(5 of 13)
The euphoric effects of cocaine are well known. Heroin kills more of its users, but it acquired a uniquely dark stigma partly because of the backward quality of the opiate high: blissfully heedless, droopy, tuned out, lazy beyond words. Stimulant cocaine, however, is far more in tune with the swaggering mood of a country of nonstop gogetters. Users tend to have the perfect illusion, for 20 or 30 minutes, that they are smarter, sexier and more competent, radiant, vigilant, masterful, better: it promotes a kind of fascism of the self. (Indeed, Hermann Goring, a morphine user, is rumored to have used cocaine as well.)
A room full of cokeheads, bristling with that hard, artificial arrogance, can be an unsettling place. "With cocaine," says Vertell Pendleton, a Chicago drug-abuse counselor and former user, "you're indestructible, perfect, the giant of your dreams." Donald, 42, a Philadelphia-born investment banker, lost his job, squandered his inheritance, and developed a hole in the septum of his nose. Nevertheless, he says, "I felt powerful, in control. Cocaine is ego food. It feeds the ego like nothing I've ever seen in my life." Tony, the owner of a Denver tire-repair shop, used four grams a day. Says he: "I wanted to feel like a kingpin, the life of the party. Coke gave me all of this. You get to feeling you're bulletproof." (Bulletproof Tony, arrested for selling more than half a pound to an undercover cop, is on probation and paying back the Government its undercover purchase money.)
By definition, people addicted to cocaine are out of control. They are probably on or over the edge of ruin. So it is a mean, symmetrical irony that cocaine's effect is to mimic will and emotional focus, permitting the user to feel he is blessed with precisely the virtues he lacks. Explains Illinois' Kirkpatrick: "The cocaine high is the way you would feel if you did something with your life. You think, 'For the first time in a long time, I've really got myself together.' "
Enthusiasts of the drug commonly use images of sex to describe its short-lived supercharge. Says the former Oregon M.D.: "It was so intense, so sexual. In fact, it beats sex all to hell." Among dabblers, cocaine can be a powerful, sharp-edged aphrodisiac. But for most overusers, love-making tends finally to pall.
It is the same with monkeys. In experiments at U.C.L.A. and elsewhere in which apes were allowed large portions of cocaine, they were found to prefer the drug to food or sexual partners, and would willingly suffer severe electric shocks in exchange for large doses. "It is the most rewarding and reinforcing drug for a primate," says U.C.L.A. Psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel. "It doesn't matter whether he has a tail or a $100,000 income. Primates like cocaine."
If cocaine merely produced a false sense of personal supremacy, and that was that, it would be less menacing. But the "crash" from coke, the letdown when the drug wears off and heady illusions disappear, is grim. To ward off melancholy and the jitters after the supply runs out, many users get drunk or take sedatives like Quaaludes. Or worse. "The drug that works best to cut the crash," says