Popularity of ‘Crack’ Fuels Cocaine Boom

The trying task of reducing cocaine production overseas is made all the more daunting by the nation’s appetite for the drug, which has grown more insatiable as “crack” cocaine has grown more popular.

Despite recent inroads, anti-drug officials acknowledge that the amount of cocaine reaching the United States has never been greater.

Unofficial estimates by the Drug Enforcement Administration put annual imports at more than 100 metric tons--a 35% increase over official 1985 figures compiled by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and a threefold increase over the cocaine influx in 1982.

The initial boom in cocaine use came as the drug’s popularity spread throughout American society. But experts believe that the number of regular users may now have leveled off at 4 million to 6 million Americans, and many middle-class users appear to have turned away from the drug.

What accounts for the increased demand, they suspect, is the fact that individual users are snorting, smoking and injecting more cocaine than they ever have before.

The reason is the booming popularity of highly addictive “crack,” a cocaine derivative so alluring that it has caused an epidemic of drug use in the nation’s largest cities.

“This drug is much more seductive than regular cocaine,” says Douglas Anglin, a drug abuse expert at UCLA. “It is a drug that people will just smoke and smoke and smoke.”

Failure to recognize the degree to which crack changed cocaine consumption patterns in the United States may have caused federal officials to underestimate the problem, drug experts believe.

“We really don’t know how much coke the average user takes,” one law enforcement officer conceded.

And the fierce demand has provided drug traffickers with a powerful incentive to form ever more elaborate networks to ensure that their cocaine reaches the U.S. market. Drug enforcement officials, squeezed between the booming demand and the increasing sophistication of suppliers, acknowledge that they have been outpaced.

“Cocaine,” says deputy DEA Administrator Tom Kelly, “is the Achilles’ heel of drug enforcement.”