Crack: A Horror That Comes Wrapped Like Candy

I always thought the most terrible words in the language were ones like leukemia, colostomy, carcinogenic, infarction. Anything ending in oma . In proper names, Mafia was not too reassuring. Neither were Gestapo, Ku Klux Klan. Letters sent shivers--KGB, AIDS.

But now I’m beginning to think the most terrible word in any language is only one syllable long-- crack.

I think it’s responsible for more heartaches than any myocardial infarction ever diagnosed. It kills more people than holiday traffic. It ruins more lives than a flood. It is inhumane, insidious, and, like every package from hell, it comes disguised as ecstasy.

It’s not a simple virus. It’s worse than that. It attacks healthy tissue. There is nothing wrong with the people exposed to it. Their immune systems are otherwise in perfect working order, their heart rates, blood pressures and temperatures are normal. They are going to ruin their minds first. The rest of their bodies will follow.

Crack is the street name for cheap, transportable, concealable cocaine. It has made slow death affordable. Better things for better dying through chemistry. Good old American know-how and capitalistic competition have finally driven the price down to where it is available to kids with lunch money. It could go in a counter with the penny candy. Maybe they’ll put baseball cards in it soon, like bubble gum.

It may be doing to this country what Hitler, the Kaiser, the Spanish fleet, the Confederacy or the British Crown could never do--bring it to its knees. It’s destroying our children.

At least, the First Lady of the United States thinks so. You argue with her. I’m on her side in this one.

She was in town the other day to address a joint meeting of the Pasadena Kiwanians and Rotarians on a subject dear to her dread--drug abuse. A condition of her appearance was that half the audience be made up of school-age children. She wants their attention.

How serious is the problem? Well, Mrs. Ronald Reagan has quoted a story in which a reporter polled a convention of small-town mayors at Niagara Falls to find out what they thought the No. 1 problem facing their communities was. And the answer was not traffic or liability insurance but the five-letter word crack.

Crack is the most diabolical form of a harmful substance to make its appearance this century. Because it comes wrapped and coated like Christmas candy. Like something you’d find in your Christmas stocking. It’s is like death wearing a bridal dress, the big rock candy mountain with a volcano inside. It is turning America into a horror movie.

The role of athletes in the ongoing struggle is not a small one.

Ironically, in spite of TV spots in which famous sports stars warn sternly against drug usage, the most powerful anti-drug messages of the past year were delivered by two sports figures who didn’t know they were doing it but who gave the ultimate to the cause--their lives. Don Rogers and Len Bias probably did more to bring home the evils of substance abuse than all the billboards on all the highways of America. A headstone is the definitive billboard, the ultimate TV spot.

But not totally decisive. Their overdoses last year should have shocked a whole generation of possible users but Mrs. Reagan pointed out sadly that “in spite of the great publicity given to the cocaine-related deaths of these two sports stars, in one survey of 223 California teen-agers, only 12% said they are scared of cocaine.”

What’s to be done? Well, while top athletes insist that they chafe and squirm under their casting as role models for American youth, it goes with the territory. It’s implicit in the million-dollar contract. If you don’t become a role model, you don’t sell tickets. Or shaving cream.

But is the best thing they can do for the cause is die for it?

It would seem the best thing they could do is eradicate it from the ranks of the most visible of American citizens, the homer hitters, the touchdown makers. If they condone drugs, what chance do you have to make it unpopular with the masses?

America gets the wrong message. People are always sure there is a short cut to success, a secret known only to the successful. If they get the idea a chemical can make you run faster, play prettier, sing louder, dance lighter, hit harder or throw longer, it could be catastrophic.

Yet, every attempt to clean up professional sports by random or mandatory testing has been wiped out in a power play between unions and management or in the active opposition of a battery of civil liberties watchdogs who see fascism in traffic tickets.

When the owner, Gene Klein, sold his San Diego Chargers, he said a big part of the reason was his failure to win his 15-year fight to mandate drug testing. He put his money into the iffy world of thoroughbred racing instead.

“Horses never want to renegotiate existing contracts and have no objection to being tested for illegal drugs,” he explained.

It’s hard to see why anyone should. Cocaine has been around since Sigmund Freud’s day. Its properties have been carefully catalogued. God put it here as a balm for the maimed, not an intoxicant for the privileged. If they’re passing it around now to the young wrapped like bubble gum, Mrs. Reagan should be leading an army, not fighting roadblocks by cynics.

People marvel when a man flies an ocean in a rickety monoplane, or jumps a canyon on a motorcycle, or walks a chasm on a wire. Mrs. Reagan holds that these are rocking-chair types compared to the daredevil who tries a drug. It is the biggest risk he will ever take in his life. The proposition is to make sure he knows it going in.

Damon Runyon once said “All life is 6-to-5 against.” For the user, it goes to 1 million to 1. Even at those odds-on, death is an overlay.