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From: moe@Radix.Net (Ted Frank)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Naked Women and Crack Factories
Date: 11 Feb 1996 22:39:03 -0500

This week's _New Yorker_ shares the lurid concept of drug-dealers running huge rooms where crack vials are filled by workforces consisting entirely of naked women, kept unclothed so they will be unable to steal the drugs.

My UL detector immediately went off, not least because naked women have, on average, at least one additional place to hide vials of crack that naked men do not. One never hears of LSD or cocaine or heroin or amphetamine processing facilities involving nude workers. Indeed, not one of the dozens of crack cases I worked on involved any hint of these allegations -- crack tends to be created fairly late in the distribution chain, because powder cocaine is so much easier to handle (and involves lesser penalties usually, though one wonders to what extent such disparities actually affect drug-dealing production decisions). Admittedly, I haven't done a comprehensive search of legal databases to see if ever there was a crack dealer accused of such a thing. But the story contains many standard earmarks of a UL (racial/sexual content; undefined source for story; moral message of "these drug-dealers are animals"), so I'm curious whether someone has credible information on the subject, or if the story is at all widespread.

Partial credit to the New Yorker writer who says he thought it was an urban myth, but changed his mind when "ethnographers" told him it was true. The author doesn't indicate how the ethnographer(s) in question knew, or whether they were happy to share the story because they were less skeptical than he was.