Word: users
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many dealers, selling a few grams or even an ounce or two a week, are in the business to satisfy their cravings. Fred Kamm, 42, for eight years a user-turned-dealer in coke-laden Aspen, Colo., made deliveries on a motorcycle and carried a telephone beeper to take orders; he also injected two grams a day of the merchandise. Says Margaret, the New York sales woman: "My boyfriend and I would get an ounce and sell off some and use some, but we always used more than we sold...
...euphoric effects of cocaine are well known. Heroin kills more of its users, but it acquired a uniquely dark stigma partly because of the backward quality of the opiate high: blissfully heedless, droopy, tuned out, lazy beyond words. Stimulant cocaine, however, is far more in tune with the swaggering mood of a country of nonstop gogetters. Users tend to have the perfect illusion, for 20 or 30 minutes, that they are smarter, sexier and more competent, radiant, vigilant, masterful, better: it promotes a kind of fascism of the self. (Indeed, Hermann Goring, a morphine user, is rumored to have used...
...room full of cokeheads, bristling with that hard, artificial arrogance, can be an unsettling place. "With cocaine," says Vertell Pendleton, a Chicago drug-abuse counselor and former user, "you're indestructible, perfect, the giant of your dreams." Donald, 42, a Philadelphia-born investment banker, lost his job, squandered his inheritance, and developed a hole in the septum of his nose. Nevertheless, he says, "I felt powerful, in control. Cocaine is ego food. It feeds the ego like nothing I've ever seen in my life." Tony, the owner of a Denver tire-repair shop, used four grams a day. Says...
...definition, people addicted to cocaine are out of control. They are probably on or over the edge of ruin. So it is a mean, symmetrical irony that cocaine's effect is to mimic will and emotional focus, permitting the user to feel he is blessed with precisely the virtues he lacks. Explains Illinois' Kirkpatrick: "The cocaine high is the way you would feel if you did something with your life. You think, 'For the first time in a long time, I've really got myself together...
...lethal. But overdoses of coke were directly or primarily responsible for as many as 300 deaths in 1981. Last year Dr. Charles Wetli, the deputy chief medical examiner for Miami's Dade County, attributed 14 local deaths exclusively to cocaine. All of those who died had been frequent users. But the alarming fact is that most of the dead had not been especially reckless: two-thirds died after merely snorting coke?not after free-basing or shooting up?and, according to Wetli, "[none used] any more on the day they died than they had previously." A stark example came last...