Comment by ChrisMarshallNY

I lived in Downtown Baltimore, from 1980-83.

It was always a fairly gritty, blue-collar town, but crack moved in around ‘83, and that’s when it became The Wire. Before, I could walk through some of the toughest neighborhoods in town, and it would be OK (I was fairly scruffy, back then, but no Billy Badass). Nowadays, even the nice areas are a bit scary.

Crack was focused on, a lot, and there was definitely a racial aspect to law enforcement and hysteria, but the drug is still quite nasty. It’s more like the focus on cocaine was muted, as opposed to the focus on crack being overwrought.

That said, gambling can have extremely similar outcomes. You don’t want to stray too far from The Strip, in Vegas or Atlantic City.

Desperate people can get fairly rapacious; regardless of the source of their desperation.