This Is Your Country On Drugs Part 3

" I've never turned down cocaine," he added, "except after midnight if I want a good night's sleep."

The nation's new enthusiasm for the drug was positively nineteenth century. Harvard University drug expert Dr. Lester Grinspoon testified at a 1979 congressional hearing that "people, generally speaking, don't use cocaine quite as recklessly as they did at the turn of the century and are more sophisticated about their use of it. At present, chronic cocaine abuse does not commonly appear as a medical problem." Users, he said, were not "very much at risk." That same year, High Times, which had been solely dedicated to pot, was running ads for "cocaine kits." The magazine showed readers how to heat c.o.ke and smoke the vapors. In Colombia, said the ad, "the natives call their Snow Vapor Base. For over 100 years, in every village, it's been the Toke of the Town!"

Carter's own top drug-policy official, Bourne, saw little danger in cocaine, writing in a 1976 article that c.o.ke "is probably the most benign of illicit drugs currently in widespread use. At least as strong a case could be made for legalizing it as for legalizing marijuana. Short acting-about 15 minutes-not physically addicting, and acutely pleasurable, cocaine has found increasing favor at all socioeconomic levels in the last year."

In July 1981, Time magazine ill.u.s.trated its cover story "High on Cocaine" with a shot of a martini gla.s.s filled with c.o.ke. In it, the piece suggests,Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No longer is it a sinful secret of the moneyed elite, nor merely an elusive glitter of decadence in raffish society circles, as it seemed in decades past. No longer is it primarily an exotic and ballyhooed indulgence of high-gloss entrepreneurs, Hollywood types and high rollers, as it was only three or four years ago-the most conspicuous of consumptions, to be sniffed from the most chic of coffee tables through crisp, rolled-up hundred-dollar bills. Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, c.o.ke is the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional and often upwardly mobile citizens-lawyers, businessmen, students, government bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, secretaries, bankers, mechanics, real estate brokers, waitresses.

Time's Michael Demarest was nearly as good a pitchman for cocaine as Leary:Superficially, c.o.ke is a supremely beguiling and relatively risk-free drug-at least so its devotees innocently claim. A snort in each nostril and you' re up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain.

Instead, drive, sparkle, energy. If it were not cla.s.sified (incorrectly) by the Federal Government as a narcotic, and if it were legally distributed throughout the U.S. (as it was until 1906), cocaine might be the biggest advertiser on television.

As the DEA had noted, though, c.o.ke's high price tag kept its use somewhat in check-at least until President Ronald Reagan revived the war on drugs in earnest. As the seventies closed out, the nation reacted against what came to be known as the "excesses" of that decade and the sixties. Drug use was certainly among them. As gas lines, stagflation, and a hostage crisis brought, as Carter famously put it, a "malaise" to the nation, news reports on pot turned negative.

Pot smoking, according to survey data, began to trail off. Nebraska would be the last state to decriminalize marijuana possession.

"We' re making no excuses for drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise," p.r.o.nounced Reagan on June 24, 1982. A veteran of many pitched p.i.s.sing contests with the counterculture while governor of California in the late sixties, he was eager to take it on again when he became president. "Drugs are bad, and we' re going after them. As I've said before, we' re taking down the surrender flag and running up the battle flag. We' re going to win the war on drugs."

Reagan redoubled efforts at curbing imports, further militarized drug policy, and brought about mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. In 1980, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report listed fewer than a hundred thousand arrests for heroin and cocaine, which were tabulated together. By 1989, that figure had jumped to more than seven hundred thousand.

But the first battle Reagan would fight in his war was against marijuana, which required laying siege to the once-ignored base of liberal resistance, northern California. His Campaign against Marijuana Production began in the harvest season of 1983. U-2 spy planes and military helicopters flew over the Golden State looking for green crops. (By the fall, corn, wheat, soybeans, and the like have turned brown, making cannabis easy to spot from the sky.) The DEA reported seizing 64,579 plants with an estimated value of $130 million. Federal law-enforcement figures marched in the streets chanting, "War on Drugs! War on Drugs!" The opposition printed b.u.mper stickers demanding, "U.S. Out of Humboldt County."

The 1984 haul was three times larger. Nationally, pot plant seizures rose from about 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million in 1987, an amount that rivals the government's previous estimate of the entire domestic crop. Reagan even began to go after "ditchweed," a wild variety of hemp that has no potential to get a user high. The first year that the White House kept data for ditchweed eradication, it claimed to have uprooted about 9 million plants. That number was up to more than 120 million by 1989 and reached half a billion in 2001.

Unsurprisingly, such sustained effort drove up the price of marijuana. The DEA closely tracks drug prices and purity, although it doesn't often make the data available publicly. It did so most recently in 2004, and the numbers include a startling, if misunderstood, observation. "The marijuana price trends . . . are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time," the report reads. "While the price of powder, heroin, and, to a lesser extent, crack were falling during the 1980s, the average price of marijuana generally rose." An eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 was going for twenty-five dollars. It stayed roughly the same in 1982. By 1986, it was up to fifty-three dollars, and it hit a high of sixty-two dollars in 1991, a 150 percent rise over ten years. c.o.ke, meanwhile, become much more affordable. It cost nearly six hundred dollars a gram in 1982. As Reagan directed resources toward the pot battle, c.o.ke's price began to tumble. By 1989, it was down to two hundred dollars a gram, cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last national c.o.ke binge a century earlier. At the same time, average purity levels nearly doubled.

Clearly, the price trends are highly correlated, but the correlation is a negative one: in the eighties, price increases in marijuana drove demand toward other drugs. The war on drugs hard, soft, or otherwise helped persuade pot smokers to put down the bong and pick up the pipe, the mirror, or the needle.

Pot smoking plummeted under Reagan. About half of twelfth graders in 1979 told the University of Michigan researchers they had smoked pot that year, the same as five years before. The numbers fell through the eighties and dwindled to one-fifth of twelfth graders in 1992. The use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different cheap high. Reported use of inhalants nearly doubled, from 4 to 7 percent between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and meth use all rose in the eighties.

Heroin dropped in price by a third between 1981 and 1988. By 1996, it had dropped by two-thirds. The price of crack was falling as well. The DEA started tracking it only in 1986, around the time the drug's use became widespread. Its price fell by about half over the next five years. In rural areas, the price of meth fell by a quarter from the early eighties to the middle of the decade. The stated goal of U.S. drug policy is to lower demand by increasing price. Reagan's drug war did precisely the opposite, with pot as the lone exception.

While the president focused on pot in California, cocaine was exploding in Florida.

Miami was the perfect base for large-scale drug smuggling. As the countercultural wars petered out, hippies who didn't drop back in or go back to the land went south to Miami. Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies by the mid-seventies, the type of smart, antiauthoritarian troublemakers that embody the perfect smugglers. Business makes strange bedfellows. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow or a.s.sa.s.sinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The move left south Florida with an idle army of well-trained, mostly Cuban American adepts of dark arts that would become valuable in the c.o.ke business: how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surrept.i.tiously pilot planes and boats. A speed-boat could zip through any one of the Everglades' hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload or dock elsewhere along Florida's more than three thousand miles of coastline. That was mostly unnecessary throughout the seventies, however, because smugglers could dock at almost any marina, back up a truck, and drive off. Interdiction was not a major concern.

The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn't created solely for cocaine or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and any other product subject to tariffs. A "mother ship," either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the sh.o.r.e, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats-named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco-zipped out to the offsh.o.r.e vessel to load up with c.o.ke. The drug also came in by air. In the late seventies and early eighties, customs officials estimated that more than eighty cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980, the Customs Service seized two hundred cigarette boats and fifty airplanes, one of which was a World War II-era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations.

"The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States," goes one favorite local saying, and for a while, the rest of the country really did behave as if the Florida c.o.ke trade were happening overseas. Criminologist Paul Goldstein, who focuses on cocaine, told me that the nation essentially ignored Miami's gradual takeover by cocaine because it wasn't happening up north, even though the city was America's murder capital throughout the seventies. "Then when crack came [to Washington and New York] in the eighties, you couldn't pick up your paper without seeing a story about it. It led people to say, 'Crack is so much worse. We've never had this problem before.' Well, they had that problem in Miami," he said.

Miami residents today talk of the seventies and eighties in almost wistful terms. There's a certain pride in having lived through the insanity that was the uncontrolled drug trade. In a 2005 memoir for the alternative newsweekly the Miami New Times, Carlos Suarez De Jesus, a former waiter at the Mutiny Hotel, a notorious dealer hangout, writes of how cocaine took over:Around town the lure of easy cash was leading friends to dabble in the drug trade's quick-strike opportunities. Guys I knew who were perennially broke and literally stealing food from the backs of parked Holsum bread trucks weeks earlier would drop by my job in brand-new BMWs, waving their Rolexes in the air. Some had been driving c.o.ke shipments to New York or Chicago for their employers, others had been unloading boats by moonlight. It was remarkable how they shrugged off the risks and bragged only of the money.

Almost everybody at work was using drugs in some form or another, and if bra.s.s was aware, they didn't act on it. It was a price they paid to keep the wagons rolling. I recall being astonished how c.o.ke seemed to permeate everything. It was the rare hospital where I didn't party with orderlies, nurses, or interns on duty. It was everywhere.

Weapons were everywhere, too. More than two hundred thousand guns were sold in Miami in the late seventies. In 1980, nearly a quarter of the city's murders were committed by machine gun. That year, Fidel Castro opened up his prisons and asylums, flooding south Florida with refugees known as Marielitos, immortalized in the movie Scarface. The Cubans went to war with the locals and the Colombians for control of the state's drug trade, quickly relegating most of their homegrown compet.i.tion to marijuana dealing. That was no small consolation, but the marijuana market paled in comparison to the c.o.ke trade. In 1980, police seized 3.2 million pounds of pot worth more than $1 billion in south Florida. They also seized 2,353 pounds of c.o.ke worth nearly $6 billion.

John Spiegel, now an attorney, was a homicide detective during c.o.ke's heyday, and he remembers the corruption and the depravity of the criminality. "I saw several of my colleagues get into major trouble after they elected to dabble in the business themselves," he recalled. One victim was blown to pieces to prevent identification-but the killers, men working for trafficker Ricky Cravero, Spiegel said, forgot to remove the guy's driver's license, which landed nearby. That case was solved, but by 1980, three of the FBI's top-ten crime- ridden cities were in south Florida: first-place Miami, then West Palm Beach, and Fort Lauderdale. In response, Dade County added 1,000 new cops to its then-1,700-person force. Many were immediately corrupted. Starting salaries were just shy of $18,000. One night running a cigarette boat could net $50,000.

Miami was flooded with dollar bills. Around a fifth of all real-estate transactions in Miami were paid in cash, the New York Times reported in the late eighties. In a study by a Florida International University professor, the underground economy was estimated to be $11 billion, a third of Miami's economic output. The Federal Reserve branch in the city built up a currency surplus of $5 billion, mostly in fifties and hundreds, as crooked banks deposited dirty money. The surplus was greater than at all other Federal Reserve banks combined. Miami's U.S. attorney, Dexter Lehtinen, told a reporter that $220 million in cash was spent on cars in Miami between 1986 and 1989, many times more than in other cities.

This new local industry couldn't have come along at a better time. It has become commonplace to say that cocaine fit the mood of a decade whose affluence was bracketed by recessions. Even Leary indulged in this cliche: "It's the drug of the eighties because this decade is facing the fact," he said at the time. "We' re in an age of realism and toughness." Robert Sabbag, in his 1976 book s...o...b..ind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade, suggests that cocaine was a way to restore a fading American spirit. "[C]ocaine'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," he wrote.

The collapse of American manufacturing left more than a psychic need, however. It also left a vacuum in the economy, which the non-goods-producing service industry rushed to fill. According to a 1992 New York Times story, "There were more jobs created within New York City in the 1980s-overwhelmingly high-skilled, high-paying managerial, professional and technical jobs-than there are people in Buffalo, the state's second largest city." We became a nation of middle managers, of bankers and bureaucrats, of adjusters, accountants, and waitpersons. And drug dealers-from the importer to the distributor to the guy on the corner.

Peter Reuter, the University of Maryland professor who helped me with my original LSD article, has made a career out of examining the economics of illegal businesses. One of his most startling observations is that the c.o.ke trade-indeed, the entire drug trade-is essentially a service industry, because the street price of a dose of cocaine is many, many times higher than the cost of merely manufacturing it. As with any other retail good, some of the excess covers the seller's profit. Some covers what accountants call transportation-in costs. But much more goes toward reducing the risk of product seizure and employee arrest, the princ.i.p.al perils of providing an illegal service.

Those perils became less significant the more the south Florida c.o.ke industry became entrenched. As cocaine's price fell throughout the decade, it became available to consumers of more moderate means. It trickled down, so to speak, spreading across the country in both powder and crack form.

During its high-priced heyday, however, c.o.ke was known as a professional's drug-as Suarez De Jesus observed. Employees of the legal service industry benefited from this product of the illegal service industry as they worked long hours in their burgeoning sector of the economy. Its exclusivity evoked a cloistered world that both the upwardly mobile and the severely impoverished dreamed of being a part of.

Unemployment had climbed in the late seventies as plants shut down and American cities crumbled. Stagflation meant that wages and job growth were falling while prices were rising-a phenomenon that some economists had thought impossible. By the close of the decade, inflation was approaching 15 percent and interest rates had risen above 20 percent. To la.s.so the beast, Reagan severely tightened monetary policy, cutting the money supply and intentionally driving the country into a recession. The Reagan Recession, as it became known, hit hard in the summer of 1981 and persisted for the next year and a half. The president's approval rating bottomed out in the mid-30, and in the 1982 midterm elections, Democrats picked up more than two dozen congressional seats.

America was no longer a place where things were made; it was a place where things were shuffled around. Cocaine slotted nicely into the new economy. The Reagan Recession had disproportionately affected urban blacks and Latinos, and American cities were teeming with unemployed men eager to earn a living distributing the drug, cutting it, or defending territory where it was sold. De Jesus describes one of the c.o.ke trade's typical recruits:A childhood friend named Celia was dating one of the city's rising dealers. His name was Manolito and he was a ruthless thug who'd been the leader of a local street gang, the Utes, and had a reputation for being trigger-happy. He once fired a shotgun into a crowd of Hialeah rivals during a quince party in Miami Beach.

Manolito, who was in his early twenties, was working for an uncle in the "shrimping business" and apparently had been involved in major trafficking. Suddenly the guy was driving a new Corvette and picking up tabs all over town. Celia showed off a shiny new Volvo and diamond tennis bracelet he'd given her for her birthday.

Both people like Manolito and the economy needed the pick-me-up that selling c.o.ke provided. The banking industry had been banged up by the recession, and it was glad to have the influx of capital brought by the cocaine biz. The Economist reported that forty-four Miami banks were given international charters in 1982, compared to ten in 1978. Another thirty-six foreign banks opened branches in Miami during that period. At least forty city banks refused to report cash deposits of more than $10,000, as required by law, throughout the seventies and into the eighties. And at least four banks, authorities estimated, were bought and controlled by drug dealers. As their trade spread across the country, dealers found still other banks eager to deal in cocaine cash. Much of the money that went to foreign producers ended up back in the American economy, too, laundered through the Panamanian branches of U.S. banks.

By the late eighties, a few banks had begun to come under suspicion as their money laundering became too blatant. But the penalties were so laughably small that even when the banks did get caught, they often still benefited from the transaction. A Beverly Hills branch of the American Express Bank was caught laundering $100 million belonging to Juan Garcia Abrego, operator of a notorious cartel with close connections to the then Mexican government. In a 1994 congressional hearing, Chairman Henry Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, noted that the $950,000 fine-less than 1 percent of the laundered cash-meant that the bank still profited from the exchange. Citibank, which since the 1950s had been the most active U.S. financial inst.i.tution in Mexico, was in a perfect position when cocaine trafficking moved from the Caribbean westward. Mexican playboy Raul Salinas was discovered to have laundered hundreds of millions through Citibank. His brother, President Carlos Salinas, a prominent ally in the U.S. drug war, was estimated to have made off with some $5 billion himself.

In two and a half years of investigation beginning in 1986, Senator John Kerry's committee looking into links between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Contras also turned up ties between drug cartels and the banking industry. One hearing involved the Medellin cartel's top accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, who had been busted laundering billions through the New York-based bank First Boston. A committee member suggested that he "must be very clever" to have cleaned up so much cash. "Well, First Boston paid a fine of $25,000 and I 'm doing 42 years," Rodriguez responded. "Who do you think is cleverer?"

Carter and Reagan, for different reasons, had both ignored cocaine as it grew in popularity in the late seventies and early eighties. The market had become so flooded that the price of a gram of c.o.ke plummeted from $600 in 1982 to $400 in 1984. The c.o.ke industry pulled itself out of this apparent death spiral through an innovation that helped it reach thousands of new consumers: crack. Cheap and packing a quick punch, crack was the perfect $5, five-minute escape. It began to spread throughout the nation, especially in poor African American communities.

Since the eighties, skeptics have cast doubt on the severity of the crack epidemic. In 1984, when c.o.ke use peaked in the United States, around 18 percent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had used cocaine, but the numbers for crack were much more modest. Monitoring the Future first began to break out crack as a category in 1986, when it found that 4.1 percent of high-school seniors had used it in the previous year. In 1987, the number was down to 3.9 percent. That year, the survey broke use down by race and found that white kids were twice as likely as black students to have used crack-with Latinos leading everyone at 5.5 percent. Use was concentrated, according to the survey, in the Northeast and in the West and in big cities. A survey of nineteen- to twenty-eight-year-olds found that only 6.3 percent admitted to ever having used crack; 1 percent had used it in the past thirty days.

For obvious reasons, surveys have some difficulty reaching hard-core drug addicts, which is why they 're better at measuring trends than at establishing absolute figures. But they do show that during the peak of the eighties cocaine panic, the number of people using the drug recreationally remained relatively small. Critics of the Reagan-era response to drugs see these data as proof that the cocaine hysteria was cooked up by politicians and the media. It's easier to blame poverty and urban decay on drugs and lock up the people than it is to treat the problem, goes the argument. And while there was certainly no shortage of scapegoating, the rise of cocaine in those years was a very real phenomenon. Although occasional use was declining-as it was for all drugs at the time-the number of people using an awful lot of the drug was increasing.

Two studies, both done by the National Inst.i.tute on Drug Abuse's Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research, reflect this. The first looked at nonlethal and lethal cocaine overdoses in hospitals between 1976 and 1985 and then between 1984 and 1988. In the first study, nonlethal overdoses increased five times over the decade in question, while lethal ones went up six times. From 1984 to 1988, at the height of the panic, nonlethal overdoses jumped another five times and lethal ones by only two and a half times, presumably because the community of users had become experienced enough to know exactly how much c.o.ke will kill you. Though the crack boom was exaggerated, it can't be said that it didn't exist.

The introduction of the new drug came, predictably, with violence, as rival organizations struggled to control territory and compet.i.tion. Miami in the late seventies and early eighties was mirrored by Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York in the mid-eighties. Murders committed by African Americans surged beginning in 1984, rising from just over 30 per 100,000 people to more than 50 in the early nineties, according to Justice Department statistics. Meanwhile, just under 30 black people per 100,000 were killed in 1984; by the early nineties, that number had risen to 40. Black males aged fourteen to twenty-four were particularly hard hit, with their murder rate doubling after 1984 before falling in the early nineties. Indexes that measure social misery-infant mortality, children in foster care, arrests for violent crimes or gun possession, incarceration rates-all worsened significantly during the same period.

In September 1989, a record 64 percent of respondents to a New York Times-CBS News poll said that drug abuse was the United States' most pressing problem. By August 1990, that number had dropped to just 10 percent, where it more or less remained for the rest of the decade.

c.o.ke use fell steadily throughout the late eighties and leveled off toward the end of the decade-just as the hysteria was at its peak. It has remained fairly flat since, though the DEA sporadically claims big victories in disrupting supply. The most recent chest pounding began in August 2007. Drug czar John Walters began making the press rounds, which included riding up New York Avenue NE to the compound of the Washington Times, tucked away in a postindustrial wasteland on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. The paper often provides the most receptive audience for a GOP administration's messengers. Walters came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the war on drugs was being won, said a source who was at the meeting. Prices for cocaine, he said, were rising fast. That can only mean a decline in supply, he explained.

Congress was in the midst of a debate over a controversial $1.4 billion aid package intended to help Mexico wage its own drug war. With Plan Mexico, as it was called, on the table, the news couldn't have come at a better time for the White House. The drug czar, however, had a credibility problem: in the past, he'd pointed to several other price increases and supply drops that quickly reversed themselves and left him and the media looking silly. A Times editorial staffer said that the reception to Walters's presentation was fairly cool. It took more than a month for anyone to bite (although the Times did tout the benefits of Plan Mexico). USA Today finally took the bait, making the price increase its lead story in a September edition. From there, word spread that there was a shortage of c.o.ke out there.

The administration gave itself the credit, citing increased Mexican cooperation, Colombian eradication efforts, and a number of high-profile seizures for the alleged supply downturn. "Drug kingpins are having a harder time moving illegal drugs and chemicals and pocketing the illicit proceeds because they are up against the full-court press of sustained, joint initiatives by a historic three -way partnership among Colombia, Mexico, and the United States," said DEA administrator Karen P. Tandy at a press conference staged in Colombia when the numbers were officially released. "This rock-solid, international lineup has disrupted the world's highest level narco-traffickers, made illegal drugs costlier and less pure, forced traffickers into an uncertain reactive mode, and formed the linchpin to greater stability throughout the Western Hemisphere."

The DEA released its price data for 2007 to make its case. I asked the agency for the numbers for years 2005 and 2006 so that I could put the current price in historical context, but the agency declined to provide them. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request and was told in a letter that there was no "public benefit" to releasing the data.

So did the DEA really have the cocaine cartels in retreat? Quite the opposite, actually: c.o.ke exporters were simply finding more lucrative markets than the economically stricken United States. Producers are "not going to see a significant impact [from a decline in American consumption] because they've seen huge increases in demand, and therefore profit, from Europe," Andre Hollis, who was the senior counternarcotics adviser to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld from 2001 to 2003, told me. Just a few years prior, he explained, Americans were doing about five times more blow than their Old World fellows. Today, c.o.ke-consumption levels in the United States and Europe are roughly equal. It's hard to confirm his claim statistically. But United Nations surveys have shown rapid rises in cocaine use in Western European countries during the early years of the twenty -first century. And press accounts from across Western Europe have talked about a continental c.o.ke binge similar to America's in the eighties.

True, the U.S. government can point to a number of high-profile seizures, including one that landed more than 20 metric tons of c.o.ke in Mexico. Tighter border enforcement as a result of efforts to curb terrorism and immigration has likely played a small role in shrinking the American c.o.ke trade, too. But the biggest factor is probably the rise of the euro and the concomitant decline of the dollar, which has made it less profitable to sell cocaine to Americans. "The euro has replaced the dollar in the Western Hemisphere as the currency of choice among these traffickers, which is an extraordinary shift," said Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, at an antinarcotics conference in April 2007 in Spain. "As cocaine use has declined in the U.S. dramatically, in the European market it has risen." Officials at the conference said that a kilogram of c.o.ke that would fetch $30,000 in the United States was worth $50,000 in Europe-and the dollar has fallen further against the euro since then. On April 1, 2007, a dollar was worth about 0.74 euros; a year later, it was worth only 0.63 euros. Because of this price differential, it's now a theoretically profitable enterprise to smuggle cocaine out of the United States. Buried in its 2009 National Drug Threat a.s.sessment, the Department of Justice cited the currency exhange rate as one possibility for decreased imports coming into the U.S. "The declining value of the U.S. dollar provides a financial incentive for drug traffickers to sell cocaine in foreign markets where the wholesale price of cocaine is already much higher than in the United States," the report said.

Donald Semesky, the DEA's chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the 1.7 billion euros that were registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, "where drug cartels launder their European proceeds." As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new trade routes has grown. A UN report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007. West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for c.o.ke traffickers on the way to Europe. Out-of-work African youth make cheap foot soldiers, and drug runners with expensive equipment and weaponry have little to fear from airport security when the places have little access to electricity and cop cars with empty gas tanks. "Africa is under attack," warned the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime executive director Antonio Maria Costa in a Washington Post op-ed in 2008. "States that we seldom hear about, such as Guinea-Bissau and neighboring Guinea, are at risk of being captured by drug cartels in collusion with corrupt forces in government and the military." From West Africa, the c.o.ke heads to Spain and Portugal. Spain, according to the UN, had levels of c.o.ke use equivalent to those in the United States for the first time ever in 2006.

From the drug cartels' perspective, the beauty of shifting exports to Europe is that the resulting decline in shipments to the United States does indeed lead to an increased price here. While expanding their business elsewhere, the cartels are getting more money per unit of American product. That increase in wholesale cost has led U.S. c.o.ke retailers to take action-by diluting their wares, the easiest way for drug dealers to pa.s.s on increases in cost. The DEA found a 15 percent decrease in U.S. cocaine purity in the first six months of 2007.

What's the real-world impact, then, for your average American c.o.ke user? As with sentencing, it depends on who you are. "There are no crackheads going without crack," Dale Sutherland, a narcotics investigator with the Washington, D.C., police department, told me. "But the white guy from the suburbs may be paying a little more." Here's why: a typical crackhead knows more dealers than a casual user. If one dealer raises prices or too heavily cuts his product, an addict can find another seller across the street-meaning that in order to keep addicts as customers, a dealer will have to accept less profit while stepping on the product just a little. Casual users, however, tend to have only one dealer and are less willing to go shopping around for the best price. And that dealer isn't very concerned about losing his business by selling them inferior product-they don't buy much, anyway.

There are data that back up this market logic. To support its a.s.sertion that supply is down, the DEA has cited a survey that measures the number of people who fail workplace drug testing for cocaine. By the end of 2007, one-third fewer workers were failing c.o.ke tests, a rather remarkable decline. Because drug addicts have some difficulty holding steady jobs, it's safe to a.s.sume that this sample includes mostly casual users-exactly the sort most likely to decrease their consumption in response to a price increase.

The ultimate goal of the war on drugs, of course, is to reduce addiction, and there are signs that raising the price of c.o.ke hasn't done it among hard-core users. Up-to-date data are tough to come by, but some cities have begun drug-testing folks who get arrested. Here, we can presume a much higher number of regular users.

In D.C., where the practice of drug testing arrestees began in 1984, a little more than 40 percent of them tested positive for cocaine in January 2007. That percentage barely budged as the price rose. Eventually, though, the price increase seems to have taken a toll: by the end of the year, the number of arrestees testing positive had indeed dipped-to just below 40 percent.

CHAPTER 6.

D.A.R.E. to Be Different.

In the summer of 1999, the sixties generation celebrated itself by throwing a concert for Woodstock's thirtieth anniversary. The do-over event was organized by the same ponytailed businessman who'd put the first one together, and typical of something organized by an aging boomer, it was a corporate s.h.i.t show. Pizza sold for six dollars a slice, and in the middle of a heat wave, water cost four dollars for a tiny bottle. For those who couldn't make it to the concert in upstate New York-at a Superfund-listed former U.S. Air Force base-the entire festival was available on pay-per-view.

More than 200,000 young people did show up, though. And unlike their gate-crashing parents, they paid $150 each to get in.

The sixties crowd might have lost their idealism somewhere along the way, but their children showed some antiestablishment-or at least antisocial-spirit on the last day of the festival, breaking into a riot, setting fires, looting vendor booths and ATMs, and allegedly raping four female concertgoers.

It's a notorious instance of the way that boomers' children simultaneously embraced and rejected the mythology of the sixties. A less-well-known expression of that att.i.tude involves those kids' drug use: during the mid- to late nineties, American teens got as high as any group of young folks since the seventies, right under the noses of the people who had kicked off the last national indulgence.

For most of American history, drug-use trends among younger and older people have moved roughly in harmony-if not to the same degree, then at least in the same direction. The late sixties were an exception: use rose first among college students and then increased among high schoolers and the rest of the country. Since then, young people have been the leading indicator of drug trends.

The next deviation was in the nineties. In 1991, eighth graders, according to their answers to the University of Michigan survey category concerning "any illicit drug," started getting high more often, but no other segment of the population did. The next year, eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders all showed increases in use, while college-student and adult use remained largely flat. The trend continued over the next few years, as middle- and high-school students continued to show more drug use while older groups' use remained steady.

By 1996, tenth graders were doing more drugs than their adult counterparts. In 1997, their use equaled that of college students; by 1998, it had eclipsed college-age use. The wave broke that year, as eighth graders finally reported a decline in drug use. As those younger kids grew up, they took their temperate ways with them, and at the very end of the decade, use among tenth and twelfth graders took a downturn. By 2004, tenth graders were once again using drugs less often than college students and adults. The party didn't completely die down, however: Twelfth-grade use, even while eighth- and tenth-grade use fell, stayed roughly constant.

The Michigan researchers who first noticed the trend call it a "cohort effect." The pattern is clearly visible moving through the charts over time. Take cocaine use: among eighth graders, it rose from 1991 to 1998; among tenth and twelfth graders, from 1992 until 1999; among college students, beginning in 1994; and among young adults, starting in 1996. Clearly, these are the same people doing c.o.ke.

Understanding why begins with recognizing that the survey numbers are only a partial reflection of the reality of drug distribution and consumption.

If the availability and price of a drug are constant yet its use goes up or down, it means that a couple of different things could be happening. Perhaps a new drug has. .h.i.t the streets and has begun to corner the market on a particular kind of high. Or maybe the change isn't economic but cultural, with changes in use reflecting new levels of approval or disapproval for a certain substance.

The forces that drive these phenomena can be captured only roughly by the Michigan survey, which asked kids about their personal disapproval of using a drug even once, and about the amount of perceived risk a.s.sociated with taking a drug. If an antidrug campaign actually works, surveys should first show att.i.tudes hardening against the drug, then a decline in its use. In a pro-drug environment, att.i.tudes will soften-users will see less risk in trying a drug once and will disapprove of it less-and then, a few years later, use will predictably rise.

The survey also measures "perceived availability," which can affect drug trends as well. Many younger users, studies have shown, get their drugs from other casual users, rather than from a specific dealer. So when there are more casual users of a drug, there are more sources for other casual users. As use declines, those sources disappear and the trend feeds on itself, further bringing use down. When use of a drug goes down among a group of casual users, perceived availability follows it. However, if perceived availability declines at the same time as, or before, a registered drop in use, then the reduction is probably supply- rather than demand-driven.

In the early nineties, kids reported that the supply of their favorite drugs was steady. It was demand that was up.

In a span of five years in the early nineties, "personal disapproval" of marijuana fell by a fifth. Disapproval dropped first for eighth graders, a year before their use increased, and the same pattern held for the older kids. The number of young people who thought that the drug is dangerous also dropped significantly. Both beliefs are leading indicators in the survey: when kids don't disapprove and aren't afraid of a given drug, a rise in use is on the way.

The high-school cla.s.s of 1996 was the first one to increase its use of drugs since the across-the-board decline of the eighties. That group of students had entered kindergarten around 1983, the same year that the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, now D.A.R.E. America, was founded by Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates.

The idea behind D.A.R.E. is simple. If drug use spreads like a virus, the thinking goes, then inoculating children before they' re exposed could slow the spread. Early on, however, D.A.R.E.'s creators made a decision that has been critical to both its success and its failure: they chose cops as the ones to deliver the vaccine. The current course includes some essay writing and test taking, but it's mostly about watching and listening as a uniformed officer conducts an intentionally frightening version of show-and-tell.

Using cops as the public face of the organization-though not surprising, given Gates's background-won it a vocal and politically popular champion. Police forces appreciated the rare opportunity to forge relationships with children outside the cops-and-robbers matrix. The police officer as public servant is a role cops understandably enjoy playing. "D.A.R.E. ' humanizes' the police: that is, young people can begin to relate to officers as people," offers the organization's PR material. "D.A.R.E. permits students to see officers in a helping role, not just an enforcement role."

Officers chosen to be part of the program first go through eighty hours of training in child development, cla.s.sroom management, and teaching. Those who take on high-school cla.s.ses get an additional forty hours' worth. Though versions of the program are available for all grades, D.A.R.E. concentrates on fifth and sixth graders. The curriculum is highly standardized, with seventeen sessions focusing on the dangers of drugs and drug addiction, as well as the "Three R's": "Recognize, Resist and Report." The officer shows the kids what drugs look like and tells stories of lives ruined or ended. He or she teaches students how to avoid peer pressure and how to build their own "self-esteem"-which, it's a.s.sumed, will give kids the strength to say no.

D.A.R.E. cops often stick around for lunch and recess to talk further with the kids about drugs-and much else. As a 1988 federal Bureau of Justice a.s.sistance study explains, "Students have an opportunity to become acquainted with the officer as a trusted friend who is interested in their happiness and welfare. Students occasionally tell the officer about problems such as abuse, neglect, alcoholic parents, or relatives who use drugs."

The campaign has succeeded on many fronts, as any parent who's been scolded for drinking by a young child knows all too well. And it has inspired more than mere scolding. In 1992, a Maryland girl told her D.A.R.E. officer that her parents were growing pot, and each parent spent thirty days in jail, according to the Washington Post. Two kids in Boston reported their parents the same year; the year before, a Colorado child called 911 and said, "I' m a D.A.R.E. kid," then told the operator about a baggie of pot that he'd found. A nine-year-old Georgian called the cops after stumbling on some speed in his parents' bedroom. "At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people who use drugs need help," said Darrin Davis to a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. "I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said they would arrest them."

The D.A.R.E. program is now in three-quarters of all school districts, reaching more than twenty-five million American kids. It also has branches in more than fifty nations worldwide. Ironically, it was born just as more than a decade of rising drug use was ebbing among all age groups, including baby boomers, who now had the sorts of responsibilities that can preclude taking recreational drugs: careers, mortgages, and, most important, children.

Apprehensive new moms and dads in the eighties and early nineties helped make D.A.R.E. a global phenomenon, but they were surrounded by countless other sources of parenting help. Best sellers such as Melody Beattie's Codependent No More and Charles Whitfield's Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families, both published in 1987, helped to build a ma.s.sive market in recovery and wellness literature during the period. Self-esteem, self-actualization, and self-help, pop-psychological leftovers from the individualistic sixties and narcissistic seventies, became buzzwords to live by as millions of Americans were introduced to their "inner child" and the potentially catastrophic consequences of neglecting it. "With our parents' unknowing help and society's a.s.sistance, most of us deny our Inner Child," Whitfield writes of this hidden, wounded aspect of the psyche. "When this Child Within is not nurtured or allowed freedom of expression, a false or co-dependent self emerges."

Motivational speaker John Bradshaw further popularized the notion with his 1990 best seller, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. He went on to host a ten-part TV special by the same t.i.tle and to author four more self-help best sellers. Together, his books would sell more than ten million copies. He and Whitfield both identified a national psychological crisis that had been caused by neglectful, unloving, and "spiritually abusive" parents.

They urged boomers not to make the same mistakes while rearing their own children-whether the one within or the ones without. "Give your child permission to break destructive family roles and rules," advises Bradshaw. "Adopt new rules allowing pleasure and honest self-expression." He also a.s.sures readers that "mistakes are our teachers-they help us to learn." Kids will make more mistakes than adults, he suggests, because "they have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. Children are natural Zen masters; their world is brand new in each and every moment." Children, therefore, shouldn't be held back by rigid rules but allowed the freedom to explore. They shouldn't be scolded but reasoned with. Parents should be friends and confidants, not authority figures. In a 1990 New York Times article, Wendy Kaminer summed up the codependency movement's att.i.tude toward parenting: "Shaming children, calling them bad, is a primary form of abuse."

The movement was strong enough-and ostensibly permissive enough-to disturb some of the more conservative elements of American society. A columnist in Georgia's Fayette Citizen was perplexed as late as 1998 by the proliferation of "parenting cla.s.ses," many taught by folks just out of college. He called one of the programs and spoke to its director. She told him that "the most prevalent problem is improper parental discipline," which probably rea.s.sured spare-the-rod types. But that wasn't all. "You wouldn't believe how many parents still don't realize that under no circ.u.mstances should spanking or hitting be used to discipline children," she added. And "the second most frequent problem," she said, "is not parents endangering children, but rather parents who try to 'control' their children, which stifles self-expression."

She was working from a set of a.s.sumptions that was backed by more than just pop psychology. At a 1995 Aspen Inst.i.tute program called "The Challenge of Parenting in the '90s," those gathered heard from Harvard professor Stuart T. Hauser, then director of the school's Judge Baker Children's Center. Relying on a longitudinal study he published in 1991, he told the conference that the "chances of a teenager experimenting with new ideas and embracing new perceptions are greatly increased when he or she is in a family where curiosity and open-mindedness are valued, and uncertainty is tolerated." The goal of his research, he said, was to "enhance" parenting "so that it will not interfere, obstruct, or aggravate the greatest difficulties during the teenage years." The t.i.tle of his lecture, "Adolescents and Their Families: Paths of Ego Development," is telling-the family belongs to the child.

Few parents, of course, wanted no structure or discipline at all. Hauser, in his talk, recommended required educational programs dealing with violence, drugs, pregnancy, and school failure. For young potential psychonauts, the rise of the codependency movement and the spread of D.A.R.E. dovetailed fortuitously: kids were encouraged to satisfy their curiosity, which uniformed officers piqued by waving baggies of pot in their faces during school.

Health-care activist Mykey Barbitta says that his first exposure to marijuana came during a D.A.R.E.-like field trip to a police station in fourth grade. "They had that cabinet that had all the drugs in it, and they said, ' These are all dangerous,' " he recalled. "I saw marijuana sitting there at the bottom, right in the middle, and I' m like: this I can see, the needles, the pills. I can understand, in fourth grade, that those can hurt you. But how can that little leaf hurt you? I just had my doubts ever since then."

Today, Barbitta is a drug dealer: he runs a state-sanctioned medical-marijuana shop in San Francisco.

Not surprisingly, the University of Michigan survey shows that just as the inner child was breaking out, LSD use among the children of the most educated parents-the sort who might watch a John Bradshaw special on PBS-began rising. According to most surveys, it's almost always the children of the least educated parents whose drug use is the highest. But not for LSD in the nineties, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast among white, educated young males.

In 1975, 11.2 percent of all twelfth graders said that they'd used "hallucinogens" at least once that year. Use skewed toward males, with 13.7 percent claiming to have used compared to 9 percent of women. Use of LSD specifically stood at 7.2 percent. The numbers for both hallucinogens and LSD slowly declined over the next fifteen years, dipping to a low of 5.5 percent of all seniors having taken hallucinogens in 1988.

Then the trend started turning around, and by 1994, use of LSD was back to 1975 levels. Mid-nineties acidheads differed demographically from those of twenty years before, however. The Michigan survey breaks the nation into the Northeast, the North Central, the South, and the West. Acid use in the seventies was spread evenly throughout the country, save for the South, which lagged behind. As far back as the surveys go, blacks barely register on the hallucinogen scale. Whites top it, although Latinos aren't far behind. The level of education of a child's parents, however, played little role in whether that kid would try acid or hallucinogens.

Beginning in the late eighties, children of the most highly educated parents took the lead in acid use. In 1975, kids with uneducated parents used hallucinogens at precisely the same rate as kids of highly educated parents-and both groups used it less than children with moderately educated parents. By 1990, the kids of the highly educated were more than twice as likely to trip.

Meanwhile, kids in the Northeast cracked 13 percent for hallucinogen use in 1996 and 1997 and nearly hit 12 percent for acid in those years-the highest of any subgroup for both categories. Numbers for the West for these years are high, too, with a peak of 8.8 percent LSD use in 1996. Whatever their parents' educational background, kids who said they wouldn't be going to college or would be going for fewer than four years dropped acid at a significantly higher rate than others.

Acid's sixties-era distribution network was there to meet the demand. The Grateful Dead, long known to be something of a psychedelics delivery service, had continued to tour throughout the eighties and dropped a top-ten comeback alb.u.m, In the Dark, in 1987. The year before, Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead, which had been released in 1974, earned platinum certification by finally reaching one million copies sold. The nineties, though, saw sales really take off. In the Dark went double-platinum in 1995, and the neophyte-friendly Skeletons. .h.i.t double-platinum in 1994 and triple-platinum just six months later, in early 1995. The cultural comeback the Dead made was in evidence following that year's drug-related death of front man Jerry Garcia, which played out on the cover of Newsweek and was memorialized with congressional speeches. LSD use among high-school and college students peaked at the same time.

College campuses in the early to mid-nineties were dominated by tie-dyes, some of which came from Dead shows, where hard-core fans set up not only T-shirt booths, but also a drug bazaar known simply as the Lot. There, youngsters all over the country could get a night of mind-blowing psychic exploration for as little as five dollars-and often for free. The Dead had company on the road, too. New England-founded jam band Phish and its southern counterpart, Widespread Panic, grew in popularity during the period. So did gatherings such as the Furthur Festival, which featured projects by various members of the Dead and replicated the Lot scene.

Psychedelia, despite the loss of Jerry, was on the rise.

In 1999, due to clamoring demand from the East Coast, the annual Rainbow Gathering-a meeting of tens of thousands of hippies in a national forest-was held east of the Mississippi River for the second time in its history and the first time in two decades. The rise of acid in the Northeast coincided neatly, in fact, with the growth of the then regional band Phish.

Several musical streams converged to form a river of explicit pro-drug peer pressure never seen before. West Coast hip-hop was one, especially for nonurban youth sufficiently removed from the music's lyrical concerns to find them seductively exotic. The Chronic, Los Angeles-area rapper Dr. Dre's 1992 solo debut, announced its drug policy right on the CD: a symmetrical green pot leaf on a simple black background. Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center might have lamented the misogyny and violence threaded throughout the work of Dre's old group, N.W.A., but the suburban and rural kids who helped make his solo effort a triple-platinum hit discovered something infinitely more interesting: the chronic itself. With a heavy influence from pothead George Clinton, the alb.u.m glorified the gangsta lifestyle. But because most suburban and rural kids weren't about to join a gang and start packing a nine, they had to channel their "inna gangsta" in other ways. The easiest options were to dress like Dre and smoke pot.

The Chronic also introduced mainstream America to Snoop Doggy Dogg, whose love of violence seemed eclipsed only by the joy he took in smoking "endo." "Rollin' down the street, smokin' endo, sippin' on gin and juice," raps Snoop in the chorus of one of the more popular songs from his 1993 alb.u.m, Doggystyle. Eventually, censors figured out that by "endo" he meant marijuana, so the radio version became "Rollin' down the street, smokin' smokin', sippin' on gin and juice." Suburbia also glommed on to ghetto-culture renditions in film, as Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Menace II Society (1993) earned cult followings.

Cypress Hill, Latino rappers from California who loved the sound of bubbling bong water, can take a share of credit, too. Almost every one of the group's songs had something to do with cannabis, and it even quoted the Bible in defense of legalization, referencing Genesis 1:12: "and G.o.d gave all seed bearing plants on Earth to use." The group's self-t.i.tled 1991 debut sp.a.w.ned three top-twenty rap singles and sold two million copies over nine years. In 1993, the group smoked pot on the stage of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, earning a lifetime ban.