when he got dragged into the drug world, he would have no clue of the severity of the consequences he would have to face for his own actions. He later discovers how hard but necessary it would be to change his occupation to prevent helping anyone else to become a Crack Baby.

Based on on-site interviews with over 200 respondents in 12 metropolitan areas, including: child welfare administrators and caseworkers, hospital and social service staff, private agency representatives, foster parents, state and local officials, and national experts. Conclusion: "the use of cocaine and other illegal substances is pervasive in women of child-bearing age." Chilling!

Carefully documenting the deceptions and excesses of television news coverage of the so-called cocaine epidemic, Cracked Coverage stands as a bold indictment of the backlash politics of the Reagan coalition and its implicit racism, the mercenary outlook of the drug control establishment, and the enterprising reporting of crusading journalism. Blending theoretical and empirical analyses, Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell explore how TV news not only interprets "reality" in ways that reflect prevailing ideologies, but is in many respects responsible for constructing that reality. Their examination of the complexity of television and its role in American social, cultural, and political conflict is focused specifically on the ways in which American television during the Reagan years helped stage and legitimate the "war on drugs," one of the great moral panics of the postwar era. The authors persuasively argue, for example, that powder cocaine in the early Reagan years was understood and treated very differently on television and by the state than was crack cocaine, which was discovered by the news media in late 1985. In their critical analysis of 270 news stories broadcast between 1981 and 1988, Reeves and Campbell demonstrate a disturbing disparity between the earlier presentation of the middle- and upper-class "white" drug offender, for whom therapeutic recovery was an available option, and the subsequent news treatment of the inner-city "black" drug delinquent, often described as beyond rehabilitation and subject only to intensified strategies of law and order. Enlivened by provocative discussions of Nancy Reagan's antidrug activism, the dramatic death of basketball star Len Bias, and the myth of the crack baby, the book argues that Reagan's war on drugs was at heart a political spectacle that advanced the reactionary agenda of the New and Religious Right--an agenda that dismissed social problems grounded in economic devastation as individual moral problems that could simply be remedied by just saying "no." Wide ranging and authoritative, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy is a truly interdisciplinary work that will attract readers across the humanities and social sciences in addition to students, scholars, journalists, and policy makers interested in the media and drug-related issues.

Discusses how cocaine and crack affect the mind and body and presents a brief history of cocaine use.

"First published in Chile as ÆCrack!"--Copyright page.