Original Publication – New York Women December 1, 1989
It used to be so amusing and chichi, sort of – cocaine. Back in my salad (or were they caviar?) days fifteen years ago, when I covered rock stars for Newsweek, I thought it was funny when I discovered Sly Stone had an entire baggie filled with coke stuffed inside his cowboy boot. “Is my nose clean?” he asked over and over one night as his limo stopped in front of the Carlyle. Sly a, a great pop-music innovator who stole the show at Woodstock aptly singing, “I want to take you higher,” was not around for last summer’s myriad twentieth-anniversary commemorations of that event. The last time I heard about him, he had been arrested in Florida for cocaine possession and jailed. I can’t recall whether he’s since found Jesus or not. Yet in 1974 when Sly got married in front of 23,000 adoring fans at Madison Square Garden, Halston did the wedding garb and Andy Warhol sat cross-legged backstage in the middle of a circle of demi-celebs snorting to celebrate. Several of them were later destroyed by the drug. Sly himself was well on his way.
In those days there was also an after-hours jazz club on Columbus Avenue up in the Eighties, where it was so-o-o exciting – you got searched for weapons before entering, there was a Haitian voodoo altar behind the bar, and sometimes, around 6:00 A.M., musicians would openly snort about two ounces of the stuff spooned into a dollar bill folded lengthwise. Whenever I bumped into him, John Belushi would always plead to be taken there – one night he even ran behind the car we had driven off in, screaming, “Take me to the coke bar!” Ha, ha, ha. Naughty, naughty.
In the late Seventies, a number of experts were still maintaining that cocaine was not physically addictive. I certainly recall arguing with the Newsweek medical researcher, and even the medical writer, in 1976, who were adamant that research from two Harvard professors showing that cocaine was not like alcohol – you could give it up voluntarily – was correct. My experience covering the world of show biz begged to differ.
I have always thought that coke abusers were far more sinister and frightening than either drunks or spaced-out potheads. Even on the most superficial level of public behavior, drunks usually become unruly or loud over time – it takes a couple of hours. Potheads you basically don’t talk to, if you get what I mean, man. Coke users, on the other hand, are jolting. Here you are having a perfectly nice dinner; then someone gets up to go to the bathroom and comes back five minutes later, opinionated, obnoxious, arrogant and excited or even completely paranoid. Then they start drinking to come down. If the craving for the drug is too intense, they might even try filching your wallet.
Worst of all is that cocaine is a drug of denial. “I just put a Q-tip up my nose, it went through to the other side and it’s bleeding. Do you think I have a problem?” a woman asked a counselor at the National Cocaine Helpline, associated with Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, several years ago when I was doing a story there. At that point, in 1984, the average female caller was white, college-educated and earning over $25,000 a year. It was nearly impossible to believe that these women would actually be so stupid as to keep doing coke if they were pregnant. Nobody had much of a clue what coke use did to a fetus, or that within a few years we would be witnessing the birth of what is being termed an entire “bio-underclass” of babies – their emotional and cognitive development arrested in the womb, their chances for a normal life cut off even before they are born, their mothers not available to them either mentally or physically all because the mothers used cocaine in one of its forms.
Now there’s a war on drugs, screaming headlines and body counts at every turn. Now coke is perceived to be a problem, not so much among the glitzy and glamourous, where it began to be used first, but among the poor, to whom it has filtered down with, unfortunately, a terrible hangover – much of the aura of its soigné, rich, dangerous thrill is still intact. In an environment where the few available jobs for young black males seems to be at minimum wage, the vast underground economy of coke is the great teaching ground of capitalism. When I’m on the shuttle these days between New York and Washington, D.C., I usually see a couple of very young kids sporting pounds of solid gold jewelry, with huge gold pendants engraved with their nicknames hanging from their necks. I don’t think they are on their way to Washington to lobby Congress for the Clean Air Act. It’s still coke and gold, ermine and pearls, rich, rich, rich.
Yet it’s ridiculous to assume that coke is solely the province of the poor. The latest research suggest that crack is moving up the social ladder, being consumed increasingly by the same people who supposedly gave up snorting cocaine just a few years ago. “In the past two years there has been a 60 percent increase in income of the average user and a 100 percent jump in use among college educated callers,” states a recent report prepared by Fair Oaks Hospital, based on 500 consecutive calls to the coke helpline. The report goes on to say that between 1985 and 1987 “the typical user was uneducated with an income below $25,000. There has been a sharp turnaround, however, suggesting that crack has succeeded in overcoming its inner city, poverty image and entered suburban and rural America.”
One could argue that coke itself never really left the middle class. As a recent article in The Nation pointed out, it’s consistently consumed, imported and its profits laundered by male Caucasians, including “friends of Pete Rose (three of whom are doing time for coke deals) and friends of Oliver North (one of whom played a leading role in a scheme to import $10 million worth of cocaine into Florida).” Just pick your neighborhood or industry: Wall Street, Seventh Avenue, Madison Avenue, Soho, Tribeca. Coke power is still pervasive in this city, and a dollop packs a wallop of social cachet. Given the way crack is destroying the life of our cities, there is still far too much tolerance of “casual” cocaine use among the middle class, people who have a lot more choice about what to do with their lives than those in the urban ghettos. How many people show the same disapproval towards coke users as they do toward those who still smoke cigarettes, wear furs or – shudder – eat read meat.
A friend of mine just told me how her husband was negotiating for a corporate takeover worth hundreds of millions, and the principal of one side kept leaving the room and coming back with drops of blood seeping out of his nostrils. No one said a word. A commodities trader I met recently, who grew up in Brazil, said he was shocked upon moving to New York to see how much coke is available at parties he attends. What keeps the young and restless occupied with being slaves of New York, anyway?
I probably have a more visceral reaction to coke use now because when I was in my early twenties, I spent two years of my life in Medellín, Colombia, before cocaine exploded in that beautiful and once-civilized city, and my closest friend there – who went on to become a high-ranking politician – has been kidnapped for a year now. His family has not heard anything of him for more than five months. No one knows if he is dead or alive, if he’s being held by the drug mafiosi or by leftist guerrillas. In any case, a huge ransom has been demanded, and his wife and four children bravely try to go on with their lives. One way or another, cocaine is responsible for his disappearance as well as for the shattering of democratic institutions in Colombia.
In 1982 I covered the inauguration of the former president of Colombia Belisario Betancur. Back then the Colombians themselves had not yet become consumers, their poor were not ravaged by bazuco (their form of crack, even more deadly than ours), their institutions were not so infiltrated with drug money, most of which comes directly from us. “The cultivation of drugs in Colombia would never have become so successful if we didn’t have such excellent clients as the United States,” Betancur told me. (After all, the U.S. is 6 percent of the world’s population, and we consume 60 percent of the world’s cocaine.) “You are an excellent market. Why doesn’t your country move against the South Florida bankers who keep our drug industry afloat?” That was 1982. The same questions are relevant today, as are a few more that ought to be posed to U.S. corporations who are supplying the Colombian drug lords. I was fascinated, for example, to read several months ago in an article on Medellín in Rolling Stone that the scion of a reputed godfather couldn’t meet the reporter there as planned. He had to stay in Bogotá to take delivery of a $2 million Bell helicopter, which I’m sure wasn’t going to be used to spray coffee beans.
“Oh, come on. I don’t know anybody who does coke anymore,” is what I hear from everyone. Well, maybe you’re lucky. But if the help line’s statistics are correct, that’s going to change pretty soon. So, let’s not try to kid ourselves that casual coke use has nothing to do with the one out of forty-seven babies (a conservative estimate) being born addicted to cocaine in New York City, or with the dead on the streets in our nation’s capital, or with the loss of some of our great talents. We are such excellent clients. Go ahead, make a distinction if you want to, split weeds: Certainly President Bush and drug czar William Bennet should be putting a lot more emphasis on prosecuting those bankers and businessman who drive the cocaine market. And it’s easy enough to argue that the administration is doomed to failure in its war on the casual drug user in this country. But I agree with the current president of Colombia, Virgilio Barco, and with President Bush: Every time you use coke or allow it to be used around you, you are putting money into the hands of murderers.
This article is typed from the original material. Please excuse any errors that have escaped final proofreading.
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