Cocaine: Middle Class High

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Coke paraphernalia are openly displayed in "head shops" such as Washington's Pleasure Chest and Lady Snow's in Hollywood. Artifacts include gleaming jade cutting stones, gold razor blades to chop the coke crystals and tiny brown bottles for sniffing (an antique gold Tiffany snuff bottle capable of holding two grams sold for $28,000 in Beverly Hills last year to an Iranian). Items like silver and gold sniffing spoons are flaunted on chains around the users' necks. The process of spreading the coke on a table in "lines" for sniffing is as elaborate and careful as a Japanese tea ceremony—an affectation hilariously burlesqued in the 1977 film Annie Hall when Woody Allen sneezed at the wrong moment and blew away hundreds of dollars' worth of the precious powder.

In Snowblind, a 1976 study of cocaine dealing that has become something of a cult book, Robert Sabbag wrote: "Cocaine, like motorcycles, machine guns and White House politics, is, among many things, a virility substitute. Its mere possession imparts status—cocaine equals money, and money equals power. And, as if in mute imitation of its symbolism, cocaine's presence in the blood, like no other drug, accounts for a feeling of confidence that is rare in the behavioral sink of post-industrial America."

The pleasure is the problem.

A cocaine high is an intensely vivid, sensation-enhancing experience—though there is no evidence, as is often claimed, that it is aphrodisiacal. For many users, it goes beyond the Freudian euphoria. Says a Manhattan ballerina: "It makes you shiver in tune with the raw, volcanic energy of New York. It bleeds your sense till you see the city as an epileptic rainbow, trembling at the speed of light." Test programs at U.C.L.A. have shown that lab monkeys will forgo both food and sex in favor of an injection of a cocaine solution.

But even casual sniffing can lead to more potent and potentially damaging ways of using cocaine and other drugs. Many cokeheads take sedative pills like methaqualone, brand-named Quaaludes (tons of which are illegally imported from Colombia) to calm down after their high and take the edge off their yearning for more coke.

A few smoke marijuana for the same purpose, or mix their C with heroin in a process called "speedballing" or "boy-girl." This produces a tug-of-war in which the exhilaration of coke is undercut by the heroin. As one former user describes the sensation, "It's like taking an elevator at 100 m.p.h. to the top of the Empire State Building and then someone cuts the cable." A few middle class users who dabble with heroin in conjunction with cocaine smoke it rather than inject it in their veins like the ghetto kid. This, they believe, prevents addiction. Not so. Heroin, however used, is a fiercely addictive drug, and treatment centers are receiving an influx of well-dressed, well-to-do men and women who have sorely underestimated it. In Manhattan alone, dozens of such people can be seen early each morning standing in line at the clinic of Greenwich House West, where they are administered methadone in an attempt to wean them from heroin.