It seems that the day of reckoning is coming for Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, the fifth-biggest municipality in North America and Canada’s biggest and most influential city. The type of conservative populist who could wring electoral reward out of gaffes and controversies, Ford has been both beloved and despised for his loud, aggressive style. Ford’s run as a politician on the international stage has always had an absurd, I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing quality.

Whether it was his penchant for getting publicly wasted, his insistence that women who contract HIV must be sleeping with bisexual men, or his inability to perform a 5-step drop without falling over like a character in a slapstick comedy, Ford always seemed a little too good (or bad) to be true.

But nothing could have prepared even Ford’s many critics and skeptics for the story first discussed by Gawker this past May: a video showing Ford smoking crack in a Toronto housing development. Gawker’s editor-in-chief, John Cook, traveled to Toronto and personally witnessed the video, for which his contact wanted to charge an exorbitant sum. The story provoked a conflicted response in the mainstream media, particularly the Toronto Star – after all these years, newspapers still struggle over whether and how to respond to stories broken under the looser ethical and legal standards employed by gossip- and rumor-oriented online publications.

In spite of a decided lack of support from traditional media, Gawker continued to pursue the story by, among other things, raising a Kickstarter-like effort to buy the video from its (understandably skittish) owner. That effort ultimately failed, with the funding going to charity, but the truth could not be contained: this week, Ford confessed to having smoked crack in the past, attributing the bad behavior to a drunken stupor. (If you’d like to write the inevitable piece about excusing one type of substance abuse through a reference to the more socially-permissible kind, be my guest.)

This is not necessarily the end of Ford’s political career – the example of Marion Barry is hard to avoid in this instance – but his reign as mayor of Toronto is likely coming to an end. Ford announced that he was running for reelection despite the controversy, but given the Toronto Police Department’s apparent interest in the story, legal repercussions are likely forthcoming. The story of Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto, seems to be hurtling towards a climax – if not through a resignation, then an arrest or removal.

But there are broader questions in play here. The situation is actually deeply symbolic, involving a city with a high minority population in a country with a huge white majority, a drug that has always been cast as a drug of the underclass, and a mayor whose oafish and exaggerated behavior has frequently been called “low class” – a reputation now combining uncomfortably with the cultural assumptions about the people who smoke crack cocaine.

As Cook and Gawker have repeatedly noted, it is, indeed, a big deal that the mayor of a major metropolis is doing something illegal, and particularly when that something illegal is using drugs, a subject which always captures the public attention. But this story has attracted a particular kind of attention – a particularly prurient atmosphere of scandal – due to the fact that Ford used crack, a drug that is typically associated with the black underclass. Ford is not the drug-using mayor. He is the crack-smoking mayor, and the difference matters.

The cultural and political differences between powder cocaine and crack cocaine have been well-documented. Crime and medical statistics demonstrate that crack is a drug that is used by racial minorities and the poor in proportions far greater than their representation in society as a whole. Cocaine, in contrast, is largely a drug of whites and the upper class. A 2009 study by the United States Sentencing Commission showed that 78 percent of crack cocaine convictions involved black defendants, whereas white defendants made up only 10 percent. In contrast, 17 percent of powder cocaine convictions were white defendants, with black defendants making up only 28 percent of convictions. (The missing percentage here is the 53 percent of those convicted who are Hispanic, a number that reflects the reality of cocaine in America: Hispanic people traffic it and are arrested for it, white people buy it and aren’t.)

These statistics confirm the common depiction in the media and arts of crack as a drug of the urban, minority poor and cocaine of affluent whites. Indeed: it’s precisely because a small amount of powder cocaine can be stretched into a larger amount of crack that crack became a drug of the poor in the first place. It’s why crack is a way to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. The fact that poor minority people are much more likely to use crack leads directly to a raft of myths about the drug, such as the notion that it is much more addictive than the powder variety, or that pregnant women smoking crack give birth to “crack babies,” or that it provokes uniquely violent episodes.

The physiology of the human brain, of course, is much less susceptible to these cultural assumptions than the media. Both get you high, both are potentially addictive and dangerous, both have had that danger dramatically overrepresented in government propaganda and the media. As the Los Angeles Times noted on the occasion of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, “There was never any scientific basis for the disparity [in sentencing], just panic as the crack epidemic swept the nation’s cities.”

Yet despite these objective similarities, crack and powder cocaine retain deeply divided racial and economic characters in contemporary American culture. The distinction is most pernicious and notorious in mandatory minimum laws, where possession of crack cocaine has carried a far harsher penalty than possession of powder cocaine. (The Fair Sentencing Act has reduced the disparity from a 100 times longer sentence for possessing crack in equal amounts to powder cocaine; now, the disparity is “just” 18 times.) There can be little doubt that this difference in our legal system arose from straightforward racism and class exploitation. America’s white majority may hold its nose when it comes to the abuse of powder cocaine by white executives, but it actively fears black people who smoke crack.