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"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."