Cocaine: Middle Class High

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This pattern can lead to a psychological dependence whose effects are not all that different from addiction. Moreover, there is growing clinical evidence that when coke is taken in the most potent and dangerous forms—injected in solution, or chemically converted and smoked in the process called freebasing—it may indeed become addictive.

Of all drugs in the U.S., cocaine is now the biggest producer of illicit in come. Some 40 metric tons of it will be shipped into the country this year. As coke experts like to point out, if all the international dealers who supply the drug to the U.S. market—not even including the retailers—were to form a single corporation, it would probably rank seventh on the FORTUNE 500 list, between Ford Motor Co. ($37 billion in revenue) and Gulf Oil Corp. ($26.5 billion). Last year street sales of cocaine, by far the most expensive drug on the market, reached an estimated $30 billion in the U.S. (Sales of marijuana, the runner-up and still the most widely used illicit drug, amounted to some $24 billion.)

The most conservative researchers estimate that 10 million Americans now use coke with some regularity, and another 5 million have probably experimented with it. (Other estimates double that figure.) According to surveys by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about 20% of young adults (18 to 25 years old) used cocaine in 1979, twice the number reported in NIDA'S 1977 survey. Another study, by a team of Harvard Medical School researchers, has traced an "astonishing" increase in cocaine use by college students. A 1979 report from the Drug Enforcement Administration has the ring of prophecy: "If present trends go unchecked, a vast new youth market for the substance [cocaine] could be opened. High cost, rather than restricted availability, will remain the principal deterrent to regular use among less affluent persons."

And it is all-pervasive. Says Peter Bensinger, outgoing administrator of the DEA: "We see coke sales in suburbs, in recreational centers and in national parks. It is an unrecognized tornado." Nor does this overstate the case. A special investigative team of TIME correspondents found that in Vienna, Ga., or Venice, Calif., a gram of coke was about as hard to find as a six-pack of Bud. Whether in a suburban high school outside Los Angeles, on Wall Street or Madison Avenue or in the interstices of ostensibly "straight" Middle America, $100 will rapidly summon up a gram of what goes for cocaine.

At a restaurant north of Boston, cooks celebrate the last day of their work week as Coke Day, sniffing the white stuff from their first order to their last, often joined by dishwashers, busboys and waitresses, who come by for an occasional hit. A more impatient group in Pasadena, Calif.—a cross section of professionals in their 20s and 30s—celebrates TGIW (Thank God It's Wednesday), gathering at the home of a local car dealer for a coke session at cocktail time.