“Heightened Chaos” will change the way you look at the streets forever. The year was 1979, as the oldest girl of eleven kids that Tomasina bared, gave birth to a baby boy, Johan Garcia at Belleview Hospital, New York City. And like all kids that are born, he possessed a pure heart, mind, body and soul… By the time Johan turned four, the innocence he was blessed with at birth, slowly started to fade. One morning as he woke up in one of the most notorious neighborhoods of New York City, Washington Heights, Uptown Manhattan, home of the brave, Dominican land; without his intentions, Johan found himself a member of one of the most powerful secret societies to ever exist in America’s history. His low key gangster Uncle, Jose Eduardo Liriano, got together with a childhood friend, Santiago Rodriguez, A.K.A Yayo, whom later on would be recognized worldwide as one of the smartest gangsters to walk the streets of New York! Robert Jackall, a Williams College sociologist, who has researched the crack trade, once said, “One has to recognize Yayo’s particular and peculiar genius even if one doesn’t honor it.” So like two kids in a science lab, Mr. Liriano and Mr. Rodriguez, were mixing chemicals together, and a very destructive drug was born. “Crack!” The drug leeched out from New York to Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior. The crack epidemic led Congress to adopt mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street possessing a hundred times more powder cocaine. Over the next decade hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses. So many people were smoking crack throughout America, and the violence that it brought to the streets was so severe that President Reagan was forced to declare war on the epidemic. When the crack epidemic exploded, Washington Heights had seemed as if a nuclear bomb had detonated in it. Everyone felt the effects. Dr. Randall D. Marshall at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital treated hundreds of residents; many with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, an illness common among Vietnam veterans. When Johan turned five, he was in the middle of a war that completely over powered him psychologically. Watching the gangsters make millions, murders, and Based heads smoking crack right in front of his door step; by then, his thoughts were covered with darkness. In this fact-inspired tale, narrated by Johan Garcia and written by Roxanne Lyons, you will witness the rise of crack in the United States. And how Mr. Liriano and Mr. Rodriguez were destined to introduce the new drug to the world!
