Kids on cocaine. (1986, March 17). Newsweek.

OVERVIEW

"Crack," a form of "freebasing," uses baking soda and water instead of ether. It produces a paste that hardens and can be cut into chips composed of 75% pure cocaine. Kids can buy crack for $10 to $15. The high achieved from using the drug is pure pleasure, lasting a half hour. It is very available (juveniles do most of the front-selling) and has even been sold from an ice cream truck in one city. Contrary to street myth, it is addictive for many vulnerable people.

Lloyd Johnston, Program Director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, says that the number of high school seniors who tried cocaine has almost doubled in the past decade, climbing from 9% to 17.3%. "...[There] is no other industrialized country in the world that has a comparable proportion of young people involved with illicit drugs," stated Johnston.

Professor Everett H. Ellinwood of Duke University says, "It’s marched through all the cultural heroes—entertainers, baseball players, quarterbacks. It’s marched through all the fast-lane professionals. Now we’re seeing a gradual progression down to kids and people at the marginal economic levels."

Arnold Washton, psychopharmacologist at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey (home of the hotline 800-COCAINE) states that crack "is almost instantaneous addiction, whereas if you snort coke it can take two to five years before addiction sets in. There is no such thing as the ‘recreational use’ of crack."

Teenagers support their habits through three main illegal means: dealing drugs to other kids, stealing, and prostitution. The ghetto cocaine scene (where teen trends often begin) is marked by big money possibilities and a violence that is shocking even to hardened street cops. Automatic weapons are contributing to a new wave of terror. Suburban high schools, infested by crack as well as marijuana and alcohol, pose similar patterns of power and seduction.

"As thousands of teens have already learned to their families’ infinite sorrow, ‘coke is it’...the most glamorous, seductive, destructive, dangerous drug on the supersaturated national black market. The federal government’s failed attempts...have allowed a flood tide of cocaine to reach consumers of all ages."

Frank LaVecchia, a former high school guidance counselor who now runs a drug-treatment center in suburban Miami, said, "There are two trends in cocaine use: younger and younger and more and more."

IMPLICATIONS

1. Denial is never an effective deterrent to drug use; neither are exaggeration or perceived adult hyper-responses.
2. Education and drug programs of all types, especially those using teen support groups and peer counselors, are important "down-stream" approaches to solving drug abuse.
3. The reinforcement of values saying "no" to drugs is crucial. The family and all institutions that affect children need to support the development of such values.
4. Society can no longer afford to neglect the vacuum of possibilities existing in the ghetto. The suburbs will fall with the ghettos.