Coke Inferno

When surveying the cocaine scene, it's almost tempting to ask, New York-style ("Is Manhattan the New Brooklyn?" "Is Abstinence the New Sex?"), whether coke is the new weed--or at least the new coke. In terms of provenance (Medellin cartel) and potency (got talc?), though, coke is pretty much what it's always been. What's changed is who's doing it, where, and why.

Fifteen years ago, access was largely limited to those hooked into clubowner Peter Gatien's Palladium-Tunnel-Limelight grotto. The limited number of buyers for the high-priced high gave the drug a kind of celebrity chic, while those living in outright ghettos had easy (and open-air) access to a short-term, low-cost crack high. For the vast and indeterminate class in between, though, scoring could be an adventure.

One friend, now a prominent young journalist, told me how when in college at the time he used to buy from a dealer in the East Village. "The guy was always home," he told me. "Always. He had completely pure, uncut stuff, unbelievably cheap. The problem was that the guy sat around literally all day in his underwear, blowing coke and watching porn movies, and he would only sell to thin young boys.

"So my friends would send me up to this guy's place while they waited in the bar under his apartment, and I would sit there with him while he weighed it and cut lines, offering to call girls up to come over and fuck me-as long as he could watch. His boyfriend would be sitting there without any clothes on reading the newspaper."

A Conde Nast writer, a club kid or a crackhead would not have had to put up with such shenanigans, but for an ordinary college kid, "It was either that or go trawling through horrible West Village bars hoping some guy would sell you a dime bag cut with talcum powder-if you were lucky. It wasn't hard to find, but there was still a mystique about it, and you had to be in the club to score well."

By the early 1990s, the bottom had fallen out of the Colombian futures market, a result of crack wars, yuppie burnout and an ever-fickle drug culture (remember Huey Lewis' "I Want a New Drug"?). And of course Giuliani and the new police state (which would have made a great 80s band name) had an effect.

But of late coke has been gaining in popularity. In 1991 just 1.4 percent of high school seniors admitted to having used the drug. By 2002, researchers for the University of Michigan found that 7.8 percent of high school seniors had tried coke-an increase of 557 percent in just more than a decade. This dramatic rise has happened even as cigarette smoking, Ecstasy and acid use have all plummeted.

Part of the reason why is price, which has stayed low even as the stigma has vanished. Old-time users may be surprised to learn how cheap a night around the mirrored table can be these days. Alvy Singer sneezed away a $200 gram in Annie Hall-these days a gram can be found for as low as 60 dollars.

At these prices, though, the drug no longer offers the same cachet it once did to Wall Street's Masters of the Universe or to Sunset Boulevardiers. Doug Dechert, a former Page Six writer and onetime partner in the popular 80s dance club Lucy's Surfeteria notes that his older male friends "who gave girls a line thinking they'd get laid in return learned that it doesn't work like that anymore."

The low price has also meant easy access for the starving-artists set and the Saturday-night fevered. Anyone who remembers the days when open-air dealing made areas like Tompkins Square a no-man's land after dark might be surprised to hear that most of the street sellers have migrated west, into heavily gentrified and heavily policed Starbucks territory. Without the high profit margins once associated with the drug, there isn't the cutthroat competition that leads to violence among dealers, and without such violence, dealing doesn't draw intense police scrutiny.

In neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea, cell phones have made home delivery as ubiquitous as Chinese takeout.

Now that coke is no more expensive than serious drinking, though, its appeal is no longer limited strictly to neighborhoods that serve as overprivileged outposts of the Midwest. At a recent Cocaine Anonymous meeting in Astoria (Queens!), the attendees were mostly working class, young, attractive and desperate. Many had been reduced to smoking crack (or, as they primly put it, "freebasing") or snorting heroin when coke wasn't around. One woman was seven months pregnant and beset with dreams of getting high. She'd already relapsed several times.

While a few social spots continue to cater, most cracked down on sales after Giuliani systematically destroyed Peter Gatien's nightlife empire due to the reputed easy availability of drugs at Gatien-owned Limelight, Tunnel and Palladium, and chased the eye-patched icon out of town. (The recent acquittal of the owner of Sound Factory may put a damper on such relentless campaigns against club owners, however.)

Bon vivants out for pleasure now tend to BYOC instead of buying in-house. Still, art critic and permanent nightlife fixture Anthony Haden-Guest maintains that however people are buying, the effect remains that "an honest pee is a hard thing to get in clubland."

Those places that remain in the business tend to be less upscale. One recently closed dive bar was known to its patrons as Cokie's; one famous Bowery rock club has for years been a better place to make connections than to hear music.

At the same time, upper-crust attitudes have changed. Haden-Guest see the biggest difference from 20 years ago as how Park Avenue treats coke. No longer do aristocrats strut about with vials and spoons slung around their necks on chains; cocaine remains on the outs at society events, and limousine drivers long ago quit dealing and started actually driving.

Public consumption of the drug is generally restricted to house parties these days, a far cry from when movie producer Julia Phillips threw a bag of powder down on the table before a marketing meeting and no one batted an eye. Haden-Guest recalls that previous cocaine epoch as one in which "people would be laying down lines at the bar? you'd be at formal dinner parties and elderly people would just take some out and shove it up their nostrils at dinner."

For those who don't take it the biggest problem with cocaine may be that, as Haden-Guest has it, "It's not an interesting drug. Once people are on it, they just yammer." Has anyone ever met a cokehead they liked?

While the Mayflower set may have discovered some sense of decorum toward the drug, not all among the city elites have. Two acquaintances recently went into a meeting with a powerful business executive and were interrupted twice: first when the businessman pulled out a bag and took a toot, and again when his beautiful young daughter popped in to help herself to a bag for later.

Afterward, the pair was invited out for a drink by the daughter, who it turned out was in the eighth grade at an expensive parochial school. Lugging about a volume of Dante, she told them that most of her friends used coke, and that she had her own dealers but visited her father because he had better stuff.

If this sounds unbelievable, recast it with marijuana in place of cocaine. It's disgusting, but not implausible-not even shocking, really. Perhaps coke is the new weed after all.