- #Where to watch freeway crack in the system documentary series#
- #Where to watch freeway crack in the system documentary tv#
It's really bad for a lot of other black men. People are intimidated by us, and believe that we are the criminals of this country. We've been made to be the criminals of America. That's just another fallout from the crack era, when they started to feel that we were all criminals, they treat us different than anyone else. There was one day where like 7 guys got shot in a row, where the police have shot black men that were innocent. You've also been following these police shootings? I'm in Ohio now working on a documentary about the prison industry, we're going to focus on why the prison industry has been gouging inmates for phone calls, emails, at the commissary. I dreamed about putting it together in prison. I was on the front line of putting that documentary together. And recently you completed a documentary that was up for an Emmy award. You have to live under those circumstances when you're in that business. To live with the fact that this could be the day that you kill somebody, go to prison or get killed. It was just selling drugs all day long.Ī million a day and sometimes three. But I had houses that would do 100 bucks. I'd sell a kilo for $15,000 at the height of my career. What was your average transaction like when you were dealing? One guy had been in prison since he was 19, like 2 ounces of crack when he was 19. There were 260 guys who had life sentences, he gave them pardons. Obama did give a few pardons out to people I was in prison with. From what I see now, they are giving more treatment than incarceration.? We're still putting too many people in prison, the walls are going to burst. I really don't think America has wised up. The people selling it are doing it out of economic needs. The people getting high are sick, they need help. Yes, but I hope the reason they're treating it differently now than with crack is not because there's white kids being addicted, but more so because they've gotten wiser and understand that drugs is more of a sickness. I was at a clinic in Cleveland, it's one of the worst hit places in America.?ĭo you see people reacting to the two crises differently? Here, it's young white guys selling opiates. With the crack epidemic, it was young black males. You've been watching the opioid epidemic spread? The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. THR?reached out to Ross to get his thoughts on the opioid crisis, the legacy of the crack epidemic, Black Lives Matter and the ongoing problem of police shootings of unarmed black men. It was effectively hashtag activism, before Twitter was even an idea."
#Where to watch freeway crack in the system documentary series#
As journalist Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury published the Dark Alliance series 20 years ago, in August 1996, they also released it online. "In a time before computers were accessible for most of America, blacks found their way to an access point for the Internet to read about the Iran Contra Scandal. "People often forget this scandal was among the first online stories to erupt within the black community," says Antonio Moore, a producer on Freeway: Crack in the System.
#Where to watch freeway crack in the system documentary tv#
prisons, as well as other film and TV projects. And now Ross is working on another documentary, about price-gouging in U.S. Ross came back into the public eye last as a key character in - and behind-the-scenes player with - Freeway: Crack in the System, a 2016 Emmy-nominated piece of investigative longform TV journalism that explores the crack epidemic through the lens of mass incarceration. It also made Ross a fantastically wealthy man - with earnings in excess of $2.5 billion in today's dollars - before he was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to federal prison for 27 years. The crack epidemic swept through large swaths of Black America, upending millions of lives and sending tens of thousands of people to jail for decades on relatively minor drug offenses. On busy days, Ross might bring in more than $1 million in a single 24-hour stretch. At the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Ross maintained a drug empire worth hundreds of millions on the streets of south Los Angeles, where he was raised. And drug overdoses are leading cause of injury related death in the United States.įor Ricky Ross, this present-tense crisis is eerily familiar. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 350 people become addicted to heroin every day, quadruple the number ten years ago. Others, like fentanyl - which led to music legend Prince's death by overdose earlier this year - are new. Some of the opioid drugs - heroin, crystal meth - have been around long enough to be household names.