Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue

Richards's searing photo-essay on inner-city communities devastated by the cocaine-crack epidemic brings into sharp focus the colossal failure of the ``war on drugs.'' His unsparing black-and-white photographs--spliced with interviews with dealers, drug users and frustrated police officers--cover only three locales: North Philadelphia and the Brooklyn, New York, neighborhoods of East New York and Red Hook. Yet the havoc drugs wreak on lives, families and neighborhoods--as cocaine and heroine addiction intersect with poverty, AIDS, homelessness, joblessness and the availability of guns--affects every American city. Richards, who has won many photojournalism awards, neither condemns nor sensationalizes his subjects in his forceful documentary. This volume complements a traveling exhibit opening at Manhattan's International Center for Photography. (Jan.)