Cocaine: Middle Class High

By Michael Demarest

The "all-American drug" has hit like a blizzard, with casualties rising

C17H21NO4. A derivative of Erythroxylon coca. Otherwise known as cocaine, coke, C, snow, blow, toot, leaf, flake, freeze, happy dust, nose candy, Peruvian, lady, white girl. A vegetable alkaloid derived from leaves of the coca plant. Origin: eastern slopes of the Andes mountains. Availability: Anywhere, U.S.A. Cost: $2,200 per oz., five times the price of gold.

Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No longer is it a sinful secret of the moneyed elite, nor merely an elusive glitter of decadence in raffish society circles, as it seemed in decades past. No longer is it primarily an exotic and ballyhooed indulgence of high-gloss entrepreneurs, Hollywood types and high rollers, as it was only three or four years ago--the most conspicuous of consumptions, to be sniffed from the most chic of coffee tables through crisp, rolled-up $100 bills. Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, coke is the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional and often upwardly mobile citizens--lawyers, businessmen, students, government bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, secretaries, bankers, mechanics, real estate brokers, waitresses. Largely unchecked by law enforcement, a veritable blizzard of the white powder is blowing through the American middle class, and it is causing significant social and economic shifts no less than a disturbing drug problem.

Superficially, coke is a supremely beguiling and relatively risk-free drug--at least so its devotees innocently claim. A snort in each nostril and you're up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain. Instead, drive, sparkle, energy. If it were not classified (incorrectly) by the Federal Government as a narcotic, and if it were legally distributed throughout the U.S. (as it was until 1906), cocaine might be the biggest advertiser on television. You can hear the commercials: Endorsed by the great Dr. Sigmund Freud. The inspiration of poets, artists, inventors! You too can be inspired, thanks to a stimulant revered as sacred eight centuries ago by the great Inca civilization. Start each day right with Snowghurt or Flake Flakes. A little Leaf instead of lettuce for lunch. Toot Sweet, come the Happy Hour. [Band music swells in crescendo.] Mayke it bet-tah with Coke!*

But coke is no joke. Although in very small and occasional doses it is no more harmful than equally moderate doses of alcohol or marijuana, and infinitely less so than heroin, it has its dark and destructive side. The euphoric lift, the feeling of being confident and on top of things that comes from a few brief snorts, is often followed by a letdown; regular use can induce depression, edginess and weight loss. As usage increases, so does the danger of paranoia, hallucinations and a totally "strung out" physical collapse, not to mention a devastation of the nasal membrane (see box page 61). And usage does tend to increase. Says one initiate: "After one hit of cocaine I feel like a new man. The only problem is, the first thing the new man wants is another hit."

This pattern can lead to a psychological dependence whose effects are not all that different from addiction. Moreover, there is growing clinical evidence that when coke is taken in the most potent and dangerous forms--injected in solution, or chemically converted and smoked in the process called freebasing--it may indeed become addictive.

Of all drugs in the U.S., cocaine is now the biggest producer of illicit in come. Some 40 metric tons of it will be shipped into the country this year. As coke experts like to point out, if all the international dealers who supply the drug to the U.S. market--not even including the retailers--were to form a single corporation, it would probably rank seventh on the FORTUNE 500 list, between Ford Motor Co. ($37 billion in revenue) and Gulf Oil Corp. ($26.5 billion). Last year street sales of cocaine, by far the most expensive drug on the market, reached an estimated $30 billion in the U.S. (Sales of marijuana, the runner-up and still the most widely used illicit drug, amounted to some $24 billion.)

The most conservative researchers estimate that 10 million Americans now use coke with some regularity, and another 5 million have probably experimented with it. (Other estimates double that figure.) According to surveys by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about 20% of young adults (18 to 25 years old) used cocaine in 1979, twice the number reported in NIDA'S 1977 survey. Another study, by a team of Harvard Medical School researchers, has traced an "astonishing" increase in cocaine use by college students. A 1979 report from the Drug Enforcement Administration has the ring of prophecy: "If present trends go unchecked, a vast new youth market for the substance [cocaine] could be opened. High cost, rather than restricted availability, will remain the principal deterrent to regular use among less affluent persons."

And it is all-pervasive. Says Peter Bensinger, outgoing administrator of the DEA: "We see coke sales in suburbs, in recreational centers and in national parks. It is an unrecognized tornado." Nor does this overstate the case. A special investigative team of TIME correspondents found that in Vienna, Ga., or Venice, Calif., a gram of coke was about as hard to find as a six-pack of Bud. Whether in a suburban high school outside Los Angeles, on Wall Street or Madison Avenue or in the interstices of ostensibly "straight" Middle America, $100 will rapidly summon up a gram of what goes for cocaine.

At a restaurant north of Boston, cooks celebrate the last day of their work week as Coke Day, sniffing the white stuff from their first order to their last, often joined by dishwashers, busboys and waitresses, who come by for an occasional hit. A more impatient group in Pasadena, Calif.--a cross section of professionals in their 20s and 30s--celebrates TGIW (Thank God It's Wednesday), gathering at the home of a local car dealer for a coke session at cocktail time.

Coke is found on the job as well as off. A busy Los Angeles lawyer says he uses "a lot" of it "because it helps drive me through a night's work, through a lot of grinding case preparation." Says a counselor at an upper-crust prep school in Massachusetts: "I'd say 10% to 15% of the kids here use cocaine with some regularity." A sun-bleached woman student at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus confesses: "I took all my finals coked out last semester, and I heard a lot of sniffing in the exam room."

A woman who worked as a maid at condominiums in Aspen, Colo., says, "The people used to leave a little cocaine on the table as a tip." Aspen, in fact, is known in faster circles as Toot City because it is so pervaded by coke. In another Colorado mountain resort, Telluride, six prominent citizens, including a former councilwoman, were charged last month with trafficking in cocaine. Says Mark Pautler, director of the police task force that made the arrests: "We have a strong feeling that a lot of people in Telluride knew what was going on but were looking the other way. Coke appears to have been a very acceptable form of recreation."

In a volatile "pass-along" market, almost anybody who buys coke can also be a dealer, "cutting" or adulterating his supply and then selling a portion at a tidy profit. A number of young professional people add $10,000 to $20,000 to their annual incomes--tax free--by dealing coke. Steve, a young California lawyer who sold marijuana to put himself through law school, now has a small, discreet cocaine business. Says he: "I started selling some to close friends because I couldn't afford to buy it for my wife and myself. We found a way to beat inflation." In fact most traffickers like Steve are engaged in a game that resembles the chain letter or pyramid schemes.

In some circles coke is a barter item, readily accepted for dental work, as an accountant's fee or in exchange for a discount on a new car. "I have one friend who got stuck with staggering alimony payments," says Jim Groth, a Southern California newspaper editor. "He started dealing a little, and now he is paying off his wife in toot, and everybody is happy."

Many large-scale dealers have women who are known by them as "coke whores." Like rock groupies, they hang around in the expectation of a heart-thumping jolt. Says a juvenile court judge in California: "To the kids here, cocaine means as much in terms of social approval as a car did when we were kids. If a boy produces some coke on a date, it is just expected that the girl is going to put out."

The relative impunity with which people take coke is encouraged by the fact that judges are notoriously reluctant to hand down heavy penalties for possession. Unlike the stereotyped scruffy ghetto addict who turns to mugging or burglary to support his habit, the cocaine user may have a three-piece suit and a well-lined wallet, and probably does his sniffing indoors without becoming unruly or threatening anybody. Says a Cook County, Ill., lawman: "These people are not the dregs of society. They tend to be legitimate business people." The Fourth District Appellate Court in Illinois last March ruled that cocaine is not a narcotic and thus is mis-classified in the state's criminal code. Further, the court found "no causal connection between the ingestion of cocaine and criminal behavior." The confusion in law enforcement is compounded by the fact that many coke deals are arranged by lawyers, and lawyers and judges are prominent in the social circles that use the drug.

And so the toot goes on. In some of the better Madison Avenue offices, admen offer clients coke instead of martinis. Says one New York advertising executive: "About 75% of all the bright young Turks in the advertising business use some regularly, some occasionally, but they all use it. Spill out a couple of grams of that white stuff on the table and everyone knows where you're coming from."

Such encomiums are in keeping with the kind of raves that cocaine has enjoyed in the past. In 1885, Parke-Davis, a U.S. pharmaceutical company, promoted it as a wonder drug that would "supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent, and free the victims of alcohol and opium habit from their bondage." Sherlock Holmes, of course, injected a 7% solution to while away the days between cases. In his classic Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin snorted a white powder before taking on all challengers. Freud, who prescribed the drug for treatment of morphine addiction, stomach disorders and melancholia, wrote of getting from it "exhilaration, and lasting euphoria which in no way differed from the normal euphoria of the healthy person."

An enterprising 19th century Corsican named Angelo Mariani had the notion of blending the coca leaf with fine wine, which he marketed under the name of Vin Mariani. Mariani collected endorsements from Popes Leo XIII and Pius X, President McKinley and the Kings of Spain, Greece, and Norway and Sweden, as well as such literary luminaries as Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola. French Sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty, swore that if he had only savored Vin Mariani earlier, he would have built the old girl hundreds of meters higher.

Cocaine is the caviar of drugs, except that it is 70 times as costly as the finest beluga. While an eclectic consumer might feel that caviar and a bottle of Bellinger brut give a headier, cheaper and wholly licit lift to an evening, many American hedonists get more of a kick* through the nose.

Coke paraphernalia are openly displayed in "head shops" such as Washington's Pleasure Chest and Lady Snow's in Hollywood. Artifacts include gleaming jade cutting stones, gold razor blades to chop the coke crystals and tiny brown bottles for sniffing (an antique gold Tiffany snuff bottle capable of holding two grams sold for $28,000 in Beverly Hills last year to an Iranian). Items like silver and gold sniffing spoons are flaunted on chains around the users' necks. The process of spreading the coke on a table in "lines" for sniffing is as elaborate and careful as a Japanese tea ceremony--an affectation hilariously burlesqued in the 1977 film Annie Hall when Woody Allen sneezed at the wrong moment and blew away hundreds of dollars' worth of the precious powder.

In Snowblind, a 1976 study of cocaine dealing that has become something of a cult book, Robert Sabbag wrote: "Cocaine, like motorcycles, machine guns and White House politics, is, among many things, a virility substitute. Its mere possession imparts status--cocaine equals money, and money equals power. And, as if in mute imitation of its symbolism, cocaine's presence in the blood, like no other drug, accounts for a feeling of confidence that is rare in the behavioral sink of post-industrial America."

The pleasure is the problem.

A cocaine high is an intensely vivid, sensation-enhancing experience--though there is no evidence, as is often claimed, that it is aphrodisiacal. For many users, it goes beyond the Freudian euphoria. Says a Manhattan ballerina: "It makes you shiver in tune with the raw, volcanic energy of New York. It bleeds your sense till you see the city as an epileptic rainbow, trembling at the speed of light." Test programs at U.C.L.A. have shown that lab monkeys will forgo both food and sex in favor of an injection of a cocaine solution.

But even casual sniffing can lead to more potent and potentially damaging ways of using cocaine and other drugs. Many cokeheads take sedative pills like methaqualone, brand-named Quaaludes (tons of which are illegally imported from Colombia) to calm down after their high and take the edge off their yearning for more coke.

A few smoke marijuana for the same purpose, or mix their C with heroin in a process called "speedballing" or "boy-girl." This produces a tug-of-war in which the exhilaration of coke is undercut by the heroin. As one former user describes the sensation, "It's like taking an elevator at 100 m.p.h. to the top of the Empire State Building and then someone cuts the cable." A few middle class users who dabble with heroin in conjunction with cocaine smoke it rather than inject it in their veins like the ghetto kid. This, they believe, prevents addiction. Not so. Heroin, however used, is a fiercely addictive drug, and treatment centers are receiving an influx of well-dressed, well-to-do men and women who have sorely underestimated it. In Manhattan alone, dozens of such people can be seen early each morning standing in line at the clinic of Greenwich House West, where they are administered methadone in an attempt to wean them from heroin.

But cocaine, all by itself, can be nightmare enough for many. "Of all the drugs I've ever done, the weirdest, because of its effects upon you, is cocaine," says a musician in Key West, Fla., who has also had experience with heroin and other drugs. "Cocaine is so subtle in the way it takes over your personality. I went through a year when I did more coke than most people will ever do in a lifetime. I went from weighing 188 Ibs. to 150 Ibs. The first time I did it, I was into heroin, so I cooked it up and shot it into a vein. A few minutes later my whole body was going cold. It felt like I was going to faint or was getting seasick. The whole world was going gray, everybody in the room getting real distant. I was going limp and lifeless, and the only thing I could think about was to concentrate on my breathing."

After that he switched to sniffing regularly. "I wasn't as aware of my personality changes as the people around me," he recalls. "Your life seems to be getting faster paced. After I'd done it for a while, I'd look at everybody funny. You get to where you don't trust the people you're around. You go to a pay phone in the middle of a city you've never been to before in your life and you think it's bugged--really and seriously."

Finally friends and his wife helped him to see how distorted his life had become. "Two or three sat down with me and said, 'Look, we just can't handle being around you any more, so would you mind just not coming by?' "

Since sniffing cocaine produces such a quick, short boost, more and more users have sought the deeper ecstatic "rush" that comes from "freebasing," smoking a chemically treated form of the powder. The large, concentrated doses used in freebasing require even more money than the straight powder, which is one reason why the practice has been more prevalent among highly paid celebrities such as Comedian Richard Pryor and former Dallas Cowboys Linebacker Thomas ("Hollywood") Henderson (see box page 62).

But anybody with a ready stash of cash can become ensnared in freebasing, as is shown by the experience of Mary (not her real name), 25, the owner of a dog kennel in Sonoma County, Calif. Mary was appalled when her brother, manager of an auto-parts store, sold his car, quit his job and began obsessively freebasing. Despite her concern, she tried it too and soon became just as hooked.

Says she: "I sort of abandoned my life in every way." She and her brother had an inheritance from a wealthy grandmother, of which Mary's share was $120,000. After a year of five-or six-day binges followed by several days of sleep and then more binges, Mary had run through most of the inheritance, lost 20 Ibs. and, in her rundown condition, developed back pains and a spastic colon.

What persuaded her to seek drug treatment was an experience that could have killed her and her brother. Like many freebasers, they used sedatives to come down off a high. "You're wired up like a mad dog," says Mary, "and your body's been running at 150 miles an hour for days." One night, after freebasing in the rear of her van, they took some Quaaludes and passed out, leaving an unlit propane torch with its nozzle open--creating a risk that a stray spark could ignite the propane and blow up the van.

At least 90% of all the coca leaf in the world comes from moist, infertile mountain land in Peru and Bolivia, whose governments cherish the crop as one of their principal exports. Raw coca leaves are soaked in various chemicals and oil. The result is a muddy brown paste, which is purified into so-called coca base, a dirty white, almost odorless substance, which is usually shipped to laboratories in Colombia for refining.

The final product is not as much in demand in Europe as in the U.S. Explains an Italian drug expert: "On such things Europe is about five years behind." Nonetheless, in cosmopolitan cities from Munich to Milan, prostitutes have easy access to cocaine for their customers, and fashionable restaurants and nightclubs have a ready supply for the would-be snorter.

From the Andes to the American nose, the trade is almost entirely controlled by Colombians, who process the drug and smuggle it into the U.S., largely by boat and plane. Enterprising individuals have hidden cocaine in everything from hollowed-out candy bars and native "carvings" to wigs, souvenirs and even plastic sacks in their stomachs, which occasionally burst, causing death.

In Bogota, the Colombian capital, a kilo of 90% pure cocaine costs $4,000; in New York City, it is worth $60,000. It is then cut or "stepped on" with adulterants like lactose (a nutrient), to add weight and volume, amphetamines to give a cheaper high and procaine to simulate coke's numbing effect. Since the powder that reaches the street often contains no more than 12% pure cocaine, the original kilo, or "key," has now been fattened to some eight kilos and will bring $500,000 or more.

Despite the dilution, so suggestive is coke's mystique, and so eager are people to believe in its efficacy, that buyers usually feel that they get high on it anyway. As a Manhattan coke connoisseur puts it, "Anyone who puts out a hundred bucks for a gram figures it has to be good."

The cocaine trade may be the most lucrative form of commerce in the world. Periodic glimpses of its staggering scale are afforded by headlines such as those in Wilmington, N.C., early this month. DEA and U.S. Customs officials swooped in on a twin-engine Cessna that made an unscheduled nighttime landing, arresting the pilot and a passenger and seizing their cargo of 440 lbs. of cocaine. The estimated wholesale value of the shipment: $16 million.

The drug's main port of entry is Miami. By no coincidence, the Miami branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is the only branch bank in the U.S. Reserve system to show a cash surplus--$4.75 billion worth in 1980. A likely explanation: laundered cash from drugs.

Allan Pringle, deputy regional director for the DEA, says of Miami: "The brokers are here, the financiers are here, the heads of the organizations are here." More than 80% of all cocaine seized worldwide is confiscated in Florida--yet by the most optimistic estimate, seizures of smuggled dope account for no more than 10% of the total traffic entering southern Florida. Arrests of cocaine smugglers and dealers pose a huge logistical problem: what to do with the confiscated cash. Says Pringle: "In some cases we've had so much cash on our hands that we've had difficulty transporting it for storage. We're talking literally about billions in small bills."

"We were being overwhelmed," says Peter Bensinger, whose recent firing by the Reagan Administration was precipitated by the DEA'S poor showing. Says Miami Police Lieut. Robert Lament, who heads the department's narcotics detail at the city's airport: "It's an epidemic right now. If you took all the drug money out of south Florida, the economy would totally collapse."

Thanks to drug-generated income, buyers in southern Florida frequently shell out cash for expensive yachts or condominiums. Seldom is a question asked or an eyelid batted in such cases. As Miami Herald Editor Jim Hampton observes, "What should a real estate dealer do when a man in his late 20s or 30s with no visible source of income plunks down $250,000 cash for a house or condo?

What should a banker do when a customer's account shows huge cash deposits, frequent wire transfers of funds to numbered accounts abroad, and other evidence that the banker knows is suspicious? None of these businessmen can be expected to turn away the customer. He'll simply find another seller who'll shrug and say, 'Well, there's nothing illegal about paying cash. And what am I anyway, a one-man morals squad?' "

With such huge profits at stake, the Colombian connection works with savage efficiency. Once landed in the U.S., the drug is distributed largely by grim professionals, many of them expatriated Cubans. The Colombians and Cubans are known as the "cocaine cowboys" for their willingness to kill in order to protect their racket. According to the DEA there were 135 confirmed drug-related murders in Florida's Dade County last year. Most were connected with the cocaine trade, say the authorities.

The "cowboy" brigades are as tightly organized as the military. Not only can they afford the best boats, planes, navigational equipment and weaponry that money can buy, but they have also hired experienced military talent to supervise their operations. The smugglers have their own intelligence, counterintelligence and reconnaissance units. Their logic is as blunt as their favorite Mac-10 submachine gun: any sizable bust by the feds must of necessity be the result of a tipoff. You find the squealer and eliminate him.

The drug trade has flooded the southern Florida criminal justice system with more offenders than it can handle. "Some officers are coming to the point of being totally frustrated with the court system," says Lieut. Lamont. "Even for large amounts of cocaine, we're seeing a revolving-door kind of system where there's no fine, no sentence, no slap on the wrist." Lamont and other honest policemen are aware that some fellow officers, not to mention high-standing community members, may be making big money from cocaine. The scenario of a defense attorney being paid off in cocaine and a judge being a dealer? Lamont nods. "The corruptibility factor is there. The money is there to be made."

Smuggling, murder, corruption, vast sums of money--all are deeply corrosive byproducts of the cocaining of America. So too are the physical shocks, the attrition of nerves, of health, of whole years of potentially productive life. Part of the underground economy of cocaine must be calculated in vast negative numbers: labor undone, careers sidetracked, money diverted from worthy projects.

But what of the purely social impact, especially among those millions of good people who would never remotely think of themselves as criminals, even though they are regularly flouting the law and sending out signals to other segments of society that it is all right to do so? They would never consider themselves addicts either, even though they devoutly believe in getting high for a little extra edge, for relief, for fun. What does their persistent and growing use of coke say about them?

Americans inhabit a society in which they are conditioned from infancy to believe there is a pill for every ill: what one expert calls "jet-age pharmacology." By contrast, Winston Churchill is credited with the observation that "most of the world's work is done by people who do not feel very well." In the U.S. particularly, says Psychiatrist Mitchell Rosenthal, "people believe that you don't have to feel uncomfortable if you have the right doctor, the right drug connection, the right pusher. We have lost touch with the fundamental notion that people can operate not always feeling terribly well. Taking cocaine is not the answer. In the end it leaves you psychologically bankrupt."

Quite apart from the Dr. Feelgood syndrome, some observers point to the intense competitiveness of American life as a major motivation for drug use. Says English-born Author Christopher Isherwood (Berlin Stories), who lives in Santa Monica, Calif.: "Americans are awfully rattled about their jobs. Can they deliver properly, can they do it? Life is a nasty, rough game, always was. Some people can't face it without some sort of backup." Rajendra Misra, Indian-born executive director of a community health center in East Cleveland, Ohio, maintains: "Right from childhood in this country there is pressure for accomplishment. Every time we do something, we are made aware of the fact that either we are achieving or we are failing. There's nothing in between."

Part of the allure of cocaine is the popular, but inaccurate, notion that it can make a male a keener achiever in bed. Says Lawrence Ross, director of a Marin County treatment center: "There is a tremendous premium on sexual performance for men. It is the one thing that people think they have to be good at." In fact, after sustained use cocaine can cause sexual dysfunction and impotence.

More profoundly, some observers of the American scene see an existential vacuum, a widespread sense that life has lost much of its meaning. Argues Philosopher Sidney Hook: "We have abandoned our old-fashioned values. We have given up our old gods. People want things to come easily, they no longer want to work hard, to suffer any pain, to feel any stress or anxiety." Since the turbulence of the 1960s, more and more Americans have come to feel that they have lost control over their lives. Finding Mom, God and apple pie less fulfilling, many have increasingly taken refuge in drugs, sex and disillusion.

"In a society that says drug taking is O.K.," suggests Rosenthal, "cocaine gives the user the illusion of being more in control. People feel stronger, smarter, faster, more able to cope with things. It's more than the pleasure principle." What these people tend to overlook, points out Charles Schuster, director of the Drug Abuse Research Center at the University of Chicago, is the tremendous psychological risk: "One of cocaine's biggest dangers is that it diverts people from normal pursuits; it can entrap and redirect people's activities into an almost exclusive preoccupation with the drug."

On the other hand, that may be what attracts some to it. As Christopher Lasch wrote in his 1978 book The Culture of Narcissism: "To live for the moment is the prevailing passion--to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. It is the waning of the sense of historical time--in particular the erosion of any strong concern for posterity--that distinguishes the spiritual crisis of the '70s." This seems most distressingly true of the students and other young people among whom cocaine is spreading so rapidly--despite the fact that they are the ones who have the greatest need to believe in a future and to trust in a posterity.

There is little likelihood that the cocaine blizzard will soon abate. A drug habit born of a desire to escape the bad news in life is not likely to be discouraged by the bad news about the drug itself. And so middle class Americans continue to succumb to the powder's crystalline dazzle. Few are yet aware or willing to concede that at the very least, taking cocaine is dangerous to their psy chological health. It may be no easy task to reconvince them that good times are made, not sniffed.

--By Michael Demarest.

Reported by Jonathan Beaty, Steven Holmes and Jeff Melvoin, with U.S. bureaus

* Coca-Cola did in fact contain cocaine until 1906, when the company had to drop the drug from its secret formula.

* Cole Porter's song from Anything Goes (1934) had the line "I get no kick from cocaine." It was some times amended to "Some like the perfumes of Spain."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty, Steven Holmes and Jeff Melvoin

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