The whole "crack whore" label is getting to be pretty stale now. And 1981 or 1982 was before the whole "crack epidemic" or at least very early on, wasn't it?
Think back on every suburban stoner kid you might have known in high school or college. Very few of them ended up on the streets, especially if they were already at a university like Columbia.
They say Obama used to carry around the novel The Invisible Man as a kind of icon, to say "Hey, I'm Black." No word on whether he actually read and finished the book. But perhaps young Obama really was an "invisible man" in a much more ordinary and banal sense.