Pubdate: Thu, 19 Apr 2007
Source: Santa Clara, The (Santa Clara U, CA Edu)
Copyright: 2007 The Santa Clara
Contact:  http://www.thesantaclara.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2775
Author: Jeremy Herb
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States)

SANTA CLARA'S UNDERGROUND COKE SCENE

Cocaine Use Largely Secretive at Santa Clara, Where Student Dealers 
Profit Off Expensive Drug Habits

Editor's note: All students' names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Christine Swift tells Sean Cowher to change the song on iTunes -- she 
knows the perfect one to listen to. Sean switches the song on his 
dorm room computer from a slow hip-hop tune to one with a bass-heavy beat.

It's Friday night, and Sean and Christine are getting high. Not just 
the typical, smoke-a-few-blunts-and-get-stoned high -- it's the 
intense but short-lived high that comes from snorting an 8-ball of 
cocaine, 3.5 grams worth.

A minute later, Christine tells Sean to find a new song. This time 
it's a rap number. Another minute, another song. One more minute. One 
more song. This one, by The Format, gets Christine out of her chair 
and dancing. Sean sits beside her, watching her arms and hips sway to the beat.

Then she drops to the floor.

Her dancing continues, Sean recalls. At least he thinks she is 
dancing. But really, Christine is having a seizure, arms and legs 
convulsing to the beat as she loses consciousness. Sean still doesn't 
think anything is wrong until Christine starts foaming at the mouth. 
Sean leaps out of his chair, shaking her, trying to wake her, but her 
eyes just roll into the back of her head.

"I thought at one point about where we were gonna have to dump this 
body," Sean recalls. "I didn't care at the time because I was so 
messed up. If I wasn't, I would have been freaking out."

Before Sean can come up with any plans to ditch Christine's body, she 
comes to, 10 minutes after losing consciousness. She sits silently 
the rest of the night, still, mumbling occasionally.

Christine survived the night, despite snorting nearly 10 grams of 
cocaine that day. But the experience hasn't stopped her or Sean from 
using coke. In fact, they are at the center of a secretive, 
underground cocaine scene at Santa Clara, where students use coke as 
a way to get a quick high, be social and push limits that alcohol and 
pot can't reach. But unlike alcohol, and even marijuana, cocaine 
isn't out in the open. While getting drunk at a party is accepted at 
Santa Clara, using cocaine is not, and those who do stay hidden.

"It's popular, but underground," explains Sean, a junior at Santa 
Clara who has dealt on and off for two years. "As soon as one 
cokehead knows you do coke and you're cool, they let you in with 
their other friends who do coke. It's little cocoons of cokeheads 
around campus. But they don't want to reveal themselves. You have to 
get to know people first to get in with them."

It's difficult to determine the actual number of cocaine users, not 
only at Santa Clara but nationally. Different national surveys say 
anywhere from 4.9 to 15 percent of college-age students have used 
coke. One survey of Santa Clara students reported that 4.1 percent of 
students -- about 200 of 4,900, or one in every 25-person classroom 
- -- have tried coke. And interviews with 10 coke users and five 
dealers reveal this is likely a conservative estimate, because many 
use the drug but won't admit it.

"It's not something I want people to know, that I take the drug, 
because they put it in a negative light," says sophomore Lindsay 
Merced, who uses cocaine recreationally.

Jeanne Rosenberger, vice provost for student life, says she is 
concerned if students are using cocaine, but it isn't high on her 
radar compared with alcohol and marijuana. That's because none of the 
41 drug violations this year through winter quarter have involved 
cocaine, and only 6.8 percent have been cocaine related in the past two years.

Sean says a majority of his approximately 25 cocaine customers would 
use the drug occasionally, like Lindsay. But some, like Christine, 
would buy coke nearly every day, abusing the highly addictive 
stimulant. Cocaine provides an intense high that can quickly turn 
recreational use into dependence, according to Ike Grozier, executive 
director of Recovery Connection Treatment Services in Santa Clara. 
Cocaine artificially creates dopamine, the body's pleasure-producing 
chemical, causing the body to stop producing it naturally. When a 
regular user stops taking the drug, the body has no way to get 
dopamine. This results in irritability, depression and, ultimately, a 
dependence to recreate the missing pleasure. Dependence leads to addiction.

"The problem is, with young adults, tolerance seems to be like a good 
thing. It's like a badge. The problem is, it's not a good thing at 
all," Grozier says. "All the way around, it's damaging. You're 
flirting with something and have no concept of what you're about to 
create. You may not have problems now (when you start using), but if 
you flirt with it too long, it can create dependence."

Fulfilling the dependence isn't cheap: A gram of coke, which one 
person can use in a night, costs around $50. At Santa Clara, there 
are plenty of students with money -- money some use on the expensive 
drug -- no matter what the cost.

Lindsay Merced sits at the table in a brown towel and bathing suit, 
her black bikini top exposed. She takes an Access card and starts 
chopping up the cocaine on the sunburst-colored tabletop in her 
friend's apartment, where a handful of people are gathered. She cuts 
off a line from the small mound of white powder sitting beside two 
black and white iPods, an empty Red Bull can and a box of Parliament 
cigarettes. Lindsay puts down the Access card and grabs a dollar 
bill, rolling it into a tight cylinder. She sticks it up to her nose, 
bends down and snorts the three-inch line. She throws her head back, 
inhales and picks up the remaining powder on her finger before 
rubbing it on her gums.

It's Thursday night and Sean is hosting a 21st birthday party for his 
roommate. There are nine people in the small living room, eating 
desserts from Bon Appetit and taking shots of Jagermeister. Poker 
pros are battling in a high-stakes game on TV, while two-thirds of 
the room takes turns snorting the gram of coke on the table. Lindsay 
gets up from the seat closest to the kitchen and Courtney Lions takes 
her place, grabbing the Access card and unrolling the dollar bill. 
She's also in a two-piece bathing suit, blue straps stemming up from 
her white towel, partially hidden by her shoulder-length brown hair. 
Courtney re-rolls the bill, breaks off a line from the pile of 
cocaine, and, without hesitating, snorts it.

"Hey, let's go in the hot tub before it closes," Lindsay says to 
Courtney as she finishes inhaling.

"Oh yeah," Courtney responds, getting up to check the message on her 
phone -- it's a text from her mom.

"Hey mom, my boyfriend you don't know about is here, and I just did a 
line of coke off the table," Courtney jokes.

Only minutes later, Lindsay's phone rings. "Ha, it's my mother, how 
ironic is that?" Lindsay says aloud, before answering the phone. "Hi 
Mom," she says calmly, walking down the hallway.

When Courtney arrived at Santa Clara, she was "an angel" by Lindsay's 
standards. She had never tried drugs or alcohol before settling into 
the dorms her freshman year. But after entering Santa Clara, Courtney 
started drinking, like most freshmen, before moving on to pot and 
then cocaine this quarter. "Just out of curiosity," Courtney 
explains. "You're drawn to a thing you know nothing about. There's no 
reason not to be."

"I knew I'd try it eventually," Lindsay says matter-of-factly. "It's 
in my personality. I love to party, socialize and have fun. As much 
as people don't want to admit it, we're at the age to be ridiculous. 
Our behavior is risky. We live on the edge because danger sparks 
people's interest. You think, 'Oh my God, I have no idea how this is 
gonna feel.' "

Courtney vacates the seat and Sarah McKenzie hops in, preparing her line.

"Play something epic," Sarah tells Sean, the DJ behind the computer. 
"Cuz this is an epic experience."

Sarah rolls up the dollar bill and hands the Access card to Max 
Harding, who puts his finger over the powder still on the card and 
rubs it on his gums.

"That's my favorite part," he says of rubbing coke on his gums to 
numb the membranes. "Snorting is still cool, though."

Sarah rolls up the dollar bill and takes her line, throwing her head 
back while inhaling. She grabs the black iPod from Sean and tells him 
she wants to play the song she listens to whenever she has a 
hangover. The Replacements' distorted guitars blare from the 
speakers, drums pounding on each downbeat, as the lead singer yells, 
"All I want to do is drink beer for breakfast!"

"There's an age you shouldn't be doing things," Lindsay says over the 
roar of the guitars. "You have to have a certain mindset. It can be 
dangerous, life-threatening the first time. But if you're at a mature 
level and willing to take the risk, that's OK."

She pauses, then adds that it's important to be with people you trust.

"The first time we used E, I've never felt closer to Courtney," 
Lindsay says. "Drugs change the way you feel. The fact that you're 
not in a regular state of consciousness makes it that much cooler."

Sarah gets up and Max takes the seat, cutting off a large line of 
coke. "Cut it in half," Sarah tells him. "You don't want to do that. 
Your nose will bleed."

"No it won't," Max says, bending down to do the line.

While Lindsay talks with me, Courtney walks outside on the patio to 
kiss her boyfriend, Tim Morgan, another dealer who is not a student 
but moved to Santa Clara two months ago. When the two started dating, 
Lindsay says even she was concerned.

"He may not have the best track record on paper," Lindsay says. "When 
Courtney told me, it was a big red flag. But I told her, if you trust 
him and he treats you right, that's legit, even though you're walking 
on thin ice. People say to her, 'Why are you dating a loser?' First 
of all, why do you say that if you haven't met him? I didn't trust 
him at first, but I got to know him, and he's a legit human being."

Lindsay says Courtney's boyfriend isn't the only one who gets a bad 
rap. Cocaine isn't talked about at Santa Clara, she says, because 
coke users are judged harshly, whereas pot smokers and drinkers are not.

"People say, 'You must be a bad kid -- you're a hard user,' " Lindsay 
says of students' perceptions of coke users. "But it's not all 
negative. I don't think it should always be considered so bad. No, 
it's not good to use it all the time, but it's OK just to play with it."

Still, Lindsay says it's not something she advertises.

"I don't think it's safe to even talk about with everyone," she says. 
"If someone is uncomfortable with it, all they have to do is tell a 
CF. Cops won't break down the door over an eighth of weed. They will 
do it for coke."

Courtney walks back into the room from the patio and asks, "Anybody 
got a cigarette?"

"What?" Lindsay blurts out. "You're gonna go do cigarettes?"

"No, it's for someone else."

"Oh, OK," Lindsay says, before turning to me. "I know, we'll do coke, 
but we won't do cigarettes."

Chris leans forward in his dining room chair, adjusting the volume on 
his computer as he lays down a beat. Beside the computer is an 
8-track digital mixer on the table and a blue Stratocaster guitar 
that two of Sean's friends, students Trent Joseph and Alex York, pass 
back and forth.

The beat continues, and Trent strums chords resembling a Matisyahu 
song while Sean takes it all in digitally on some of his $6,000 worth 
of music equipment, partially purchased with drug money. While Trent 
continues strumming, Frank pulls out an orange medicine bottle 
containing an ounce of weed. He then pulls out a multi-colored, 
foot-long bong. He packs the weed inside and takes his first hit. 
After a second one, he trades the bong for the guitar and picks up 
strumming where Trent left off. Trent takes two puffs and directs the 
bong in my direction.

"No thanks," I tell him. Without questioning me further, Trent 
motions to Sean seeing if he wants a hit.

"No, I got a drug test coming up," Sean responds.

Sean, wearing a Santa Clara hoodie, has a slender build, a baby face 
and wavy, uncombed hair. When he arrived at Santa Clara, he smoked 
weed but didn't think anyone did coke. That changed when a girl 
convinced him to split an 8-ball with her. Sean was hooked.

"I love drugs," he explains. "I love that feeling. Your teeth go 
numb. Your heart beats really fast. It's awesome."

After trying coke for the first time, Lindsay remembers just one 
thing was on her mind the next day.

"I woke up the next morning and thought, 'Holy shit, I want to do it 
again -- tonight,' " Lindsay recalls.

Grozier, who runs a drug treatment facility in Santa Clara, says the 
body's natural reaction after using cocaine is to want more. "When 
you stop doing cocaine, the body already has stopped producing normal 
chemicals," he explains. "Now, nothing's there, and that's where you 
get irritability, mood swings, depression."

Lindsay says she quickly recognized how dangerous the drug is. "I 
realized the next morning, and that thought scared me. And I'm glad 
it scared me. I have an addictive personality. If I like something, 
I'll keep doing it. But if it's dangerous, I'll limit myself."

Lindsay says she hasn't noticed any effects from her occasional 
cocaine use, but Tim and Sean have seen them firsthand.

"Girls ask me if I want to do it on a Tuesday night," Sean explains. 
"And I say, do you seriously want to see the sunrise? Because if you 
take E or too much coke, you're gonna watch the sunrise. You wish 
nothing more in the world than to fall asleep, but you can't go to 
sleep. It's not possible."

Tim says he's been woken up by a knock on his window at 4 a.m. -- a 
knock for coke. "This one girl was like, 'Tim, can I have a gram?' " 
Tim explains. "She kept touching her legs, and I realized I sold her 
a gram earlier that night. She was coming down harder than anybody. 
It's no roller coaster ride. It's just a straight drop down."

Grozier, whose facility treats nearly 30 percent of his patients for 
cocaine addiction, says that college students, especially at 
universities like Santa Clara, are less likely to go in for 
treatment. "No one in the upper-middle class wants to let on there's 
anything wrong, so they're going to hide it all the better," Grozier 
says. "They're going to work much harder, making it look on the 
outside like nothing's wrong, when inside they're suffering, starting 
to struggle. They cover it up even more (at college) because of the 
social influence. They don't want to let on they can't keep up, that 
they're losing ground."

At Recovery Connections, cocaine treatment requires a minimum 45-day 
stay in a residential program and can last up to six months, meaning 
college students would need to drop out of school for treatment. At 
Santa Clara, Larry Wolfe, director of Cowell Health Center, says it's 
unlikely Cowell will be treating anyone for a cocaine problem at any 
given time. At most, they'll likely treat one person each year for 
cocaine. While he knows there is some usage on campus, Wolfe says 
cocaine is a much smaller problem at Santa Clara than alcohol and marijuana.

Phil Beltran, assistant director of Campus Safety, says cases 
involving cocaine are rare, most likely because the cost of the drug 
makes users more careful and secretive.

Lindsay says she doesn't worry about becoming addicted to cocaine 
because she hasn't let herself get to that point. It's sporadic, she 
explains. "It's not like I say, 'Well, today's the second Friday of 
the month, today's coke day.' But as long as I'm not a user, I'll use 
it recreationally."

Grozier warns that the line between recreational use and addiction is 
blurry. "If you develop tolerance, you develop dependence," he says. 
"And if you develop dependence, you're developing addiction. That's a 
natural process you can't stop. It continues to go and go and go, 
unless you abstain completely. That's the only way to stop it."

While Sean says he loves doing drugs, he wasn't hooked on the cost.

"It came to the point where, do I want to spend $50 on an eighth (of 
weed) everyday, or do I want to smoke for free?" Sean says, 
explaining his rationale for dealing drugs.

During Sean's freshman year, he was denied access into parties, he 
says. That changed once he started dealing. Sean became everybody's 
best friend: a friendly, approachable source.

"I'd go to parties, have a backpack with coke, ecstasy and weed, and 
I'd shout out, 'Who wants to buy drugs?'" Sean says. "Nobody could 
mess with me because I had 20 people in there who were my best 
friends because I got them drugs. I could go to work and make $8.25 
an hour at Old Navy, or I could sit on my ass and make 10 bucks 
selling weed, or sell a sack of coke or an 8-ball and make 70 bucks. 
It makes school 20 million times more fun."

Sean, along with two of his friends, started dealing weed and 
ecstasy, but the moneymaker was cocaine. "The game," as Tim and Sean 
explain coke dealing to me, is a food chain of dealers. They are the 
lowest rung, buying ounces from the guy with kilos of coke, who Sean 
describes as someone who deals for a living, a "30-year-old skeezer." 
He then buys from the guy with bundles of kilos, and it goes up from 
there. No one reveals their suppliers. But everyone makes a profit 
buying in bulk.

It costs around $50 for a gram, Tim explains to me. A half-ball, or 
"teener," which is 1.7 grams, costs $75 to $80. An 8-ball, 3.5 grams, 
costs around $150. An ounce (28 grams), the amount Tim and Sean would 
buy, is about $550 to $600. The way dealers like Tim and Sean make a 
profit is by buying half an ounce (14 grams) for about $300. Then, 
they'd sell six grams for $50 each, making back the $300 and leaving 
eight grams left over. "That's 150 percent profit," Bryan says. 
"That's fucking beautiful. That's cocaine."

In just a little over two months in Santa Clara, Tim, despite not 
attending the university, has already racked up about 20 customers, 
mostly by word of mouth. He is a skinny, 22-year-old with an unshaven 
face, wearing baggy clothes and a red sweatshirt. He says he has a 
nine-millimeter pistol in his room -- just in case. Tim talks 
quickly, always with something to say, moving around Sean's kitchen 
like he's on a stage, one hand on the bottom of his sweatshirt, the 
other switching between a bottle of alcohol and a cigarette. His 
phone rings, and he declares, "I'm 'bout to get paid," before answering.

"What's up," he answers. "You want $20 worth? I don't deal in that. 
You gonna need at least a G for me to make the trip."

He hangs up, no deal. "Man, motherfucker wants $20 -- that's not even 
gonna last him 45 minutes," he says, annoyed, before turning his 
attention back to me. "The customers, the clients, are nuts. They're 
crazy," he says. "They call the phone over and over again, bothering 
you. Over and over. You're driving home and they call, 'Are you home 
yet?' You say no, then they call 100 more times. With yayo, when it's 
gone, that's not when it's gone. Money (customers) didn't even think 
about spending -- now it's the only choice."

Nearly all of Tim's customers are Santa Clara students. He says more 
than half will call every other Friday, but the others call nearly 
every day. "They're gonna get it somewhere," Tim says. "No, it's not 
right. We be killin' people. You turn somebody into a cokehead -- 
it's disgusting."

"See, I didn't have that kind of conscience," Sean responds, 
explaining he didn't feel guilty dealing. "If you don't, someone else 
will supply them if the need exists."

But Tim says even though he feels bad about what effects the drugs he 
sells may have, he's too addicted to "the game" to stop.

Sean stopped dealing after fall quarter because it took too much of 
his time, nearly two to three hours each night. He sold around $1,000 
on his best nights, dealing "QPs" (a quarter pound or 4 ounces) of 
weed and 8-balls of cocaine. A few weeks into his first quarter 
dealing, he went home with close to $2,500 in profit. In his phone, 
he had codes signifying weed and coke next to his customers. Sean 
made a name for himself by selling with a unique angle: offering 
students direct delivery to their dorm rooms.

"Money isn't really that much of an issue for me," Sean tells me. 
"It's just so fun dealing drugs. I'd go into a shoe store, buy two 
pairs of sneakers and bust out a fat roll of cash."

Cocaine isn't a new drug on college campuses. According to the 
Monitoring the Future study, which has tracked drug and alcohol use 
among high school students for 30 years, cocaine reached its peak in 
1985, when 17.3 percent of 12th graders had used it. By 2000, the 
number had fallen below 9 percent, and it has hovered between 8 and 9 
percent since.

Another survey says fewer people use cocaine in high school. 
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, however, the 
number of people who have tried coke increases more than six-fold 
upon entering college, from 2.3 percent of 17-year-olds to 15.1 
percent of 18- to 25-year-olds. Two other surveys, the National 
College Health Assessment and the Core Institute, claim nationally 
only 6 and 4.9 percent of college students have tried cocaine. The 
National College Health Assessment is the only gauge of Santa Clara 
students, which says 4.1 percent have tried the drug. Tim and Sean 
say that number is too low.

"The thing about Santa Clara is it's behind closed doors," Tim says. 
"I show up at a party, and I go in a corner and say 'come here,' " he 
explains, gesturing with his hand. "I gather up all my little custees 
and get my money and bounce. You won't find me passed out on the 
floor. Motherfuckers buy coke or sell coke. You either a hustler or a 
customer. You can't blur the line."

I ask Tim if he does coke, and he smiles, before saying, "I do coke 
when I'm drunk. With Hennessey. Straight."

"Yea, but you drink Hennessey straight every night," Sean responds 
with a laugh.

"Regardless if I'm as worse, or worse than everybody else, how do I 
still make money? The difference is a coke fiend is out of money. 
They come begging you to front 'em. I've been addicted, very 
addicted. But my addiction is answering the phone and getting the 
dollar in my pocket."

Tim's dad died when he was a child, and his mom has been in and out 
of rehab, he says. Tim started dealing to survive; it's his source of 
income. But not Sean.

"Drug money is play money for me," Sean says, adding the biggest perk 
of selling is the kickbacks -- free drugs. Sean does coke at least 
once a week, he says. When we finish our interview, he gets out of 
his chair and says, "I think I'm going to use drugs right now," as I 
head for the door.

The high Sean got from dealing drugs stopped suddenly during finals 
week spring quarter with a knock on his friend's door. It was Campus Safety.

Campus Safety was knocking because they were about to search his 
friend Chris Gonzalez's room, and Chris had a safe with drugs inside.

"My heart just dropped," Sean says when he heard his friend got busted.

Sean painstakingly recalls Chris telling him, "They were there for an 
hour and ransacked the room, opening up tea packets -- they searched 
through everything. The week before, Chris had bought a safe because 
he got jacked for $1200. Finally, they realize the giant footstool 
with a tablecloth over it. One of them tried to move it and it didn't 
move, and they found it."

Beltran says Campus Safety found a "large cache" of drugs inside the 
safe -- enough to call Santa Clara police.

Chris was arrested and spent the night in jail before his parents got 
him out on bail. While he avoided jail time, Chris had to go through 
rehab and is now living in a halfway house. He was also kicked out of 
Santa Clara. "You never think you're gonna get in trouble till you 
do," Sean admits.

Even though his friend was taken away in handcuffs, Sean started 
dealing again during the fall before stopping winter quarter this year.

"In the end, my conscious crept up," Sean says. "I'm conscious that 
my parents pay for college. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for 
them. And this is how I'm repaying them? As soon as my parents find 
out I'm selling coke, there goes college."

Sean says he stopped dealing, but he started liking coke more because 
he didn't have to think about making money. Still, he isn't worried 
about getting addicted.

"I think I'm the exception to the rule, because I enjoy using drugs, 
but I get homework done," says Sean, who has a GPA above 3.0. "But if 
I have nothing to do, I'm always down to do drugs."

He still gets free drugs from his friends who deal, but when he 
stopped he lost his social access.

"It's a big ego boost dealing, but as soon as you stop doing it, you 
realize all those people weren't your friends," Sean says. "I know it 
sounds dumb, but it hurt my feelings -- people who'd let me into 
parties now don't."

While Sean stopped dealing, Tim says he has no plans to slow down. 
But during spring break, Tim was pulled over for speeding and 
arrested for driving without a license. Sean hasn't heard from him since.

Lindsay says she now realizes how much Tim influenced her.

"I wouldn't have done as much had he not been here -- I would have 
taken it a lot slower," she says. "But it was accessible and easy for 
me to try it, and I was curious, so I thought I might as well. Now 
that it's come full circle, I see it's all fun and games, but drugs 
can fuck up your life. You've got to be so careful and in-tune with yourself."

A week before Tim is arrested, he takes a drink and says to me, 
"Someday, real life's gonna hit. But now, if you're a doctor or a 
lawyer, I'm right there with you, paying for dinner, tipping $25, 
$50, no problem. Maybe not for the long haul, but for the night anyway."

Tim then sits down beside me, looks at me sincerely and says, "When I 
get out, I'll be a happy soul. Till then, it's slavery. I feel like a 
slave, trapped, the game sucked me in. I have to work extra hard to 
make it. The game is what it is. It makes you who you are. Once I get 
out, then you'll see who I really am." 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake