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Cracked up
How did a drug whose addictive properties were once compared to potato chips become the scourge of America?
By Maia Szalavitz
[05/11/99]

Fixin' under Nixon
A new book examines Richard Nixon's progressive drug policies and the deevolution of the war on drugs.
By Lori Leibovich
[05/11/99]

Beijing journal
An American student watches the not-so-spontaneous uprising against NATO and the U.S.
By S.H.
[05/10/99]

Milosz: Peaceful coexistence is still possible in the Balkans
The Nobel Prize-winning poet, whose own country was devoured by its powerful neighbors, supports the NATO attacks -- and holds out hope for the future.
By Tamara Straus
[05/10/99]

Stop this war
Clinton and his leftist buddies in NATO are squandering our money and our military credibility in the Balkans.
By David Horowitz
[05/10/99]

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Crack and youth are a particularly volatile combination. The typical user's notion that he won't become hooked is only exacerbated by the youthful illusion of invincibility. Joseph, now 17, began dealing drugs in his early teens, and he saw crack's effects.

"I've seen the people starting out looking nice, then they're out on the streets begging for it," he says. Joseph himself realized he was hooked after he faced a one-year prison term for auto theft. Suddenly, treatment looked like a good option.

He's been clean for six months, and has been offered a full scholarship to a local cooking school. "I still have urges," he confides, "but I stay away from the people I used to hang out with."

Josh, 16, is another caught up in the city's crack reemergence. He was only 4 years old at the worst of the crack epidemic of the 1980s, and as a budding juvenile delinquent in the 1990s, "never paid attention to crack." That changed when a friend's uncle, straight out of prison, introduced him to the drug when Josh was 13.

Josh was primed for a new high. Fueled by crack, his petty crimes turned into a crime spree that included stealing cars and breaking into houses. "I was stealing for the drugs," he says. It wasn't until he faced a stiff prison sentence for 25 separate crimes that he took the last-chance option of drug treatment.

That was six months ago, and now Josh is clean for the first time in years. He's even allowed a few visits to his father's home in the Keys, where he carefully avoids old hangouts and habits. "I'm tired of the same thing, always getting into trouble," he says.

Jim Hall, director of the Up Front drug information center in Miami, estimates that anywhere from 3 to 5 percent of all adolescents in Miami-Dade now use crack, up three-fold in the past five years. Most striking, it is spreading out of the inner city and taking hold among young white and Hispanic suburbanites.

In short, while crack may have vanished from the media's radar, the problem has not gone away. "Local cocaine abuse still outranks other illicit drug problems," Hall wrote in a recent report co-authored by Dr. Michael Whitman.

The reasons for the persistence of the crack problem in Miami continue to confound local experts, but there's little doubt about its harsh effects. In East Little Havana, a 2.5-square-mile area populated mainly by low income Hispanic immigrants, Officer Fred D'Agostino and his partner, the lanky and hyper-alert Jose DeHombre, are driving their blue and white patrol car past the run-down homes and little knots of people watching them warily from the street corners. The officers are part of a neighborhood policing program that responds to ongoing citizen complaints about drug dealing. They don't limit themselves to making arrests. D'Agostino and DeHombre also seek to involve local kids in police-sponsored athletic activities to keep them out of trouble.

But their main weapon is enforcement. Last year, the pair made 70 crack-related arrests in just one month. One dealer was arrested three times in eight days. In February, their squad launched a three-month "Operation Hellraiser," targeted at drug dealing and prostitution. The team made 210 crack-related felony arrests, including 100 busts of small-time dealers. But that has barely put a dent in the city's continuing crack problem.

"I've been in this for 11 years, and in my view, it's never gone away," said D'Agostino, a compact man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. "Treatment has failed and jail has failed," he said, and he is still on the streets every day arresting people buying and selling rock cocaine.

"I wish the system would catch up with them. They're out [of jail] before we go back out in the streets."

Next page | No more "cocaine cowboys"