America's Crusade
By Evan Thomas
In Harlem, angry residents paint large red X's on crack dealers' doors and put stuffed animals in the windows of abandoned buildings as a symbolic gesture to reclaim them from drug users. In New Mexico, two children turn in their parents to the police for marijuana possession, just as a California girl did her coke-using parents a week earlier. In Washington, the President of the U.S., the Vice President and most of the White House staff patriotically provide urine samples so that it can be seen if they have within the past few days consumed any heroin, cocaine, marijuana, PCP or hallucinogens.
Like a drunk waking up from a 20-year binge with a massive hangover, the nation is bitter, remorseful and full of resolution. The easy tolerance of the late 1960s, when turning on was a statement of personal freedom, has turned to dread. Cocaine, the glamour dust of the late '70s -- fast, clean, fun! -- has been boiled down to hard and mean little pellets of crack, giver of euphoria, taker of lives. To a nation that espouses self-reliance, drug dependence has emerged as the dark side of the American character, the price of freedom to fail. It is as if America, so vain and self-consciously fit, has looked upon itself and suddenly seen the hideously consumptive portrait of Dorian Gray.
The country, it seems, is awash with drugs. Fine white powder pours past the border patrol like sand through a sieve. On busy street corners and in urban parks, pushers murmur, "Crack it up, crack it up," like some kind of evil incantation, bewitching susceptible kids and threatening society's sense of order and security. The public is outraged; opinion polls show that drug abuse has surpassed economic woes and the threat of real war as the nation's No. 1 concern. For a nation whose penchant for righteous crusades can surpass even its tolerance for libertine individualism, the crackdown against crack has become the latest celebrated cause.
"The War on Drugs" is now a regular feature on the nightly news and the front pages. CRACK USERS' BABIES CROWDING HOSPITAL NURSERIES, blares a headline in the normally staid New York Times. The networks air two prime-time specials in a week: CBS Anchorman Dan Rather can be seen tagging along on the police bust of a crack house in New York City; NBC's Tom Brokaw earnestly questions addicts about the evils of dope. The war on drugs, like the war in Viet Nam, has been brought home to the nation's living rooms.
This coming Sunday evening the President and his wife will deliver a joint television address from the family quarters of the White House on the subject of drug abuse. "They wanted to do it together, from their home to our homes, as parents and friends, as well as the First Couple," said Spokesman Larry Speakes. By his noted powers of moral suasion, Reagan hopes to do nothing less than make drugs socially unacceptable in the U.S.
It is hard to say precisely why drugs are this year's public bane, just as it is hard to know why other threats that are ever present -- from nuclear holocaust to world hunger to environmental disaster -- seem to obsess the national consciousness in cycles. Perhaps it is the sheer insidiousness of crack, the newly popular, highly potent form of cocaine that can in short order transform the casual pleasure seeker into an addict. Perhaps it is the perception that drugs have spread into the workplace and the neighborhood, that they have arrived like the wolf at the door, or at least next door.
In any case, this is hardly the nation's first drug crisis, nor will it be the last. Just as the U.S. periodically launches antidrug crusades, it regularly succumbs to new waves of forbidden indulgences. In the late 19th century, Americans swigged the true Classic Coke, Coca-Cola bottled with a dash of cocaine. A panicked nation banished cocaine to the shadows back then, but over the years new drugs -- from pot to heroin to LSD -- always seemed to come along, promising momentary escape and delivering long-term misery and waste.
It is of course possible to lose perspective on the actual dimensions of today's crisis. Statistics to be released by the National Institute on Drug Abuse this month will show rather surprisingly that the current cocaine epidemic has already peaked, and the use of other drugs is declining significantly. Drugs kill, but not nearly so often as the family car. Coke and heroin cause much less overall harm, in statistical terms, than alcohol or tobacco.
Even so, the fear that has seized the nation is hardly unwarranted. Drug abuse remains unacceptably high, and its more virulent form -- crack addiction -- appears to be spreading. The press and politicians may be guilty of hyping the drug crisis, but the costs to users and society are nonetheless appalling.
When President Reagan mounted his bully pulpit to call for a "national crusade" against drugs last month, he was hard put to offer any specifics beyond suggesting that federal employees in "sensitive" jobs, like air- traffic controllers, be required to undergo drug testing. Until now the Administration has focused on interdiction -- catching drug smugglers and . their booty at the border. But while federal seizures of cocaine have increased tenfold in five years, the available supply on the street has not been dented.
The Administration has nearly doubled its drug-enforcement budget, from $853 million in 1982 to $1.5 billion this year, but has neglected efforts to reduce the demand for drugs. The federal budget for drug treatment and prevention has actually declined, from $200 million in 1982 to $126 million this year. Somewhat belatedly Reagan seems to have realized that the flow of drugs will abate only when the U.S. curbs its persistent craving. What since 1984 had been the personal cause of First Lady Nancy Reagan -- getting young people to "Just Say No" to drugs -- finally became a top item on the President's own political and public agenda. Promising a massive drug- education campaign and a nationwide drive for "drug-free" schools and workplaces, Reagan urged "a sustained national effort to rid the U.S. of this scourge by mobilizing every segment of our society against drug abuse."
Philosophically wary of Big Government, the President would prefer to see private business and local government lead the way, or at least foot the bill. As they labor to come up with a program to fulfill the goals Reagan announced last month, White House aides realize that in the era of Gramm-Rudman they must fight drugs on the cheap. One top Administration official privately tempered the President's high-flown rhetoric with bottom-line bureaucratese. Said he: "You've got a zero-sum game as far as budgeting goes."
Congressional Democrats apparently feel no such restraints. Under pressure to "do something," they realize that a lawmaker who does nothing about drugs on the eve of an election puts himself at political risk. "If our country was invaded by a foreign force, the Administration would not be raising the question of Gramm-Rudman," says Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem. This week the House will take up a $2 billion-to-$3 billion antidrug package that will fund every weapon in the war on drugs, from more radar balloons for the border patrol to more drug-treatment centers in the ghetto.
It is too early to see the shape of the inevitable compromise. But it will surely not satisfy the demands of local officials in drug-plagued cities, like New York Mayor Edward Koch, who has called on the Army, Navy and Air Force to join the war. While calling for more federal help, state and local governments are launching their own crusades. Stiff jail sentences for pushers are in vogue; Alabama's new "drug-barons law," for instance, mandates a life sentence without parole for high-volume traffickers. Where the states will house drug dealers and pushers while they serve out their long sentences is another question. Most prisons are jammed, and urban court systems are rapidly approaching gridlock.
Private businesses and government agencies alike have seized on drug testing to clean up the workplace. About a third of the FORTUNE 500 companies require some sort of drug testing for employees. "By the end of the year," says Peter Bensinger, the former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency and now a Chicago-based consultant on drug abuse, "we will see a quantum leap in the number of companies that are testing for drugs."
Inevitably, the antidrug crusade is producing some ludicrous results. A best-selling toy in the U.S. is Madballs, a set of eight rubber balls adorned with gross names and faces. One of the more grotesque Madballs, depicting a creature whose skull has been split wide open, was called Crack Head. Fearful that this charming toy might be accused of glorifying drug use, the toymakers last month changed the name to Bash Brain.
The rush by lawmakers and government officials to pass antidrug legislation and prove their own purity by submitting to urinalysis has provoked the mirth of columnists and the sighs of weary legislators who have lived through earlier drug crises. New York Times Columnist William Safire writes mockingly of "drugocrats" waging "jar wars." Says Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "We're all going to drug conferences and making the Secretary of State pee into a paper cup."
"The country is becoming unstuck," insists Arnold Trebach, director of the Institute on Drugs, Crime and Justice at American University in Washington. "This is a very serious problem, but it is a problem that has leveled off." Americans, particularly younger ones, are in fact learning to just say no. Reports Charles Schuster, the director of the National Institute on Drug and Alcohol Abuse: "The trend since 1979 is that people are backing off. In almost all classes of drugs, abuse among younger people has diminished. When you get that kind of change in attitude on the part of youth, it's obvious that drug use is going to decline." Marijuana has been widely feared as the "gateway drug" that leads teenagers from smoking joints to experimenting with stronger stuff, such as cocaine and heroin. In 1978, according to government surveys, a staggering 10% of all high school seniors smoked marijuana every day. Today the percentage has dropped by half. That is still way too high, but attitudes have changed markedly. Only one-quarter of high school seniors reported that marijuana was a dangerous drug in 1978, but now fully 75% do.
Heroin abuse has stabilized at half a million users, about the same number as 15 years ago. That is still a tragically high number, but the heroin-addict population is aging. The NIDA reports there are relatively few new heroin users.
Even cocaine use has evened out. Though some 22 million Americans have felt the euphoric tug of its 20-minute high, the number of "current users" (those who have taken the drug in the past 30 days) has remained constant since 1979, at about 4.3 million. "Drugs come and go," says Donald Ian Mcdonald of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, "and cocaine has seen its period of social acceptability and of harmlessness put behind us now. I'd guess we'll see a relative improvement in the number of young people willing to try cocaine. Certainly the yuppie who has got his head screwed on halfway straight is not going to put that stuff in his nose, as he might have been tempted to do by a well-meaning user friend three or four years ago. You'd just have to be crazy to do it, with what people have seen."
Maybe so, but a growing number of people seem to be willing to suck into their lungs the smoke from cocaine in a far more powerful form known variously as base, baseball, gravel, rock, roxanne and, more commonly, crack. Crack is cocaine boiled down (it makes a cracking sound when heated) into crystalline balls that can be smoked. "Crack is like throwing gas on the cocaine fire," says Manhattan Special Prosecutor Sterling Johnson. A gram of coke costs about $100, but two beads, or pea-shaped pieces, of crack go for $10, enough to guarantee a single user two or three blissful joyrides. Coke sniffers so constrict their nasal passages that they can no longer snort the stuff, while heroin users must constantly search for new veins to pop. The only limit on the amount of crack an addict can use is the amount he has. "There is no such thing as saving crack," says Dr. Herbert Kleber of Yale Medical School. "You use what you have."
Cocaine, many physicians now believe, is the most addictive popular drug of all, and crack is by far its most addictive form. "People fall desperately in love with this drug the first time they use it," says Dr. Arnold Washton, director of research for the National Cocaine Hotline. Unlike heroin users, who vomit and shake when they withdraw, crack addicts show few immediate physical signs of dependency -- at least at first. But they feel an overpowering yearning for more. Bouts of depression and irritability can lead to deep depression and paranoia. "I was afraid to be with it and afraid to be without it," says Kurt Bolick, a 28-year-old oilfield-services reporter in Houston. "I was afraid of myself, I was afraid of life, I was afraid of everything. I was afraid, period."
Researchers who have studied cocaine's effect on the brain believe it interferes with normal biochemical agents that control the desire for food, sex and sleep. Given a choice between food and cocaine in laboratory experiments, monkeys will become hooked on cocaine and take it until they starve to death. Humans become almost as manic. "You don't even see it coming," says Ken, a 33-year-old construction worker from the east side of Cleveland who began snorting cocaine with his wife in 1982. "We didn't think we were addicted. But once you get into it, it's got you. You don't even have a choice. I became a workaholic, a superman, staying up four or five days at a time." He also began beating his wife and blowing his entire paycheck; when he tried to quit, his wife accused him of ruining their marriage by going straight.
Since crack is a relatively new phenomenon (it was first imported from the Bahamas around 1983), some parts of the country have remained fairly unscathed. Yet in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, crack is already out of control. In an effort to at least cut down the tools of the trade, New York police last month seized 45,000 crack pipes (some of them labeled I LOVE NEW YORK). But in some New York neighborhoods, crack dealers are so cocky that they waltz down the street patting children on the head and greeting store owners by their first names, "like they're running for mayor," says Sergeant Kevin Kilcullen, superintendent of the 24th Precinct narcotics division. "Sometimes they see us driving down the streets and wave to us and say, 'Hi, officer!' It's disgusting."
Crack is an "equal-opportunity addiction," says Kilcullen. Crack is as easy to come by on Wall Street as it is in Harlem, and teenagers drive into the city from their parents' suburban homes to stand in line next to yuppies who are furtively handing over $100 bills for crack vials.
Beyond the personal tragedy and waste is the cost to society. As drugs have moved out of the ghetto and into the workplace, as bus drivers and lawyers and assembly-line workers get hooked, innocent consumers are put at risk. The cost to employers from drug abuse -- from lost productivity, absenteeism and higher accident rates -- is estimated at about $33 billion by the government. At a time when America is losing foreign markets to nations that can outproduce the U.S., the economy itself stands to suffer.
Crime is directly fueled by drug abuse. "I believe the crime problem in America today is the drug problem," declares New York City Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward. The sheer dollar volume of narcotics traffic is immense, estimated at anywhere from $27 billion to $110 billion a year. In a study released this year of the link between drugs and street crime in New York and Washington, 56% of suspects tested were using drugs at the time of arrest. In Florida, the burglary rate is up 30% so far this year; cocaine arrests are up 80%.
Great as it is, however, the social cost of drugs has to be seen in a broader context. While it is true that the number of cocaine-related deaths has nearly tripled since 1981, more people (570) died from appendicitis last year than from cocaine abuse (563). The death toll from cocaine is minute compared with the number of fatalities attributed in 1980 to alcohol (98,186) and tobacco (some 300,000 annually). While the health cost of drug abuse was estimated by one National Center for Health Statistics study at $59.7 billion in 1983, the medical bill for alcohol abuse was $116.7 billion. "There is no question that alcoholism in terms of social cost remains our No. 1 problem. We can't lose sight of that because of our emphasis on drugs," says the NIDA's Schuster.
"This is a drug society. We have prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs and drugs you can buy in the grocery store," says Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, a psychopharmacologist at UCLA. "We have to understand that the drive to intoxication is irrepressible, unstoppable. It functions almost like hunger and sex. Our species has always gotten high on something, long before we were fully civilized primates."
History offers ample evidence. Ritual opium use has been traced back to Greece and Cyprus as early as 2000 B.C. The ancient Aztecs took ololiuqui (similar to LSD), peyote, marijuana and other mind benders. In the Middle Ages, witches rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments.
The fortunes of early New World merchants were amassed by trading opium and rum (as well as slaves). George Washington, historians believe, probably used hemp (marijuana) to ease his dental pains. President Ulysses Grant took cocaine in his last years while writing his memoirs, on the advice of his publisher Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
After the Civil War, opium use was widely tolerated in the U.S. and even extolled by some leading thinkers. Under the influence of opium, wrote Dr. George Wood, the president of the American Philosophical Society, in 1868, "the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity." Doctors began prescribing opium- based concoctions for every malady from headache to skin rash. Respectable Victorian ladies calmed their babies with narcotic potions, such as Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup and Hooper's Anodyne, the Infant's Friend. Heroin, a morphine derivative, was sold legally at the turn of the century in drugstores and by mail-order catalogs and traveling salesmen.
Cocaine first became popular in America in the late 19th century. Parke- Davis, the U.S. pharmaceutical company, sold at least 15 products with cocaine, including cigarettes, cheroots, and coca skin salve and face powder. At the time an estimated 1 in 400 Americans used opiates regularly.
But as drug abuse and addiction abounded, the inevitable backlash set in, with a decidedly racist and xenophobic tinge. A 1910 federal survey reported that "cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes in the South and other sections of the country." Southern sheriffs believed cocaine even rendered blacks impervious to .32-cal. bullets (as a result many police departments switched to .38-cal.). Chinese immigrants were blamed for importing the opium-smoking habit to the U.S. "If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope," concluded the blue-ribbon citizens' panel, the Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit, in 1903, "we can get along without him." Despite the opposition of U.S. drug companies, the government began to crack down. Many states and Congress passed laws regulating the sale and use of cocaine and opiates; the U.S. banned the import ^ of opium in 1909. By the 1920s, public revulsion against drugs verged on the hysterical. "Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy," declared Antidrug Crusader Richmond Hobson in a national radio address in 1928.
So ended the first drug crisis in the U.S. In less than a generation, public attitudes had been transformed. Once widely regarded as a harmless cure-all, cocaine "had become in the American mind the most hated, feared and loathed drug," says Dr. David Musto of Yale, a leading authority on the history of drugs and society.
The backlash drove coke and opium underground. Cocaine was the narcotic of choice among some jazz-band musicians and avant-garde actors and artists, but "decent" Americans steered clear. It was Prohibition, after all, and most Americans in the years after World War I were too busy finding bootleg gin to think about more exotic intoxicants. Marijuana began arriving in large quantities in the 1920s and '30s, smoked by Mexican immigrants who came North looking for jobs. Pot, too, was regarded with horror. One 1936 propaganda film called Reefer Madness warned the nation's youth that smoking the "killer weed" was a direct road to hell, suicide or at least insanity.
Drugs stayed on the fringes of society throughout the '50s, but Beat Generation artists began enhancing their perceptions with pot and later with more mind-bending hallucinogens. LSD's hallucinogenic qualities were discovered by a chemist who accidentally swallowed a dose in 1943. By the early '60s, an obscure Harvard lecturer named Timothy Leary began feeding his students LSD and advising them to "turn on, tune in, drop out." Fired by Harvard, he promptly became a counterculture deity.
The baby-boom generation offered the drug-culture priests a slew of ready disciples. "By 1960 you had a whole generation who knew nothing about drugs, and what little they did know came from people who didn't know anything about drugs either," says Historian Musto. "When people found out that marijuana didn't drive you wild and mad, the Government lost what little credibility it had."
In the age of the youth rebellion, the fact that parents were shocked by drugs was all the more reason for children to take them. Hollywood and Broadway, ever sensitive to changing mores, romanticized the drug culture with pot-smoking antiheroes in Easy Rider (1969) and let-it-all-hang-out hippies in Hair (1968). "In the 1960s the baby boomers got fooled into thinking, just like the people in the 1890s, that you could use drugs recreationally and not get addicted to them," says the National Cocaine Hotline's Washton. "Marijuana had a meaning beyond just getting high. It was the source of shared identity among people who had a common point of view, notably that their parents were stupid, that Government was immoral, and that the war in Viet Nam was wrong."
Slowly the dark side emerged. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the communal temple of flower power, became a seedy slum of strung-out addicts. Heroin sent urban crime soaring as addicts stole to sustain their habits. For many college students, LSD became a bad trip.
Even so, illicit drug use had become so deeply entrenched that it continued to permeate all levels of society, particularly the youth culture. While still illegal, drug use became socially acceptable in many quarters. Pot was smoked as openly as tobacco in some city parks and on street corners, while police looked the other way. Newly popular man-made chemicals like phencyclidine, better known as angel dust or PCP, drove users into violent frenzies, making the myth of wild-eyed drug fiends, which had been scoffed at by '60s college students, a horrifying reality.
The mid-'70s marked the second coming of cocaine. It was the perfect drug for the Me generation. "The new morality of young America is success, the high- performance ethic," says University of Massachusetts Professor Ralph Whitehead. "Pot bred passivity. On alcohol you can't perform well. You smell. People can tell when you've been drinking. But cocaine fits the new value system. It feeds it and confounds it. Young adults walk a tight line between high performance and self-indulgence, and cocaine puts the two together."
In show business and in chic society, dinner guests were offered crisp white lines of cocaine along with their demitasse. Cute silver spoons began to adorn the jewelry of hip, rich women. Coke became a workplace pick-me-up, like coffee, only perkier. Says Dr. Wesley Westman, chief of the alcohol- and drug- dependency center at the Veterans Administration hospital in Miami: "Cocaine is the drug of choice by people who are into the American dream -- I love my job, I am successful, except that they don't and they're not."
The U.S. may finally be trying to kick its habit, but other countries around the world are just getting hooked. Like blue jeans and rock 'n' roll, America's drug culture has been exported to European and Asian youth. Although statistics are hard to come by, drug use seems to be expanding worldwide, especially in the countries that export drugs to the U.S.
When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran drove the Asian-crescent drug trade through Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts there went from virtually nil in 1980 to some 650,000 abusers today. (The U.S.S.R. is not unscathed by the global epidemic; Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan are said to trade their weapons for opium and hashish.)
On the other side of the world, along the spine of the Andes in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, both the lower and middle classes have begun smoking coca paste, a potent and addictive form of cocaine that costs only pennies a cigarette. "These countries have never had a problem like this before," says Manuel Gallardo, chief of the Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters. "Their people are getting strung out right and left from all social classes, and the governments don't know what to do." Drug dealers are so high-handed in Colombia that last week they gunned down Carlos Luna, the security chief of Avianca Airlines, because he had the temerity to bust a 440-lb. shipment of coke hidden in the tires of a 747 jetliner bound for Miami. U.S. officials are concerned that drugs may provoke enough social unrest to lead to civil war and revolution. In Mexico official corruption tied to drug dealing threatens to destabilize America's southern neighbor.
Although drug abuse is not a problem unique to the U.S., the nation's cultural values and attitudes make it unlikely that the problem will ever be erased by even the most concerted Government crusade. The freedom inherent in American society assures that people will always be able, and often willing, to pursue their desired indulgences, however illicit. A society filled with wealth and the ability to consume, along with failure and despair, provides a ripe market for the world's drug supply, which will always exist as long as there is the demand for it. Experts point to other deep-seated causes that produce a continued national craving for drugs: lack of community, disintegration of the family, moral laxity, the relentless pressure to perform in a fast-paced society. "The real remedies to the problem don't satisfy Americans' urge for a quick fix," says Ted Galen Carpenter of the CATO Institute, a Washington think tank. "It's a long, laborious process." Merely preaching about the evils of dope is no more likely to purify the school- yard than a Sunday sermon about fallen women is likely to make the congregation chaste. Actually, moralizing often makes decadence more alluring. While NBC vigorously protests that only the bad guys take dope on Miami Vice and they come to an unseemly end, public polls show that many people still feel such shows glamourize drug use. Fast clothes and cars may be the toys of villains, but they are seductive nonetheless. In Oakland two weeks ago, many were shocked when the body of a notorious local drug lord, Felix Mitchell, was carried by a gold-and-black hearse, drawn by two bay horses, followed by a long line of Rolls-Royces and luxury cars. Inside the Baptist church where Mitchell lay in his bronze coffin with glittering rings on his fingers, a sound track played Sade's pop hit, Smooth Operator. Mitchell, 32, had been stabbed to death in Leavenworth penitentiary while serving a life sentence for drug-trafficking conspiracy. But in the faces of young people who lined the funeral route were expressions of awe.
In the wild swings of public attitudes toward drug use, it is useful to look to the way that alcohol abusers have learned to regard their addiction. They understand that the craving never really disappears; it is merely denied. An alcoholic can stay sober for years, yet he still says, because he knows it to be true, "I am an alcoholic." If the current revulsion against drug abuse does manage to banish dope back into the shadows, society could use a measure of the same honesty and self-awareness. "It seems we forget so easily," says NIDA's Schuster, "and so we have repetitions of these cycles of drug-abuse epidemics. It almost seems that every other generation has to re-establish the dangers of drugs."
Indeed, the flurry of activity and proposals in the past few months threatens to obscure the most basic fact about drug use in America: border patrols, police raids and even random urinalysis are unlikely to have a lasting impact as long as there remains a demand for drugs and a general social tolerance of their use. A true change can come only if Americans are willing to say clearly -- to their workmates and schoolmates, to their neighbors and friends, to their communities and to themselves -- that drug use is not acceptable. If that is, in fact, one result of the current frenzy over what has been a recurring crisis for successive generations of Americans, then even all the hype and excess may in retrospect be worthwhile.
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With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Los Angeles, John Moody/New York, Dick Thompson/Washington