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