Word: classing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...poor? In the bleak and bitter outskirts of Buenos Aires, thousands of people stand in line every morning, eyes glazed by hunger, clamoring for government handouts. The residents of most lower-class neighborhoods have had to fend for themselves. In the city's northern barrio of San Fernando, Ever Ponce, 30, and his brother Miguel, 37, work as shelf clerks in a supermarket and try to make ends meet with second jobs as painters at a private airport. Hard-pressed as they are, in recent months they helped organize a soup kitchen for their hunger-crazed neighbors, lining up donations...
Every country has its rich and poor, but in Latin America the gap between them is especially vast and is growing worse. The richest 20% of families enjoy a more extravagant life-style than that of the upper class in such industrialized countries as the U.S. and Japan. On the other side is an enormous group, 60% to 80% of the population, whose situation is approaching the despair of sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh. Of Argentina's 32 million citizens, close to 10 million are below the poverty line (a family income of less than $100 a month...
This is not the picture of the crack epidemic portrayed by the nightly news. On TV, crack addicts are almost invariably blacks and Hispanics from the ghetto. In real life, the problem is much broader: the number of white middle- and upper-class crack users may equal -- or even exceed -- the total from poor minority communities. No government studies break down crack use by economic status, but William Hopkins, a leading narcotics expert working for the state of New York, estimates that 70% of New York City's drug users are affluent. Across the U.S., drug counselors report rising numbers...
...problem of crack abuse among the affluent is especially disturbing because it comes at a time when the middle class seemed to be weaning itself from recreational drugs. Between 1985 and 1988, the number of casual drug users in the U.S. dropped from 23 million to 14.5 million, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. But according to another federal study, the number of Americans using crack cocaine at least once a week increased by one- third during that period, from under 650,000 to more than 860,000. "The poor people in the ghetto aren't buying...
Crack is not for men only. One of the most striking developments of the past five years is the increase of crack abuse among middle-class women. The American Association for Clinical Chemistry, the organization whose members perform 80% of the drug tests in the U.S., reports that among people who test positive for drugs, the percentage of women jumped from 25% in 1972 to 40% in 1988. Many of them first used cocaine to help lose weight...