Pubdate: Mon, 21 Aug 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Author: Charlie LeDuff

COCAINE QUIETLY RECLAIMS ITS HOLD AS GOOD TIMES RETURN

There is a nice little jazz bar in the East Village. The drinks are a fair 
price and the mix of people is good. The only problem is that it's tough to 
get into the bathroom.

This agitated a silver-haired college professor named Jason who was in the 
bar on Thursday night. He crossed his legs. He uncrossed them. Reaching the 
point where he could wait no longer, the professor walked out onto 13th 
Street and ducked behind a trash bin. He had to have that snort of cocaine.

"It's getting harder and harder to use the toilets in the bars because 
there are so many people in the toilets doing everything except using the 
toilets," said Jason, 45, who said he first tried cocaine two years ago at 
a Manhattan party. "If you dope-tested the top of every toilet tank in the 
city, I bet half would test positive for cocaine."

At a time when the names of increasingly popular pharmacological drugs -- 
most notably MDMA or Ecstasy -- and a few of the old standards like heroin 
are in the news, little attention is being paid to the drug that is 
re-emerging as the narcotic of choice among New York's pinstripe and 
cocktail set. Cocaine.

While a good many cocaine users and experts maintain that the drug never 
really went away, and national surveys and other numbers suggest that 
cocaine use is at least holding steady, there is strong anecdotal evidence 
to suggest that powder cocaine use is edging up as it undergoes a 
renaissance among the well-dressed and well-fed in New York City.

Daytop Village, the largest drug-rehabilitation program in the city, 
reports that 45 percent of its 2,000 white- and blue-collar outpatients 
were treated for using powder cocaine in 1999, compared with 30 percent in 
1990.

Furthermore, cocaine-related emergencies in New York City increased by 21 
percent from 1990 to 1998, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network.

According to Jonathan Porteus, a clinical psychologist at Daytop, those 
emergencies range from heart palpitations to lethal overdoses.

"Cocaine is back for the 30- and 40-year-olds," said Avery Mehlman, the 
deputy bureau chief of narcotics for the Brooklyn district attorney. "Crack 
is considered to be highly addictive and synonymous with people down on 
their luck. Powder cocaine, due to its higher price, implies a certain 
social strata. It's become the drug of choice for the so-called 
recreational user."

If anything has changed, it is the culture of cocaine. It is not bought on 
a shady street corner anymore, and its use is less and less clandestine. 
"Every bar's got a coke dealer, and everybody has a delivery service," said 
Andrew M., an independent filmmaker who sat in the corner of a bar in 
Chelsea sipping a cosmopolitan and snorting cocaine from the palm of his hand.

"And then you have your spots that sell cocktails and coke," he said. "The 
coke bars are becoming the people's choice because you don't know who's 
monitoring your pager anymore."

Andrew M. was referring to the cocaine service that he could beep to have 
drugs delivered to his Upper East Side apartment. That is until federal 
agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration broke it up in January, 
arresting four people and seizing a notebook listing the names, addresses 
and phone numbers of more than 2,000 customers all over Manhattan. The 
addresses included major financial institutions and apartments on the Upper 
East and West Sides, SoHo and Chelsea.

"It's a bunch of yuppies mostly," said an agent with the federal drug 
agency. "Lawyers and business types. White people with too much time and 
money on their hands. I've got to say, though, it was a pretty smooth 
operation."

The rebound in cocaine use can be traced to two causes, and both have their 
roots in money, said Rick Curtis, a professor of anthropology at John Jay 
College of Criminal Justice, who studies patterns in urban drug use. Not 
surprisingly, Professor Curtis said, the boom times on Wall Street have 
spurred the use of the drug, and so have falling cocaine prices. There is a 
worldwide glut in the cocaine market, and when the authorities confiscate 
1,500 pounds, as they did this month in the Bronx, it makes the newspapers, 
but it hardly makes a difference in the supply or the demand.

Two decades ago, a kilogram of cocaine sold for a wholesale price of 
$40,000, experts say. Today it goes for $20,000 to $25,000 wholesale. 
Translated into consumer prices, half a gram costs $25; a gram, $50; and an 
"eight ball," 3.5 grams, $150. The average price for a gram of cocaine in 
1990 was $100, Professor Curtis said.

"It's the dot-com crowd driving it," he said. "It's the hip art and money 
crowd, the Wall Street people looking for a kick. There is new money to 
burn, and it's the 30- to 40-year-olds who remember the kick."

But gone are the days of wide-collar Huk-A-Poo shirts, gum sole shoes and 
coke spoons hanging from gold neck chains. Gone are the times when a patron 
of Danceteria ordered a drink while snorting dust off the bar. The police 
have made it too difficult for that, with antidrug efforts like the 
crackdown on nightclubs, Operation Condor and the Model Block programs. It 
is too hard to binge because cocaine cannot be bought on street corners 24 
hours a day, 7 days a week, experts say.

What has taken the place of the disco are dinner parties and dark corners 
of bars, Jason said.

On Thursday night, he tours the Manhattan and Brooklyn powder scenes. At 11 
p.m., there is a birthday party in the East Village. It is the hip crowd: 
writers, actors, academics. They are all white, and a black kid arrives 
from uptown. He is paid $150 for the cocaine and $20 for the cab fare. He 
stays for a beer, smiles sideways and is gone. The birthday speech is made 
and the birthday song is sung and then the cocaine is passed around on a 
compact disc case.

"It's not like it's crack," says a writer for New York magazine. "Sneaking 
off into the bathroom is so over. I mean, how does anyone expect to drink 
all night without a little pick-me-up to balance it off?"

As the party starts to peter out around 2 a.m., a half-dozen partygoers, 
including the writer and the professor, make a beeline for Brooklyn, where 
there is a chummy little club that features cocaine and cocktails in 
plastic cups. The place is known from Chelsea to Astoria, Queens, and the 
bartender, Marilyn, says the clientele was once exclusively Puerto Rican 
gangsters.

"But just like everywhere else, they got gentrified out," Marilyn says. 
"There's too much money to be made on these people."

The bar is interesting, not for its decor, which is glass and red paint. It 
is the fact that there is a bond broker at the bar wearing a candy-striped 
oxford and loafers, and he looks so much like an undercover cop that 
everyone has gotten sick of asking him if he is an undercover cop.

"Hey, my money and my nostrils are as good as anyone else's," says the 
broker, Larry L. "I don't make it a habit of coming here. I mix it up. 
Chelsea, Astoria. I've got my spots."

Which is the second interesting thing about this bar. To snort cocaine in 
the bathroom is absolutely verboten, Marilyn says. The doors do not lock 
because management prefers that people use the toilets for corporeal 
reasons. Instead, there is a large phone booth in the back corner with a 
draw curtain. Perhaps six strangers can fit inside.

Yet, snorting illegal substances out in the open from the palms of their 
apartment keys does not bother the Thursday night crowd. "After a while, 
everybody knows everybody in here," Larry says.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart