Crashing on Cocaine

By KURT ANDERSEN

Phil and Rita's life shimmered like an advertisement. Indeed, to an outsider it seemed less a life than a perfect lifestyle: tree-lined California suburban street, tasteful $150.000 home (with piano), two sunny youngsters. Phil, 37, was a $30,000-a-year microchip sales engineer in Silicon Valley; Rita. 34, was a $20,000-a-year bookkeeper. Like their smart, attractive Northern California friends. Phil and Rita played tennis and ate interesting foods and knew about wine and, starting four years ago, sniffed coke.

And more coke. And then more. That is why several times last year Phil stood quivering and feverish in the living room, his loaded pistol pointed toward imaginary enemies he knew were lurking in the garage. Rita, emaciated like her husband, had her own bogeymen--strangers with X-ray vision outside the draped bedroom window--and she hid from them in the closet. The couple's paranoia was fleetingly sliced away, of course, as soon as they got high: they "free-based," breathing a distilled cocaine vapor, Phil alone all night with his glass water pipe and thimble of coke, Rita in another room with hers. In the mornings, Phil and Rita got back together, down on all fours, scratching and picking at the carpet for any stray grains of coke.

This is the good life? This is hip?

It is, anyway, no longer rare. Among the 4 million to 5 million Americans who regularly (at least monthly) use cocaine, drug counselors estimate that 5% to 20%--at least 200,000, perhaps 1 million--are now profoundly dependent on cocaine, a new corps as numerous as heroin addicts.

Cocaine is no longer just a curious upper-class kink. During the past two years or so, the number of Americans who have used the drug climbed from 15 million to 20 million and is rising still: every day some 5,000 neophytes sniff a line of coke for the first time. They cannot be written off as crazy kids: Government studies find that those in their late 20s and 30s constitute the fastest-growing proportion of users and, as of 1982, a majority of people who had tried cocaine were over 26. Nor does it seem that cocaine use has peaked. Says Thomas B. Kirkpatrick, executive director of the Illinois dangerous drugs commission: "My guess is that we're only halfway there. I would say the use of cocaine will double in the U.S. before we see any decline in its popularity."

A national survey, conducted for TIME by the polling firm of Yankelovich, Skelly and White, found that 11% of U.S. adults admit having sampled cocaine, and one in four says that "someone close to me has tried it." Cocaine in the early 1980s has become a democratic craze instead of a high-society toot. Indeed, it is like the once exclusive vacation resort that the masses discover after its founding trendies have moved on: today, just as a lot of cosmopolites on both coasts are souring on cocaine, the drug is pushing its roots wider and deeper into America's social strata. Peter Bensinger, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration from 1976 to 1981, is now a consultant to businesses on employee drug use. "It is not just a matter of John De Lorean and John Belushi," he says. "Cocaine use does not exempt anyone. You see it in mid-level managers and factory workers." Indeed, the Yankelovich survey found that blue-collar workers are more likely than professionals (14% vs. 9%) to have tried cocaine.

The spread of cocaine has continued even though police and, more significantly, some 2,500 federal drug agents have mobilized to cut into the booming trade. Last year the DEA--and the FBI, which for the first time has been assigned to drug cases--arrested 4,500 people and seized 12,500 lbs. of nearly pure cocaine. This record take, which in diluted form might bring around $3.5 billion retail, was larger than the amounts seized during 1980 and 1981 combined. It included the largest single seizure (3,236 lbs. in Miami) in history. New federal antidrug task forces, forming in a dozen cities, will all be in place by late summer. Last week the Houston-based task force made the $127.5 million program's first bust: most of a 30-member ring, operating mainly out of New Orleans, were rounded up and charged with smuggling 550 lbs. of cocaine.

But for every pound authorities grab, another six sift out into the marketplace, an estimated 45 tons a year. Cocaine has become a $25 billion business, about three times as big as the recording and movie industries put together. (The manufacture of cocaine paraphernalia is a small industry in itself: users spend millions of dollars a year on coke spoons, free-base pipes and extraction kits, digital gram scales and the like.) Selling coke is, in the words of one U.S. drug official, "the most lucrative of all underworld ventures."

Consumers are plunging nose first into coke just when medical studies are reporting conclusions that should scare off new users and old. Until recently, when speaking of cocaine dependence, no one dared call it addiction: cocaine's withdrawal symptoms are not physically wrenching, as with heroin and alcohol. Nonetheless, says Dr. David Smith, director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, "addiction is compulsion, loss of control and continued use in spite of the consequences. Cocaine is very addicting." What is more, and a fact many social snorters refuse to believe, coke can kill its users, and not just those who inject and free-base.

Nor is cocaine simply a public health concern. Coke users increasingly indulge their habit in casual defiance of the law. The very possession of cocaine is illegal in every state and a felony in 33. Possible sentences range widely, from a $3,000 fine in Delaware or 90 days in jail in West Virginia to life in prison in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York and Texas; federal law provides for up to a year in prison. The penalties for dealers are, of course, stiffer; they can get a life sentence in twelve states and up to 15 years if convicted on federal charges.

For the coke subculture and its sympathizers, the laws against this latest drug of choice are regarded as little more than a nuisance, Prohibition redux. "I wasn't running out and killing or robbing people," says Margaret,* 30, a saleswoman for a clothing manufacturer who for two years sold small amounts of coke to support her habit. "I assumed the law-enforcement people had something better to do with their time than to come into my house and arrest me." Margaret, never caught, was right about police priorities: overburdened big-city forces (and prosecutors and courts) are more concerned, necessarily, with violent crime and major thievery.

Police and prosecutors know that they have no great public mandate to wage a war on cocaine--a war they admit, realistically, they could not win. "They never got rid of pot," says Rene, 29, a Western publishing executive, "and they won't make a dent in cocaine. There's no stigma." Cocaine retains its less and less valid cachet as the plaything of athletes, entertainers and other starry achievers. Says DEA Agent James Burke of Denver: "The mystique, the myths and the respectability are all working against us."

The mystique seems in part to derive from breaking the law. "The risk taking is luring them in," says Antoinette Helfrich, coordinator of the University of Colorado's busy coke-abuse clinic. Even when Steve, 30, a Miami land salesman, was arrested for possession and found himself in jail overnight, it was, like, you know, a real trip. "I was with vagrants, drunks and car thieves," he says. "It was unreal, bizarre, like The Twilight Zone. "The glamour of outlawry, with the ante upped considerably, is also an attraction for many dealers and even some smugglers. Says a DEA official in Florida: "Breaking the law may not be just incidental to the white Americans involved in dealing cocaine. It may be essential."

Moreover, from society's standpoint, cocaine has a special perniciousness. "It takes a disproportionately high toll," says Dr. William Pollin, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, "because it is largely used by people who are most likely to have an impact on their environment. Think of the neurosurgeon operating on your child, or the mechanic working on the 747 you are taking."

The symbolic effect is amplified, too, when industrious, influential citizens by the million become cocaine scofflaws. A computer programmer snorts with his pal the lawyer, who buys grams from her neighbor the contractor. The builder also sells ounces to the local junior college teacher and the restaurateur, and buys his pounds out of town from a full-time coke broker in Florida. "Getting coke is just a telephone call away," says Chuck, 34, a San Francisco insurance executive.

"It's like having the groceries delivered." It all seems cozy and clean, a kind of Tupperware criminality that can have as much to do with friendship and status seeking as with drug taking. But in fact the cocaine trade is dirty and dangerous. Middle-class users implicitly acquiesce in the scores of cocaine-related murders that take place annually in the U.S. Says Associate U.S. Attorney General Rudolph Giulani: "The regard for law and values deteriorates, because if you can't stop people from pumping poison into themselves, you can't do much of anything else as a society." If one untrivial law can be broken merrily and en masse, he and many others wonder, why not another and another?

"The coke market," ventures George Schiavone, a fashion photographer familiar with the cocaine scene in Miami, "is the same as the nuke-freeze market. You're not talking about just 'druggies.' You're talking about all walks of life." One former Oregon physician, disastrously addicted for five years, knows how the groovy group solidarity fades. "It starts out very cute and social," he says of cocaine. "Then it gets very lonely. And then it gets very scary."

Joey, 36, a loader at a truck terminal in Brooklyn, got his supply from a man wearing a ski mask at a bustling "drug market" five minutes from work. "I'd go during my breaks and at lunch, picking up four to eight nickel [$5] bags at a time," he says. "If it was payday, I could run through my whole check [$515]." Joey, now in a drug-abuse treatment program, says he is "trying to find a place where there is no dope."

Such virgin territory may not exist. At a pair of Houston carpet stores, the former manager says that the owners, "two family men in three-piece suits," gave cocaine to employees who would work 18-hour shifts. Cocaine, in fact, is dangerously well suited to sales jobs. "You can do a lot of selling, a lot of talking when you're on cocaine," says Dana, 28, a South Florida man who would snort as much as seven grams (about a quarter of an ounce) a day while selling -- and to finance his habit, stealing -- building materials. "I didn't really like the job," he says. "Coke accounted for a lot of my motivation." Margaret guesses that at least a third of her fellow fashion-industry salespeople are regular users.

"It's going bananas all through town," says Denver Police Sergeant Don De Novellis, who directs the department's major coke cases. "It's everywhere. It's like cigarette machines in a bar." That seems a bit hyperbolic. But in North Beach, a funky neighborhood in San Francisco, the banks' "electronic teller" machines, which will dispense no more than $200 daily to each customer, attract long lines just before midnight every Saturday. "I'll bet you," says Haight-Ash-bury's Dr. Smith, "that 90% of them are taking out their next day's money to buy some coke."

At street prices that range from $ 100 to $ 150 a gram, which is about a teaspoonful, enough to keep two people well stoked for a few hours, cocaine is as pricey as it is evanescent. And for many people, conspicuous consumption is the point. Says a drug counselor in Houston: "The very expense makes people think they're special." Even the cocaine high seems unattractively linked to cash. "It's the drug for the all-American middle class," says Chuck, the insurance executive, who for 18 months spent nearly a third of his $35,000 salary on coke. "It makes you feel like you can make lots of money."

The people lined up at money machines are not all addicted wretches, of course. Most cocaine users do not get hooked. Says New York Psychiatrist Richard Resnick: "Just as with alcohol, there are those who can use coke on occasion and have no problems, and there are cocaholics." Statutes cannot recognize such a distinction (although Delaware's try, with lesser penalties for addicted dealers), nor should smug cocaine apologists be permitted to bandy the distinction about as a shield. But it is necessary to an understanding of just how such a dangerous drug could become so pervasive, even routine. "The only way to cut down the demand for coke," says a senior DEA agent in the South, "is to prove what the effects are and aren't. People are fairly well educated, and the ultra scare tactics don't work any more."

The euphoric effects of cocaine are well known. Heroin kills more of its users, but it acquired a uniquely dark stigma partly because of the backward quality of the opiate high: blissfully heedless, droopy, tuned out, lazy beyond words. Stimulant cocaine, however, is far more in tune with the swaggering mood of a country of nonstop gogetters. Users tend to have the perfect illusion, for 20 or 30 minutes, that they are smarter, sexier and more competent, radiant, vigilant, masterful, better: it promotes a kind of fascism of the self. (Indeed, Hermann Goring, a morphine user, is rumored to have used cocaine as well.)

A room full of cokeheads, bristling with that hard, artificial arrogance, can be an unsettling place. "With cocaine," says Vertell Pendleton, a Chicago drug-abuse counselor and former user, "you're indestructible, perfect, the giant of your dreams." Donald, 42, a Philadelphia-born investment banker, lost his job, squandered his inheritance, and developed a hole in the septum of his nose. Nevertheless, he says, "I felt powerful, in control. Cocaine is ego food. It feeds the ego like nothing I've ever seen in my life." Tony, the owner of a Denver tire-repair shop, used four grams a day. Says he: "I wanted to feel like a kingpin, the life of the party. Coke gave me all of this. You get to feeling you're bulletproof." (Bulletproof Tony, arrested for selling more than half a pound to an undercover cop, is on probation and paying back the Government its undercover purchase money.)

By definition, people addicted to cocaine are out of control. They are probably on or over the edge of ruin. So it is a mean, symmetrical irony that cocaine's effect is to mimic will and emotional focus, permitting the user to feel he is blessed with precisely the virtues he lacks. Explains Illinois' Kirkpatrick: "The cocaine high is the way you would feel if you did something with your life. You think, 'For the first time in a long time, I've really got myself together.' "

Enthusiasts of the drug commonly use images of sex to describe its short-lived supercharge. Says the former Oregon M.D.: "It was so intense, so sexual. In fact, it beats sex all to hell." Among dabblers, cocaine can be a powerful, sharp-edged aphrodisiac. But for most overusers, love-making tends finally to pall.

It is the same with monkeys. In experiments at U.C.L.A. and elsewhere in which apes were allowed large portions of cocaine, they were found to prefer the drug to food or sexual partners, and would willingly suffer severe electric shocks in exchange for large doses. "It is the most rewarding and reinforcing drug for a primate," says U.C.L.A. Psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel. "It doesn't matter whether he has a tail or a $100,000 income. Primates like cocaine."

If cocaine merely produced a false sense of personal supremacy, and that was that, it would be less menacing. But the "crash" from coke, the letdown when the drug wears off and heady illusions disappear, is grim. To ward off melancholy and the jitters after the supply runs out, many users get drunk or take sedatives like Quaaludes. Or worse. "The drug that works best to cut the crash," says Psychiatrist Resnick, "is heroin."

But given the choice, most people would really prefer more bright piles of cocaine. "It doesn't seem to be a drug of moderation," says Schiavone, the Miami fashion photographer. Another Miamian, Eugene ("Mercury") Morris, the former Dolphins' football star who just began serving a 20-year term for dealing, says he was a free-baser and plain insatiable: " 'Enough' is never present in your reasoning. You've had enough when it's gone, and when it's gone you want some more."

Addiction and heroin have seemed almost exclusively coupled. Indeed, heroin's withdrawal pangs are physically terrible. Cocaine's are not. But according to people who have been dependent on both drugs, kicking cocaine can be tougher. "When they say it's not addictive, that's crap," insists Investment Banker Donald, who is struggling to beat his cocaine habit. "Just talking about it makes my sinuses clog up and my nose twitch." At Dr. Siegel's Los Angeles therapy sessions, deprived cocaine users, he says, sometimes "start crying for it, and get doubled over on the floor. It looks like a physical thing, but it isn't--it's psychological."

According to Psychiatrist Resnick's clinical studies of 430 users, compulsive cokeheads tend to be professionally successful. Yet beneath a bouncy, worldly facade, says Resnick, the typical abuser is a certifiable narcissist who has "an undeveloped sense of identity and a profound despair," and "an inability to express ... intense rage toward one or both parents." Rob, 26, a Connecticut native who has sold various drugs for a decade, including cocaine, has his own, hard-boiled theory of addicts. "They're the same kind of people who don't have self-control in other parts of their life," he says of those who go overboard on cocaine. "If they don't get messed up on coke, they'll get messed up on something else."

But cocaine's spell is by no means confined to the obviously troubled or the weak-willed. Free-basing in particular, says Harvard Psychiatry Professor Dr. Lester Grinspoon, "powerfully fastens itself on people." Elizabeth, 33, a Chicago hair stylist, had occasionally sniffed coke for a decade. In the fall of 1981, she tried free-basing and was soon spending whole days with her pipe. "Once I started that, all I wanted was more and more," she says, her voice still full of amazement at her fling. "That's what puzzles me. I'm the type of person, I don't let things get the best of me. Nothing. But I know I'm powerless with cocaine." Says Kevin McEneaney, senior vice president of New York's Phoenix House drug-treatment center: "We all think our personalities are well grounded and well formed, but it doesn't take a lot to tilt the psychological balance." Bensinger, the former DEA chief, has his own plausible criterion for measuring that tilt: "What will they do to get it again? That's how you tell what's addictive."

Some of them will steal. Nicky, 32, the son of a prominent Boston family, was in the midst of a third attempt to quit cocaine. One Sunday last December, he stole a cache of jewelry from his parents. In exchange for the $50,000 worth of gems, he got half an ounce of coke worth $1,000. Nicky's parents had him arrested, and until two weeks ago he lived at Boston's Third Nail drug-treatment center.

In the quintessentially suburban San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, David, 21, was not reduced to stealing from his family to support his five-gram, $750-a-week habit. Instead, during six months last year, he embezzled $20,000 from the camera store where he worked. His thefts were discovered just before Thanksgiving, but the police were not called, and David's father repaid the $20,000. David cannot figure it. "I was the all-American kid who had never been in trouble," he says. "I was popular. I taught religion classes at the synagogue. How could a well-brought-up kid like me get into something like this?"

A few years ago, cocaine users were a rarity at Phoenix House; today a third of the people seeking help say cocaine is their main problem. At Northwestern University on Chicago's North Shore, Dr. Sidney Schnoll, the director of the chemical dependence program, says that in 1979 one or two of the patients were being weaned from coke; today, as in New York, about a third are. Between 1979 and the end of 1981, the number of cokeheads admitted to federally funded treatment programs rose by more than half, from 1,961 to 3,393.

Sometimes it is purely psychological wounds that drive cocaholics to therapy. But diehard users can be prone to high-pitched anxiety, irrational fears, paranoia and even, reports Harvard's Grinspoon, "out-and-out cocaine psychosis:" Violence is not rare. When Nicky's wife finally smashed his free-basing pipe, he threw furniture and chased her from their suburban house. "I went ape," he says. Mike, the son of a well-to-do South Carolina lawyer, is a patient turned counselor at Charleston's Fenwick Hall drug-treatmeat center. He carried a gun during his cocaine madness. In 1980, as he was being arrested for the last time (for jumping into Charleston Harbor to "hunt sharks"), he kicked out the windows of a police squad car. Fortunately, according to Haight-Ashbury's Dr. Smith, cocaine psychosis can be moderated with antipsychotic drugs (like Haldol), and the hallucinations usually stop two to four days after the last dose of coke.

Specialized treatment regimens are proliferating. Dr. Richard Miller has run 50 people through his "cokenders" spa (one week, $900) in the countryside north of San Francisco. During the week of therapy he offers the recovering overusers a toot of cocaine to test their resolve. In Los Angeles, new Cocaine Anonymous groups draw 700 people to weekly meetings. At South Miami Hospital, a coke-treatment program (four weeks, $6,300) has been discharging more than 300 patients a year.

Medical research is still sketchy. The commonest cocaine-related ailment, a breakdown of nasal membrane, "is the least of one's worries," according to Dr. Pollin of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Chronic cocaine use kills the appetite and so regularly results in severe weight loss. In a three-year study, Gerald Rosen, a Duke University pharmacologist, has found that metabolized cocaine destroys dangerous numbers of liver cells. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, among other places, have seen evidence of serious lung damage in free-basers, who may constitute a third of the country's cocaine abusers. (Free-basers cannot be surprised by the findings: they often cough up black phlegm and sometimes blood.) Last year coke problems brought almost 3,000 New Yorkers to emergency rooms, 50% more than in 1981, and in Colorado the number of such panicked hospital visits doubled between 1979 and 1982. The increase may be, in part, a hopeful sign: more users now know that the drug carries genuine medical risks.

Free-basers are apparently the likeliest to die. The high is more intense than the high from snorting (and equal to that from injection) because the pure, heated cocaine vapor is absorbed into the bloodstream so fast. The speed of absorption, not the size of the dose, also seems to be the operative factor in cocaine deaths. Blood vessels are simultaneously constricted and cardiopulmonary muscles overstimulated; heart attacks (sometimes not diagnosed as cocaine-triggered) or lung failure are the direct causes of death.

National fatality figures are approximate, since coroners do not or cannot always find the evidence that cocaine was lethal. But overdoses of coke were directly or primarily responsible for as many as 300 deaths in 1981. Last year Dr. Charles Wetli, the deputy chief medical examiner for Miami's Dade County, attributed 14 local deaths exclusively to cocaine. All of those who died had been frequent users. But the alarming fact is that most of the dead had not been especially reckless: two-thirds died after merely snorting coke--not after free-basing or shooting up--and, according to Wetli, "[none used] any more on the day they died than they had previously." A stark example came last week near Palm Beach, Fla. Socialite William Ylvisaker Jr., 27, died of respiratory failure after snorting cocaine late into the night. His friends insisted that Ylvisaker, a champion polo player and son of a Chicago electronics mogul, had not been a heavy user.

The cocaine trail to the U.S. begins 2,500 miles southwest of Florida, on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains. The cash-crop cultivation of coca is divided primarily between Bolivia (86,000 acres) and Peru (123,000 acres). The DEA, which has five agents in each country, estimates that 23,000 Bolivian peasant families depend on coca for their livelihoods, and that the crop generates nearly $1 billion a year for Peru, where the entire national budget is just over $5 billion. But the business is controlled by Colombians. All but a small fraction of cocaine headed for the U.S. comes first to Colombia, generally as a gooey coca paste, for final refining into crystalline white cocaine.

Some 7,500 acres of coca are grown by Colombian farmers. Until 1980, Jose Antonio Monroy, 50, grew corn on his ten acres near San Jose del Guaviare, southeast of Bogota. Now he tends 15,000 coca bushes. He harvests the leaves three times a year and processes them in a bath of gasoline, sulfuric acid, potassium permanganate and ammonia. "You can't blame me if others get poisoned with this stuff," Monroy says. "This is what they pay me for." Colombia's annual per capita income is about $1,150. From his annual end product, 35 lbs. of paste, Monroy nets $65,000. Inflation along this booming stretch of the Guayabero River is understandably rampant: prostitutes can earn $3,000 a month, coffins cost $450 each. The Colombian government last year seized 16,000 lbs. of refined coke, only about 4% of the amount that leaves the country but more tonnage than was confiscated in the U.S. Persuading Colombia to step up its efforts will be difficult. Explains Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Clyde Taylor: "It is politically hard for them to crack down on coca production if it is seen as reacting to pressure from the U.S. against the poor peasant farmers."

In Colombia as in the U.S., says John Bacon, head of cocaine-intelligence gathering for the DEA: "There is no Mr. Big." But another U.S. official estimates that there are 100,000 Colombians living in the U.S. who "earn major dollar figures in drugs." According to DEA officials, there are ten principal Colombian cocaine rings with members in Bogota, Miami and the middle-class New York City borough of Queens. Each ring takes in at least $50 million a year. Says Bacon about the Colombian coke gangsters: "They are tremendous organizers. They deal very effectively with Americans." They also operate as a cartel, says Bacon. Although there is now a cocaine glut in South America and production costs have been cut in half, the price of the drug in the U.S. has hardly dropped. Oddly, U.S. authorities and Colombian exporters both have an interest in keeping the price high, the police to discourage use and the crooks to maintain huge profits.

Experts believe that about half of the cocaine entering the U.S. is funneled through Miami. A quarter of all the coke seized by authorities last year came from one bust at Miami International Airport; the shipment would have been worth more than $100 million wholesale. But the business is not strictly urban, and intensified police pressure seems to be pushing big-league traffic north and west from Miami. Last year in New Iberia, La., federal agents found nearly 1,200 lbs. of cocaine in two dozen gunny sacks that were supposed to be filled with cattle feed. Near Santa Rosa, N. Mex., duffel bags packed with 200 lbs. of coke were tossed out of a plane onto the wrong patch of scrubland and found by a state policeman. The same thing happened near Ellijay, Ga., when, police gathered up more than 500 lbs. of coke in duffel bags that had been dropped into the wrong valley. And three weeks ago in Dothan, Ala., after a private plane made an emergency landing, police found 600 lbs. of coke on board.

Low-level distributors get caught more routinely. Last week John Lindsay Jr., 22, the son of the former New York mayor and presidential candidate, was arrested at his father's house and charged with selling three grams of coke to undercover cops for $300. Consider a sampling from the past three months in the Washington, D.C., area: a suburban couple picked up with 8 lbs. of coke, a Virginia accountant arrested when 45 lbs. shipped from Ecuador were intercepted and delivered to his door by DEA agents posing as deliverymen, an Air Force member of the presidential honor guard charged with distribution of cocaine, and in Frederick, Md., a six-person coke ring (including a local lawyer and a banker) busted. "It used to be that a pound of cocaine was a big seizure," says Assistant U.S. Attorney James Walsh, John De Lorean's prosecutor and head of the new federal task force in Los Angeles. "Nowadays, if it's a couple of pounds or a kilo [2.2 lbs.], we'll prosecute it, but it's no big deal."

Government experts say that 40% of U.S. coke comes into the country aboard private planes. "In southeastern Georgia," says Gary Garner, a commander of the state's antismuggling squad, "all you have to do is get the cows out of the way and bring the planes on in. They're in and out in 45 minutes, before we even know they've been there."

Smaller parcels arrive in dozens of ways: in the holds of small boats, in the bags of merchant seamen, taped to tourists' flesh, dissolved and then impregnated in clothing or, as New York customs agents discovered early last year, secreted behind a framed reproduction of Da Vinci's Last Supper.

The smuggler's most foolhardy practice is called body packing: they swallow cocaine-filled rubber packets, usually made of fingers snipped from surgical gloves. The carriers, known as mules, gulp down the packets in Colombia with the intention of excreting them in the U.S. The danger to the mule is that a packet may rupture, causing a massive drug overdose. The technique is becoming either safer or less popular. Since late 1980, the Dade County coroner has not come across any body-packing fatalities, after an earlier spate of such deaths. Yet during the past year at Kennedy International Airport in New York, 51 mules have been arrested on the hoof: suspects are X-rayed and, if they do not confess, put in a hospital with a bedside commode and two patient customs guards. "The packets often come out like machine gun bullets, with a loud report," says Customs Inspector Peter di Rocco. A mule commonly ingests upwards of a pound of coke inside 100 packets or more.

Once in the U.S., cocaine is diluted at each step in the distribution chain, usually with vegetable starches or anesthetics like Novocain. A typical retail gram of "cocaine" is only about 15% pure, although concentrations as high as 40% and as low as zero are not unusual. The price markup from dockside to coffee table is roughly ten times.

Many dealers, selling a few grams or even an ounce or two a week, are in the business to satisfy their cravings. Fred Kamm, 42, for eight years a user-turned-dealer in coke-laden Aspen, Colo., made deliveries on a motorcycle and carried a telephone beeper to take orders; he also injected two grams a day of the merchandise. Says Margaret, the New York sales woman: "My boyfriend and I would get an ounce and sell off some and use some, but we always used more than we sold."

Just as many are simply entrepreneurs. The profits can be staggering. Says one California ex-dealer: "I remember having $800,000 in cash lying around the house. Or I'd be out playing tennis and have my tennis gear in one bag and $200,000 and a kilo of coke in the other." One federal drug official stationed in Miami sounds almost like a franchise promoter. "In two days in Miami," he says, "anyone can score a kilo [for $50,000]. The small dealer is taking no greater risk than running a traffic light. He can afford a fantastic lifestyle, he doesn't have to go to work at 7 a.m., and there are few dissatisfied customers." The agent might have been describing Leonard, a former social worker who sold cocaine for six years until he decided to quit the business in 1981. He bought a pound at a time in Miami, sold ounces to a small circle of affluent suburbanites throughout the Northeast, lived unflamboyantly and saved about $150,000. "Am I glad I did it? Yes, plain and simple," Leonard says. "It was a perfectly safe business."

Not for everyone. An exceptionally violent streak seems to run through the trade. Says the DEA's Bacon about the Colombian gangs: "They're absolutely ruthless, and they've imported their way of doing business to this country." A fellow DEA official, formerly stationed in New York and now in Dade County, is still astounded by the savagery. "Heroin dealers in Harlem didn't wipe out each other's whole families. They did in one guy on a bar stool," he says. "The Colombians wipe out the whole bar." Says U.S. Attorney Walsh: "Behind that social line of cocaine laid out at a party, there might well have been a murder in Miami between rival gangs."

Perhaps worse, there is the inevitable police corruption. Says U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, who is to visit Bolivia and Peru this week to discuss drugs and tour coca fields: "The dollar amounts are so great that bribery threatens the very foundation of law and law enforcement." A blond New York preppie, at 18 a recovering cokehead, was always ready to bribe: "I figured if a cop ever stopped me, I'd just offer him cocaine and buy him off."

One cocaine ring, known as the grandma Mafia because three of its principals were grandmothers, banked more than $2 million a month; in the trial of the head grandma now under way in Los Angeles, there have been at least four plausible allegations of corruption against DEA and IRS agents. Last December a federal indictment in Georgia said that a state police sergeant and a local deputy sheriff were confederates in a 25-person smuggling ring. In one week in February, a Los Angeles deputy sheriff, a California-based DEA agent and a San Jose policeman were charged with selling coke. Says Prosecutor Walsh: "I'm surprised, frankly, that there isn't more of that sort of thing, with the temptations of that kind of money."

Two federal laws, passed in 1970 and aimed at the drug trade, are being used with some success in the law-enforcement campaign against coke. The first requires that banks report all cash transactions of $10,000 or more to the IRS. This makes it a little more difficult for dealers to dispose of the enormous amounts of money that pass through their hands. The grandmas in Los Angeles, for example, came to the authorities' attention when they tried to bribe a bank president not to report their deposits to the IRS. Some South Florida banks, generally small, quiet and unadvertised, are notorious as money "launderers" Local cocaine traders are sometimes brazen, sauntering into Miami banks carrying suitcases or cardboard boxed overflowing currency. Indeed, the city's banks have been embarrassingly awash in cash, much of it cocaine profits. In late 1981, the local Federal Reserve branch had a $5 billion surplus of currency, more excess cash than was in the dozen other Fed branches combined. Suddenly, in early 1982, the cash surplus started to fall, just as smugglers began transferring their operations out of South Florida.

The second important federal law allows the Government to seize property bought with drug profits. Prosecutors must go through a distinct and scrupulous legal process to prove that the gains were specifically illgotten. Says Miami U.S. Attorney Stanley Marcus: "It takes a lot--I mean a lot--to convince a federal judge that $10 million in someone's personal bank account should be taken away from him." Nonetheless, the DEA and other federal agencies last year managed to seize about $100 million in cash, $40 million worth of aircraft, boats and cars, and $20 million in real estate. Local police also seem to get a special kick from seeing cocaine merchants stripped of their fancy possessions. Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police department ended last year with a $2.5 million surplus thanks to its expropriated share of local dealers' loot. Some cocaine tycoons are prosperous enough to shrug off the loss of a swank beach house or a DC-3 (fitted out with extra fuel tanks for long intercontinental coke flights) as business overhead. Still, says DEA Agent William Schnepper: "It's what hurts them the most. Not only do they go to prison, but they come out with no treasure socked away."

Given that bounty-hunting enthusiasm, the new federal task forces, modeled on the feds' year-old South Florida unit, could pay for themselves. The task forces in each of twelve cities* might typically include four prosecutors, at least six agents from the FBI, six more from the DEA, three from the IRS and two from Customs. Until last year, the FBI steered clear of drug cases, largely because J. Edgar Hoover did not want his agents tempted by narcotics cash. But now 600 FBI agents are working on 1,100 drug investigations, and the bureau already has 326 convictions to its credit.

One of the weaknesses of the Government's approach is the tendency of the agencies involved to squabble over prerogatives and credit. Communication is sometimes only intermittent. The task will be to develop smooth relationships between, say, the rough-and-ready DEA (one in 50 agents was shot at in 1981), which specializes in street stakeouts and gritty undercover work, and the green-eyeshade technocrats at the IRS, who delve into the esoteric evidence of drug peddlers' financial crimes. "Any prosecutor," says U.S. Attorney Walsh, "can tell you horror stories about information they didn't have because it was in the hands of another agency." Says U.S. Attorney Daniel Hedges, head of Houston's task force: "One of my jobs will be to serve as a referee in the turf rights."

The federal authorities are eager to catch bona fide kingpins. "We're not going after the Mexicans standing on the street corner any more," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Markley in Chicago. "We're after the big financiers, because they have the direct routes to the main traffickers." Agrees U.S. Attorney Marcus: "The money trail can lead you to the top. A lot of major dealers do not touch the dope, but they do touch the money. It may be easier to catch them on the money than the dope." Criminal lawyers, naturally, are skeptical, even contemptuous. "They always say they are going after the financial side," says Houston Attorney Charles Szekely, "but they don't. They find anybody they think they can convict."

Experienced drug police are inclined to believe that their efforts against cocaine will amount in the end to a token fight. "All we can hope to do," says Sergeant Rene LaPrevotte of San Francisco's drug squad, "is prevent someone from setting up a cocaine stand in Union Square." One federal official, who has been with the DEA since it began in 1973, has no heroic notions of putting an end to cocaine runs. "We feel like we're part of a spectator sport," he says. "We're not the answer. The answers are going to be found in your wallets and your conscience."

The point is well taken: criminal sanctions are a difficult, awkward way to do battle against people's vices. As long as millions of Americans want to pay fortunes for diluted cocaine, cocaine will get to them, the law be damned. Another DEA veteran poses the problem this way: "The only way to stop the trade is to stop the production or stop the demand. And we can't stop the source."

Maybe not. But curiously, there is a new, burgeoning demand at the source of cocaine: Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian youths are rushing to become cokeheads. South American governments have been generally unsympathetic to U.S. jeremiads about the northward flow of South American drugs. But now they are seeing stylish cocaine abuse firsthand. And because the drug is so cheap in the Andes ($14 a street gram), it is more often smoked liberally in cigarettes than snorted.

"It's the fashion, like jeans," says Juan Carlos, a young Bogota professional. "At our parties now, everyone just sucks smoke and gets selfabsorbed. The parties are spooky: no laughing, just puffing." Alberto Laverde, 27, is a smooth, smiling Bogota hustler who dispenses cocaine at the local Wimpy hamburger bar. "Get into it," he encourages in accented English, sniffing up a bit of his pure product. "It's the flow of the apocalypse, man. You're king for a moment or even two. And you can be that again and again." Cocaine, sent off to the States to make money, has acquired American glamour, and come back home.

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Benjamin W. Cate/Los Angeles, David S. Jackson/Washington, WilliamMcWhirter/Miami and Janice C. Simpson/New York

Those referred to only by first names have been given pseudonyms at their request. * The task forces are based in Boston, New York, * The task forces are based in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

With reporting by Benjamin W. Cate/Los Angeles, David S. Jackson/Washington, WilliamMcWhirter/Miami, Janice C. Simpson/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.