Cocaine: Middle Class High

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Coke is found on the job as well as off. A busy Los Angeles lawyer says he uses "a lot" of it "because it helps drive me through a night's work, through a lot of grinding case preparation." Says a counselor at an upper-crust prep school in Massachusetts: "I'd say 10% to 15% of the kids here use cocaine with some regularity." A sun-bleached woman student at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus confesses: "I took all my finals coked out last semester, and I heard a lot of sniffing in the exam room."

A woman who worked as a maid at condominiums in Aspen, Colo., says, "The people used to leave a little cocaine on the table as a tip." Aspen, in fact, is known in faster circles as Toot City because it is so pervaded by coke. In another Colorado mountain resort, Telluride, six prominent citizens, including a former councilwoman, were charged last month with trafficking in cocaine. Says Mark Pautler, director of the police task force that made the arrests: "We have a strong feeling that a lot of people in Telluride knew what was going on but were looking the other way. Coke appears to have been a very acceptable form of recreation."

In a volatile "pass-along" market, almost anybody who buys coke can also be a dealer, "cutting" or adulterating his supply and then selling a portion at a tidy profit. A number of young professional people add $10,000 to $20,000 to their annual incomes—tax free—by dealing coke. Steve, a young California lawyer who sold marijuana to put himself through law school, now has a small, discreet cocaine business. Says he: "I started selling some to close friends because I couldn't afford to buy it for my wife and myself. We found a way to beat inflation." In fact most traffickers like Steve are engaged in a game that resembles the chain letter or pyramid schemes.

In some circles coke is a barter item, readily accepted for dental work, as an accountant's fee or in exchange for a discount on a new car. "I have one friend who got stuck with staggering alimony payments," says Jim Groth, a Southern California newspaper editor. "He started dealing a little, and now he is paying off his wife in toot, and everybody is happy."

Many large-scale dealers have women who are known by them as "coke whores." Like rock groupies, they hang around in the expectation of a heart-thumping jolt. Says a juvenile court judge in California: "To the kids here, cocaine means as much in terms of social approval as a car did when we were kids. If a boy produces some coke on a date, it is just expected that the girl is going to put out."