"I Thought I Was God"

Jules Trop's life as he turned 45 was exactly what he wanted it to be. The Miami Beach physician enjoyed a lucrative practice, a waterfront home on a private island in Biscayne Bay and a prized art collection. There was an added fillip: cocaine. Many of his rich patients used and sold the drug, and Trop was sucked in by its siren charms.

"It made my conversation seem sparkling, music sound better, made me feel good," he recalls. It seemed a fountain of youth. He could beat his 19-year-old son in a three-mile run, and his sex life sizzled. "I could be the macho man I always dreamed about." Soon he was spending $1,000 a week, snorting two grams a day with only minutes between "toots." "Even when you drive, you can pour a little sniff on your hand," he says. After a year of cocaine use, Trop discovered freebasing, and the social highs turned insidiously antisocial. "In the beginning, I felt I was communicating with God," he says with a wry smile.

"In the end, I thought I was God." With the help of an unsuspecting nurse, he maintained his medical practice. But his life at home was unraveling. He was unperturbed by the constant small fires he started with his free-basing equipment. He was now smoking $2,000 worth of coke a day.

He wanted to be alone, away from his disapproving wife and children. Even sex seemed boring: "You could line up the Latin Quarter. All I wanted was the pipe."

Trop moved out of his house and into a dilapidated apartment. "I was chasing the memory of the high," he says. "The highs got lower, and the lows got deeper." His skin was covered with sores from malnutrition. The free-basing also caused rashes and made his tongue so swollen that he could barely talk. In one of the fits of rage that accompanied the "down" periods, he snapped off two teeth. Shards of broken glass pipes formed a thigh-high pile. The apartment was rancid, filled with unwashed clothes and dishes. The doctor did not notice. He spent most of his time in the shower, even smoking his coke there, to relieve the constant sweating. "I went as low as you can go without dying."

Trop's climb back was arduous. He had sold off his art collection and mortgaged his house to pay for his habit. He went through a series of treatment clinics and rebuilt his marriage and career. Even though he has not had cocaine in nearly three years, he is on guard.

"I'm a hit away from being back to where I was," he says. He attends support meetings three times a week and has just opened his own ten-bed center for teen-age cocaine users in Miami. "I think cocaine use is going to become heavier," he says. "It's a marriage, not a flirtation, with this society." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.