Word: gram
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cover was designed by Deputy Art Director Nigel Holmes and Design Consultant Tom Bentkowski. To fashion the "cokehead," they used nearly 100 one-gram packets of powdered artificial sweetener. "We found that it photographed the best," says Bentkowski. Just as well; obtaining the real thing not only would have been illegal but would have cost...
Once in the U.S., cocaine is diluted at each step in the distribution chain, usually with vegetable starches or anesthetics like Novocain. A typical retail gram of "cocaine" is only about 15% pure, although concentrations as high as 40% and as low as zero are not unusual. The price markup from dockside to coffee table is roughly ten times...
...Peruvian and Bolivian youths are rushing to become cokeheads. South American governments have been generally unsympathetic to U.S. jeremiads about the northward flow of South American drugs. But now they are seeing stylish cocaine abuse firsthand. And because the drug is so cheap in the Andes ($14 a street gram), it is more often smoked liberally in cigarettes than snorted...
...year. Cocaine has become a $25 billion business, about three times as big as the recording and movie industries put together. (The manufacture of cocaine paraphernalia is a small industry in itself: users spend millions of dollars a year on coke spoons, free-base pipes and extraction kits, digital gram scales and the like.) Selling coke is, in the words of one U.S. drug official, "the most lucrative of all underworld ventures...
...street prices that range from $ 100 to $ 150 a gram, which is about a teaspoonful, enough to keep two people well stoked for a few hours, cocaine is as pricey as it is evanescent. And for many people, conspicuous consumption is the point. Says a drug counselor in Houston: "The very expense makes people think they're special." Even the cocaine high seems unattractively linked to cash. "It's the drug for the all-American middle class," says Chuck, the insurance executive, who for 18 months spent nearly a third of his $35,000 salary on coke. "It makes...