Choose Your Poison

In New York City's Spanish Harlem, the highs come cheap. To create a "blunt," teenagers slice open a cigar and mix the tobacco with marijuana. To enhance the hit, they fashion "B-40s" by dipping the cigar in malt liquor. In Atlanta, police observed 100 teenagers and young adults at a rave party in an abandoned house -- the rage among middle-class youths everywhere with money to burn -- and their rich assortment of hooch: pot, uppers, downers, heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy, a powerful amphetamine. In Los Angeles, Hispanic gangs chill out by dipping their cigarettes in PCP (phencyclidine, an animal tranquilizer),...