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Joey, 36, a loader at a truck terminal in Brooklyn, got his supply from a man wearing a ski mask at a bustling "drug market" five minutes from work. "I'd go during my breaks and at lunch, picking up four to eight nickel [$5] bags at a time," he says. "If it was payday, I could run through my whole check [$515]." Joey, now in a drug-abuse treatment program, says he is "trying to find a place where there is no dope."
Such virgin territory may not exist. At a pair of Houston carpet stores, the former manager says that the owners, "two family men in three-piece suits," gave cocaine to employees who would work 18-hour shifts. Cocaine, in fact, is dangerously well suited to sales jobs. "You can do a lot of selling, a lot of talking when you're on cocaine," says Dana, 28, a South Florida man who would snort as much as seven grams (about a quarter of an ounce) a day while selling — and to finance his habit, stealing — building materials. "I didn't really like the job," he says. "Coke accounted for a lot of my motivation." Margaret guesses that at least a third of her fellow fashion-industry salespeople are regular users.
"It's going bananas all through town," says Denver Police Sergeant Don De Novellis, who directs the department's major coke cases. "It's everywhere. It's like cigarette machines in a bar." That seems a bit hyperbolic. But in North Beach, a funky neighborhood in San Francisco, the banks' "electronic teller" machines, which will dispense no more than $200 daily to each customer, attract long lines just before midnight every Saturday. "I'll bet you," says Haight-Ash-bury's Dr. Smith, "that 90% of them are taking out their next day's money to buy some coke."
At street prices that range from $ 100 to $ 150 a gram, which is about a teaspoonful, enough to keep two people well stoked for a few hours, cocaine is as pricey as it is evanescent. And for many people, conspicuous consumption is the point. Says a drug counselor in Houston: "The very expense makes people think they're special." Even the cocaine high seems unattractively linked to cash. "It's the drug for the all-American middle class," says Chuck, the insurance executive, who for 18 months spent nearly a third of his $35,000 salary on coke. "It makes you feel like you can make lots of money."
The people lined up at money machines are not all addicted wretches, of course. Most cocaine users do not get hooked. Says New York Psychiatrist Richard Resnick: "Just as with alcohol, there are those who can use coke on occasion and have no problems, and there are cocaholics." Statutes cannot recognize such a distinction (although Delaware's try, with lesser penalties for addicted dealers), nor should smug cocaine apologists be permitted to bandy the distinction about as a shield. But it is necessary to an understanding of just how such a dangerous drug could become so pervasive, even routine. "The only way to cut down the demand for coke," says a senior DEA agent in the South, "is to prove what the effects are and