"Five Minutes of Fire": Crack, Bernie Goetz, Hypodermics on the Shore

<v Speaker 1>Hey, this is James Buckley up in North Louisiana. When
<v Speaker 1>I have a raging fever for eighties and nineties nostalgia
<v Speaker 1>that I can't even cure with more cow bell, I
<v Speaker 1>turned to the experts Jason Coffin and d Graves on
<v Speaker 1>the Shirley You Can't Be Serious Podcast.
<v Speaker 2>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely you Can't
<v Speaker 2>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We're
<v Speaker 2>here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start the
<v Speaker 2>Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes at
<v Speaker 2>a time, which is about to link for the song,
<v Speaker 2>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 2>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 3>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 3>going to be covering today. Crack Bernie gets.
<v Speaker 2>Epodermics on the shore on the shot, all right, d
<v Speaker 2>tell me about crack. Okay, Jason, Americans love their cocaine,
<v Speaker 2>Yes to do. In the nineteen eighties, that was huge.
<v Speaker 2>It was the biggest drugg around. The majority of cocaine
<v Speaker 2>was being shipped into the US, landing in Miami, originally
<v Speaker 2>through Columbia. Check out the movie Narcos if you like
<v Speaker 2>traffic through the Bahamas. Soon, however, because of the love
<v Speaker 2>for cocaine by Americans, there was a huge glut of
<v Speaker 2>cocaine powder on these islands, which caused the price to
<v Speaker 2>drop by as much as eighty percent. So faced with
<v Speaker 2>the prices of their illegal product dropping, the drug dealers decided, Hey,
<v Speaker 2>let's convert some of this powder to crack, which is
<v Speaker 2>a solid, smokeable form of cocaine made by the method
<v Speaker 2>of freebasing, which makes it more pure. It was cheap,
<v Speaker 2>simple to produce, ready to use, highly profitable to dealers,
<v Speaker 2>and as early as nineteen eighty one, reports of crack
<v Speaker 2>were appearing in La Oakland, New York, Miami, Houston, and
<v Speaker 2>in the Caribbean. The word crack may have first appeared
<v Speaker 2>in a Rolling Stone article from May first, nineteen eighty
<v Speaker 2>titled Freebase a Treacherous Obsession, The Rise of crack Cocaine
<v Speaker 2>and the fall of Attics destroyed by the drug. The
<v Speaker 2>problem was is that it was most used as a
<v Speaker 2>recreational drug in impoverished neighborhoods New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
<v Speaker 2>d C, LA and San Francisco, and Miami in late
<v Speaker 2>nineteen eighty four and nineteen eighty five. This resulted in
<v Speaker 2>what they refer to now as the crack epidemic, which
<v Speaker 2>ultimately they got under control by the nineteen nineties. The
<v Speaker 2>only problem was around nineteen ninety people started developing methamphetamine,
<v Speaker 2>and you had a whole new problem. All right, Tell
<v Speaker 2>me about Bernie Gets.
<v Speaker 3>On December twenty second, nineteen eighty four, a man named
<v Speaker 3>Bernie Gets shot four young black men on a New
<v Speaker 3>York City subway train after they tried to rob him.
<v Speaker 3>All four survived, although Darryl Caby was paralyzed and had
<v Speaker 3>brain damage. The four had approached Gets on a train, asking,
<v Speaker 3>some say, demanding money. He pulled out a gun, fired
<v Speaker 3>four shots, wounding all but Kby. Gets stated that when
<v Speaker 3>he saw Kby cowering in a corner, he bent down
<v Speaker 3>and said, you don't look so bad. Here's another and
<v Speaker 3>shot him once injuring his spine. He fled to Vermont
<v Speaker 3>and hit out for a while before turning himself into authorities.
<v Speaker 3>Supporters of Getz point to a public frustration with crime
<v Speaker 3>in New York City. Detractors note that he was known
<v Speaker 3>for racist language. He was sentenced to one year incarceration
<v Speaker 3>in a five thousand dollars fine. He served eight months,
<v Speaker 3>and he is also one of the few people who
<v Speaker 3>are still alive.
<v Speaker 2>Tried to drive him with the screwdriver. That was an
<v Speaker 2>incredibly bad idea. Okay, do you tell me about hyperdermics
<v Speaker 2>on the shore. I can remember seeing the news on this.
<v Speaker 2>This is hyperdermic needles washing up on the shores of
<v Speaker 2>various beaches. It was called the syringe Tide, and it
<v Speaker 2>occurred during nineteen eighty seven and eighty eight in Connecticut,
<v Speaker 2>New Jersey, and New York where there was significant amounts
<v Speaker 2>of medical waste, including the hypodermic syringes, that washed up
<v Speaker 2>onto the beaches on the Jersey Shore and in New
<v Speaker 2>York City and in Long Island. It forced the closing
<v Speaker 2>of these beaches on the Atlantic Coast. Reports of the
<v Speaker 2>medical waste and sewage spills drove away hundreds of thousands
<v Speaker 2>of vacationers, costing the seven point seven billion dollar a
<v Speaker 2>year tourism industry on the Jersey Shore more than one
<v Speaker 2>billion dollars in lost revenue that summer. The reason that
<v Speaker 2>this was such a big concern is one you've already
<v Speaker 2>mentioned in a past episode. HIV and AIDS was known
<v Speaker 2>to be passed through hypodermic needles and was epidemic at
<v Speaker 2>that time. The officials finally traced the source of the
<v Speaker 2>waste to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. New
<v Speaker 2>York City was required to pay one million dollars for
<v Speaker 2>pass pollution damages as well as pay for the cleanup.
<v Speaker 2>No money was paid to the business owners on the
<v Speaker 2>Jersey Shore for the revenues that they lost during the
<v Speaker 2>months of inactivity. They ultimately developed a plan to keep
<v Speaker 2>this from happening in the future, called the Short Term
<v Speaker 2>Floatables Action Plan. It was ultimately successful. The closures declined
<v Speaker 2>from over seventy miles in nineteen eighty eight to fewer
<v Speaker 2>than four miles in nineteen eighty nine, and closures have
<v Speaker 2>remained at a low level since that time. Okay, guys,
<v Speaker 2>that does it for today's episode. Join us next time
<v Speaker 2>for five minutes of fire.