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."