Smokable Cocaine-Heroin Mixture Seen as Spreading Lethal Addiction : Drugs: The blend moderates the crash and depression of crack. Users call it the ‘ultimate high.’
Jay Tee Warner dropped to his knees. Man, he thought, this is powerful stuff. His head buzzed from the crack--the light, wonderful feeling that soon gives way to the sweat washing down his face and the ringing in his ears that leaves a terrifying silence in its wake.
Normally, the high disappears after a few minutes, and then he feels awful. Not this time. This was the weirdest trip Warner had taken in 25 years of drug use. This rock tasted like medicine--like dope, like heroin. Instead of crashing, Warner found himself enjoying a gentle descent, sort of like a parachute.
Warner’s skinny body--139 pounds of pallid flesh on a 6-foot, 2-inch frame--still throbbed with the crack. He needed some booze to calm down. As he stood in line to buy cognac at a liquor store on a sweltering August morning in Washington, his head drooped, smacking against his chest. A friend smacked him. Stay awake, man. He was up again.
‘Ultimate High’
Users call it the “ultimate high.” It’s easy to see why.
Crack, turbocharged cocaine in smokable rock form, causes euphoria. It jolts the brain with a charge that sends the senses reeling. Users want to jump up and down and run a one-minute mile--but they often just sit there, hearts racing, sometimes so fast that they go into cardiac arrest.
Heroin--dope, in street parlance--does the opposite. It’s called “the nods” because users’ heads flop down like a rag doll’s. Heroin smoothes away all the difficulties of life--sometimes so much so that the respiratory system nods into a never-waking slumber.
Now people are beginning to smoke both at once. In trying to ease the intense depression that follows a crack high, users mix that drug with heroin in a smokable rock or spread heroin over crack. “It’s like having your cake and eating it, too,” said a crackhead in New York who is trying to kick drugs and asked not to be named.
It’s also like playing Russian roulette with five bullets. Drug experts fear that the hybrid will combine the worst of each substance, littering already devastated inner-city streets with more corpses and leaving the living with a terrible new dual addiction.
“You could have a smokable heroin epidemic every bit as bad as the crack epidemic,” said Mark A.R. Kleiman, a drug control expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
At a recent hearing on drug abuse, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) called the crack-heroin combination “a new form of an old drug that promises to make more Americans heroin addicts than ever before.”
The Bush Administration warned when it outlined its anti-drug strategy that crack could be followed by a smokable combination of crack and heroin.
“Almost every stimulant epidemic in history has ignited a sedative epidemic in its wake, as users begin employing chemical ‘downs’ to modulate the peaks and valleys of addiction,” the Administration said. “The drug market has shown a genius for innovation. In the past year or so, a cheap, powerful and instantly intoxicating form of smokable heroin--which obviates the need for intravenous needles--has begun to appear on our streets.”
Phoenix House, one of the largest treatment programs in New York, where the smokable combination of crack and heroin was first reported, says that one-third of its entrants have smoked it. In the drug unit of Washington’s D.C. General Hospital, about half of the two dozen adolescents in treatment on a recent day had experimented with the combined substances.
Even before the new smokable form of the two drugs became available, the trends had been ominous. In Los Angeles and Washington, emergency rooms report fourfold increases from 1984 to 1988 in the number of persons admitted for combined heroin and cocaine use, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
In Los Angeles, overdose deaths from combined cocaine and heroin use jumped from 46 in 1984 to a high of 127 in 1987 before dropping to 64 the next year. Washington reported a doubling of overdose deaths in the same period.
Officials point out that the numbers do not mean that the two drugs were taken in the new rock form or even that they were smoked. But they do point to a worrying surge in dual use.
Mixing drugs is nothing new. Addicts have long experimented with a dizzying array of substances, forever looking for a better high, a fact often obscured by headlines announcing large seizures of single drugs and the separate tallies that police and experts keep.
And drugs are often cut with everything from soap to strychnine. Some users have even been reported intentionally smoking formaldehyde with pot and PCP.
Nor is this the first time that cocaine and heroin have been combined. “Speedball,” an intravenous brew of the two drugs, has been around for a long time. But its popularity is thought to have waned because of the difficulty involved in mixing and shooting the drug, not to mention the risk of AIDS from dirty needles.
The new mixture solves all those problems.
Couldn’t Be Revived
Warner was down again. Back home from the liquor store, fortified by the cognac, he smoked a second rock, which sent him crashing to the floor. His friends shook him, slapped him, yelled at him. They stuck ice packs between his legs. But they couldn’t revive him.
Finally, after who knows how many hours, he came to. His first thoughts were the addict’s usual ones. “I wanted some more dope,” he recalled. “That’s all I was concerned about.”
Not that he didn’t have anything else to worry about. He had a court appointment that morning for dealing crack.
On top of that, District of Columbia officials came to evict the 43-year-old Warner, his common-law wife (years ago he went to buy a marriage license but blew the money on dope instead) and their seven children from their dilapidated house in southeast Washington. Startled by the sight of the emaciated, besotted Warner, the officials asked him if he wanted help.
“Man,” he told them, “I’ve been trying to kick drugs for three years.”
Called ‘Parachute’
On the street, they call it “parachute,” “moon rock” and “50-50.” Sometimes, it is mistakenly known as “speedball,” the combination of cocaine and heroin taken intravenously, and “chasing the dragon,” a term formerly applied to smoking heroin alone.
National Institute on Drug Abuse officials say that the drug has reached widespread use only in New York, where the new mixture has become so popular that almost nothing else is available on some street corners.
Robert, a 24-year-old recovering New York addict at Phoenix House, a rehabilitation program with 10 centers on both coasts, said that dealers at first gave it away to build up a clientele.
“You’re going to love this,” he said a dealer told him several months ago when he gave him an ordinary-looking rock, not telling him about the heroin in it. “I loved it.”
Authorities in Washington report that people are coming to treatment programs with stories of smoking the drugs together in one rock. Dealers seem to be “testing it around” before going retail, they say.
Spot checks with drug experts in Los Angeles turned up several confirmations of the combination’s being used there. “It’s being requested now” from dealers, said Lee Christian, a drug counselor and former addict at the Avalon-Craver Community Center in South-Central Los Angeles. “It’s not really a big deal yet.”
“I don’t think the gangs have it,” Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Wes McBride said. “But they will.”
Anti-drug workers fear that the combination of crack and heroin is likely to prove alluring--and lethal.
“There is a ready market out there, almost a need,” said Blanche Frank, chief of epidemiology with New York’s Substance Abuse Services. “After being wired out on cocaine, there’s nothing like smoothing out on a narcotic like heroin. People are really looking for something to ameliorate that terrible feeling” of post-crack depression.
By itself, crack is terrifying enough.
“There’s nothing like the first hit,” a New York user who calls herself Cindy fondly recalled recently. “I always say, ‘I’m never going to do another one,’ but I always do. It’s like potato chips.”
However, a $5 or $10 hit lasts only a few minutes. In its wake comes a terrible depression.
“Imagine being Donald Trump and someone snatches it away from you,” is how Robert, the recovering New York addict, put it. “You feel like a worm.”
“They know damn well that, when they smoke that last rock, they’re going to plunge,” said William Hopkins, director of street research with New York Substance Abuse Services. “They will do anything, anything , to avoid that.”
Enter heroin.
Combining it with cocaine can be relatively simple: You sprinkle a little of the powdered Asian white heroin powder or smear the gooey Mexican black tar over a rock of crack and fire it up.
But more and more drug workers are reporting a precooked version of the drug, an off-white square half the size of a sugar cube that looks like ordinary crack but contains varying amounts of heroin. That’s the way crack started in the early 1980s, as a more marketable, convenient and compact form of the complicated “free-base” process of smoking cocaine.
When heroin is combined with crack in a rock and lit, the whole thing immediately turns to smoke--smoke that no rockhead will let escape. Users who hasten to suck in the smoke immediately get the full dose, no matter how much heroin is mixed in.
Drug experts fear that this will result in an epidemic of overdoses. And younger users, those who have no experience with heroin, will be particularly at risk.
Hopkins predicted “an entire new generation of people addicted to heroin.” He worries that, once people start smoking heroin, they will start shooting it as well. And that, he says, could open the floodgates to a surge of AIDS.
One recovering addict, interviewed at the Daytop Far Rockaway residential center in Queens on the condition that his name not be used, said that he started snorting heroin and then began shooting it. Added a former heroin user at Daytop named Anthony: “If you like the high from smoking heroin, you’ll love shooting it.”
By mitigating crack’s wild high, heroin brings users a sense of being in control. Drug workers regard that as a disguised evil.
“If they’re convinced that they’re in control of their life, they won’t seek help,” said Chris Policano of Phoenix House. “It’ll keep them on the street longer.”
“They might look more controllable, but it’s a harder addiction,” added Dr. Walter Faggett, who heads the drug program at D.C. General Hospital. “We’re talking dangerous. We’re talking death.”
In-Patient Program
Usually, it takes three weeks to get into the in-patient drug program at D.C. General.
Warner, who went there when he was evicted from his house, got in after one night--a night of fitful sleep on the hard chairs of the emergency room, sweating buckets and occasionally throwing up from heroin withdrawal. Then there were the hallucinations--people holding him down, sticking needles in him.
“It’s pain, pure pain,” he said weeks later. “Like you want to die; it’s terrible. You feel like killing yourself, like blowing someone else away to get some money for a fix.”
The normal stay at the hospital is a week to 10 days. Warner was there for three weeks.
The admitting physician described Warner, whose crack addiction has wasted 50 pounds off his body, as “thin, lean, shabby looking.” His gentle-looking face, framed by a scraggly beard and close-cropped hair, is covered with the innumerable scars of years spent living on the brink. Now, in a half-way house, he sports a slightly worn suit and tie, an outward sign of his inward determination to learn to read and write and find a good job.
Warner, an eighth-grade dropout and a heroin addict since age 18, started smoking crack two years ago. Somehow he had maintained a semblance of normalcy on heroin, holding down a job as a pipe fitter for 18 years.
Crack sent him over the edge. To get some, he once fire-bombed a dealer’s apartment with a vodka bottle filled with gasoline. “Fire started spreading everywhere,” he remembered. “People started running, and I grabbed the ‘caine.”
His prize was a waste basket-size plastic bag full of thousands of dollars worth of the drug. It was gone in less than a day--traded for sex, sold for cash and, of course, smoked.
Somewhere along the line of sex and needles, Warner picked up the AIDS virus, as have about 25% of those tested on entry to the drug program in which he is enrolled. He has not developed the disease--not yet.
Chances are Warner would not have cared if he had known at the time. On crack, all you care about is the next rock--and how to cushion the hard fall you know is coming on the heels of that first, delicious hit.
That’s what happened that steaming summer day when Warner put a pipe to his lips and smoked a rock of parachute.
“I was the type couldn’t no drug take me down,” he boasted. “But I found one that did.”