Word: cracking
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With so much drug-related horror in the inner cities, it is easy to assume that crack is an exclusively underclass problem. Not so. "I see Key Club members and honor-society members destroyed by crack," says Jeanne Howard of the state attorney's office in Palm Beach County, Fla. There is a terrible symbiosis between the wealthy addicts and the inner-city dealers. Privileged kids who venture into the ghetto to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on crack are largely responsible for the booming drug business...
Eric grew up in Los Angeles' posh Brentwood section, and by tenth grade was an honor student, a varsity baseball player and an accomplished cellist. He was also becoming a crack addict. With friends who were similarly hooked, Eric would hop into the white Volkswagen camper his dad had bought him and drive into the seedy Venice Beach area. There he would purchase rocks from Los Angeles gang members. Sometimes he made three trips...
Eric, now 18, estimates that in two years he spent $40,000 on crack. At first he supported his habit with $200 a week earned from an after-school job delivering pizzas to big tippers in Westwood. As his habit became more expensive, he began forging checks and filching money from the wallets of his divorced parents. In eleventh grade, he flunked all his classes but still continued his trips to Venice. "It was scary all the time now," Eric recalls. "I would sit in the van needing a hit, but couldn't stop looking out the window...
...head when a menacing dealer forced his way into Eric's mother's home and demanded that she pay him the $200 her son owed him. Shortly thereafter, Eric entered a rehabilitation program called Pride. After four months, he emerged shaken but sober. He has dropped all his crack-smoking friends but worries about temptation. "Coke is still all around me," he says...
...Crack's corruption of children is becoming, in the Bible's phrase, a millstone around the neck of American society. Never before has public awareness of the crack crisis been so widespread. But most of the sweeping solutions being offered seem specious, if not unworkable...