Cocaine: Middle Class High

(9 of 11)

The drug trade has flooded the southern Florida criminal justice system with more offenders than it can handle. "Some officers are coming to the point of being totally frustrated with the court system," says Lieut. Lamont. "Even for large amounts of cocaine, we're seeing a revolving-door kind of system where there's no fine, no sentence, no slap on the wrist." Lamont and other honest policemen are aware that some fellow officers, not to mention high-standing community members, may be making big money from cocaine. The scenario of a defense attorney being paid off in cocaine and a judge being a dealer? Lamont nods. "The corruptibility factor is there. The money is there to be made."

Smuggling, murder, corruption, vast sums of money—all are deeply corrosive byproducts of the cocaining of America. So too are the physical shocks, the attrition of nerves, of health, of whole years of potentially productive life. Part of the underground economy of cocaine must be calculated in vast negative numbers: labor undone, careers sidetracked, money diverted from worthy projects.

But what of the purely social impact, especially among those millions of good people who would never remotely think of themselves as criminals, even though they are regularly flouting the law and sending out signals to other segments of society that it is all right to do so? They would never consider themselves addicts either, even though they devoutly believe in getting high for a little extra edge, for relief, for fun. What does their persistent and growing use of coke say about them?

Americans inhabit a society in which they are conditioned from infancy to believe there is a pill for every ill: what one expert calls "jet-age pharmacology." By contrast, Winston Churchill is credited with the observation that "most of the world's work is done by people who do not feel very well." In the U.S. particularly, says Psychiatrist Mitchell Rosenthal, "people believe that you don't have to feel uncomfortable if you have the right doctor, the right drug connection, the right pusher. We have lost touch with the fundamental notion that people can operate not always feeling terribly well. Taking cocaine is not the answer. In the end it leaves you psychologically bankrupt."

Quite apart from the Dr. Feelgood syndrome, some observers point to the intense competitiveness of American life as a major motivation for drug use. Says English-born Author Christopher Isherwood (Berlin Stories), who lives in Santa Monica, Calif.: "Americans are awfully rattled about their jobs. Can they deliver properly, can they do it? Life is a nasty, rough game, always was. Some people can't face it without some sort of backup." Rajendra Misra, Indian-born executive director of a community health center in East Cleveland, Ohio, maintains: "Right from childhood in this country there is pressure for accomplishment. Every time we do something, we are made aware of the fact that either we are achieving or we are failing. There's nothing in between."