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The spread of cocaine has continued even though police and, more significantly, some 2,500 federal drug agents have mobilized to cut into the booming trade. Last year the DEA—and the FBI, which for the first time has been assigned to drug cases—arrested 4,500 people and seized 12,500 lbs. of nearly pure cocaine. This record take, which in diluted form might bring around $3.5 billion retail, was larger than the amounts seized during 1980 and 1981 combined. It included the largest single seizure (3,236 lbs. in Miami) in history. New federal antidrug task forces, forming in a dozen cities, will all be in place by late summer. Last week the Houston-based task force made the $127.5 million program's first bust: most of a 30-member ring, operating mainly out of New Orleans, were rounded up and charged with smuggling 550 lbs. of cocaine.
But for every pound authorities grab, another six sift out into the marketplace, an estimated 45 tons a year. Cocaine has become a $25 billion business, about three times as big as the recording and movie industries put together. (The manufacture of cocaine paraphernalia is a small industry in itself: users spend millions of dollars a year on coke spoons, free-base pipes and extraction kits, digital gram scales and the like.) Selling coke is, in the words of one U.S. drug official, "the most lucrative of all underworld ventures."
Consumers are plunging nose first into coke just when medical studies are reporting conclusions that should scare off new users and old. Until recently, when speaking of cocaine dependence, no one dared call it addiction: cocaine's withdrawal symptoms are not physically wrenching, as with heroin and alcohol. Nonetheless, says Dr. David Smith, director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, "addiction is compulsion, loss of control and continued use in spite of the consequences. Cocaine is very addicting." What is more, and a fact many social snorters refuse to believe, coke can kill its users, and not just those who inject and free-base.
Nor is cocaine simply a public health concern. Coke users increasingly indulge their habit in casual defiance of the law. The very possession of cocaine is illegal in every state and a felony in 33. Possible sentences range widely, from a $3,000 fine in Delaware or 90 days in jail in West Virginia to life in prison in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York and Texas; federal law provides for up to a year in prison. The penalties for dealers are, of course, stiffer; they can get a life sentence in twelve states and up to 15 years if convicted on federal charges.
For the coke subculture and its sympathizers, the laws against this latest drug of choice are regarded as little more than a nuisance, Prohibition redux. "I wasn't running out and killing or robbing people," says Margaret,* 30, a saleswoman for a clothing manufacturer who for two years sold small amounts of coke to support her habit. "I assumed the law-enforcement people had something better to do with their time than to come into my house and arrest me." Margaret, never caught, was right about police priorities: overburdened big-city forces (and prosecutors and courts) are more concerned,