Cocaine: Middle Class High

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Part of the allure of cocaine is the popular, but inaccurate, notion that it can make a male a keener achiever in bed. Says Lawrence Ross, director of a Marin County treatment center: "There is a tremendous premium on sexual performance for men. It is the one thing that people think they have to be good at." In fact, after sustained use cocaine can cause sexual dysfunction and impotence.

More profoundly, some observers of the American scene see an existential vacuum, a widespread sense that life has lost much of its meaning. Argues Philosopher Sidney Hook: "We have abandoned our old-fashioned values. We have given up our old gods. People want things to come easily, they no longer want to work hard, to suffer any pain, to feel any stress or anxiety." Since the turbulence of the 1960s, more and more Americans have come to feel that they have lost control over their lives. Finding Mom, God and apple pie less fulfilling, many have increasingly taken refuge in drugs, sex and disillusion.

"In a society that says drug taking is O.K.," suggests Rosenthal, "cocaine gives the user the illusion of being more in control. People feel stronger, smarter, faster, more able to cope with things. It's more than the pleasure principle." What these people tend to overlook, points out Charles Schuster, director of the Drug Abuse Research Center at the University of Chicago, is the tremendous psychological risk: "One of cocaine's biggest dangers is that it diverts people from normal pursuits; it can entrap and redirect people's activities into an almost exclusive preoccupation with the drug."

On the other hand, that may be what attracts some to it. As Christopher Lasch wrote in his 1978 book The Culture of Narcissism: "To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. It is the waning of the sense of historical time—in particular the erosion of any strong concern for posterity—that distinguishes the spiritual crisis of the '70s." This seems most distressingly true of the students and other young people among whom cocaine is spreading so rapidly—despite the fact that they are the ones who have the greatest need to believe in a future and to trust in a posterity.

There is little likelihood that the cocaine blizzard will soon abate. A drug habit born of a desire to escape the bad news in life is not likely to be discouraged by the bad news about the drug itself. And so middle class Americans continue to succumb to the powder's crystalline dazzle. Few are yet aware or willing to concede that at the very least, taking cocaine is dangerous to their psy chological health. It may be no easy task to reconvince them that good times are made, not sniffed.

—By Michael Demarest.

Reported by Jonathan Beaty, Steven Holmes and Jeff Melvoin, with U.S. bureaus