(3 of 13)
Police and prosecutors know that they have no great public mandate to wage a war on cocaine—a war they admit, realistically, they could not win. "They never got rid of pot," says René, 29, a Western publishing executive, "and they won't make a dent in cocaine. There's no stigma." Cocaine retains its less and less valid cachet as the plaything of athletes, entertainers and other starry achievers. Says DEA Agent James Burke of Denver: "The mystique, the myths and the respectability are all working against us."
The mystique seems in part to derive from breaking the law. "The risk taking is luring them in," says Antoinette Helfrich, coordinator of the University of Colorado's busy coke-abuse clinic. Even when Steve, 30, a Miami land salesman, was arrested for possession and found himself in jail overnight, it was, like, you know, a real trip. "I was with vagrants, drunks and car thieves," he says. "It was unreal, bizarre, like The Twilight Zone. "The glamour of outlawry, with the ante upped considerably, is also an attraction for many dealers and even some smugglers. Says a DEA official in Florida: "Breaking the law may not be just incidental to the white Americans involved in dealing cocaine. It may be essential."
Moreover, from society's standpoint, cocaine has a special perniciousness. "It takes a disproportionately high toll," says Dr. William Pollin, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, "because it is largely used by people who are most likely to have an impact on their environment. Think of the neurosurgeon operating on your child, or the mechanic working on the 747 you are taking."
The symbolic effect is amplified, too, when industrious, influential citizens by the million become cocaine scofflaws. A computer programmer snorts with his pal the lawyer, who buys grams from her neighbor the contractor. The builder also sells ounces to the local junior college teacher and the restaurateur, and buys his pounds out of town from a full-time coke broker in Florida. "Getting coke is just a telephone call away," says Chuck, 34, a San Francisco insurance executive.
"It's like having the groceries delivered." It all seems cozy and clean, a kind of Tupperware criminality that can have as much to do with friendship and status seeking as with drug taking. But in fact the cocaine trade is dirty and dangerous. Middle-class users implicitly acquiesce in the scores of cocaine-related murders that take place annually in the U.S. Says Associate U.S. Attorney General Rudolph Giulani: "The regard for law and values deteriorates, because if you can't stop people from pumping poison into themselves, you can't do much of anything else as a society." If one untrivial law can be broken merrily and en masse, he and many others wonder, why not another and another?
"The coke market," ventures George Schiavone, a fashion photographer familiar with the cocaine scene in Miami, "is the same as the nuke-freeze market. You're not talking about just 'druggies.' You're talking about all walks of life." One former Oregon physician, disastrously addicted for five years, knows how the groovy group solidarity fades. "It