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But given the choice, most people would really prefer more bright piles of cocaine. "It doesn't seem to be a drug of moderation," says Schiavone, the Miami fashion photographer. Another Miamian, Eugene ("Mercury") Morris, the former Dolphins' football star who just began serving a 20-year term for dealing, says he was a free-baser and plain insatiable: " 'Enough' is never present in your reasoning. You've had enough when it's gone, and when it's gone you want some more."
Addiction and heroin have seemed almost exclusively coupled. Indeed, heroin's withdrawal pangs are physically terrible. Cocaine's are not. But according to people who have been dependent on both drugs, kicking cocaine can be tougher. "When they say it's not addictive, that's crap," insists Investment Banker Donald, who is struggling to beat his cocaine habit. "Just talking about it makes my sinuses clog up and my nose twitch." At Dr. Siegel's Los Angeles therapy sessions, deprived cocaine users, he says, sometimes "start crying for it, and get doubled over on the floor. It looks like a physical thing, but it isn't—it's psychological."
According to Psychiatrist Resnick's clinical studies of 430 users, compulsive cokeheads tend to be professionally successful. Yet beneath a bouncy, worldly facade, says Resnick, the typical abuser is a certifiable narcissist who has "an undeveloped sense of identity and a profound despair," and "an inability to express ... intense rage toward one or both parents." Rob, 26, a Connecticut native who has sold various drugs for a decade, including cocaine, has his own, hard-boiled theory of addicts. "They're the same kind of people who don't have self-control in other parts of their life," he says of those who go overboard on cocaine. "If they don't get messed up on coke, they'll get messed up on something else."
But cocaine's spell is by no means confined to the obviously troubled or the weak-willed. Free-basing in particular, says Harvard Psychiatry Professor Dr. Lester Grinspoon, "powerfully fastens itself on people." Elizabeth, 33, a Chicago hair stylist, had occasionally sniffed coke for a decade. In the fall of 1981, she tried free-basing and was soon spending whole days with her pipe. "Once I started that, all I wanted was more and more," she says, her voice still full of amazement at her fling. "That's what puzzles me. I'm the type of person, I don't let things get the best of me. Nothing. But I know I'm powerless with cocaine." Says Kevin McEneaney, senior vice president of New York's Phoenix House drug-treatment center: "We all think our personalities are well grounded and well formed, but it doesn't take a lot to tilt the psychological balance." Bensinger, the former DEA chief, has his own plausible criterion for measuring that tilt: "What will they do to get it again? That's how you tell what's addictive."
Some of them will steal. Nicky, 32, the son of a prominent Boston family, was in the midst of a third attempt to quit cocaine. One Sunday last December, he stole a cache of jewelry from his parents. In exchange for the $50,000 worth of