DRUGS THE COCAINE CAPITALISTS : A World Bank for Inner-City Kids : Neglected in the talk of legalization is what it would do to ghetto economies. Dealing offers powerful economic incentives for the young.

It’s midnight Thursday. A dank, dark crack house (a place where the drug is used, not sold) in Washington Heights. Julio and Skinner, two local dealers, sit at a corner table smoking a powerful blend of ganja and freebase. Others look on, thirsty for the smoke that spirals upward, then evaporates into the off-white walls.

Julio and his teen-age apprentice are off work, eager to breathe the smoke they are forbidden when selling. They are low-level dealers making five, six “hunnert” (hundred dollars) a day selling “product” (crack cocaine). Julio has invested his money in a local head (drug paraphernalia) shop. His eldest brother has a car dealership. His family owns a disco bar in the Dominican Republic. Julio encourages Skinner to invest his money in legit businesses.

Skinner has other ideas: He wants to buy the gold chain he saw downtown and a new car just like the one driven by the dealers in the next block.

“It’s not good to do that,” Julio warns his young associate. “If you do that, every kid that sees you will want to do the same thing. It’s not righteous, not politically chill (cool) to act this way.”

Like thousands of other inner-city youths and many adults, Julio and Skinner are cocaine capitalists. What cocaine does for inner-city economic life and what would replace it if drugs were legalized are rarely-discussed aspects of the multinational, multibillion-dollar drug business. Indeed, drug dealing offers powerful economic incentives for minorities in the United States.

“Cocaine is our World Bank, it is our product,” Julio asserts. “Without cocaine, my family would starve.

“We know the Colombians and the other Latino brothers are making money for their people. You can talk to the politicians in those countries and they tell you the reality is that the Escobars and the Ochoas are like folk heroes because they take the money and give it back to the people. Pablo Escobar has built homes for the poor in Medellin. Other big drug guys have used cocaine capital to boost the lives of the poor. This is more than the politicians can say.”

During the 1980s, the drug trade made life livable, in spite of some of its devastating social costs, for tens of thousands of people who would not have benefited from trickle-down economics or enterprise zones even if they had worked. Where can a 14-year-old inner-city youngster find a job with an income of several hundred--perhaps a thousand--dollars a week? He can’t.

Legalizers beg the question of what would happen to people who depend on the drug trade for survival--in other words, the loss of community income. Would the government replace this income with aid programs, jobs or entrepreneurial incentives? Would the pharmaceutical companies be the new beneficiaries of America’s appetite for drugs?

To ask these questions is not to condone the illegal lifestyles of drug-trade participants. Rather, it is to highlight the human complexities ignored by most legalization advocates. That same 14-year-old would be either using the legal drugs or selling to his friends who would be using them.

In my investigations of the cocaine-kid culture during the past 15 years, I discovered that despite the cocaine trade’s code of ethics that prohibits use of crack/freebase cocaine, it is clear that if not kids like Julio and Skinner, then others will find themselves--after a few years--using the drug not on off-days but every day. Instead of being dealers, they will be user/dealers and, eventually, just users. These are the kids who would constitute the ready market for legalized cocaine and other drugs. They are hooked.

Legalization would give them the venue to continue on the road to self-destruction already set in motion by the lack of legitimate opportunities in the regular economy, proper mentoring by concerned adults, poverty and disillusionment. Many of the young people who got involved in the cocaine business in the 1980s (it is estimated that as many as 150,000 teen-agers in New York City alone were in the trade) did so because they recognized an opportunity--one not forthcoming from the Reagan Administration and Congress when they cut job-training funding.

The illegal opportunity emerged as a result of the drop in world kilo prices of cocaine. Everybody took advantage of it: former marijuana dealers, corrupt officials, heads of state, investment-banking houses, money launderers, law-enforcement bureaucracies, unemployed teen-age crews/gangs. These teen-agers became the cocaine kids, the stepchildren of a marriage between poverty’s despair and the American dream.

The adults in the drug trade, meanwhile, were struggling to find a small business in which to invest their cocaine dollars so they, too, could get a part of that dream. The irony, of course, is that this is “the American way.” Various clans who made their way to legitimacy and respectability from illegal opportunities are the legendary families of which icons were made.

But let us return to the crack house in Washington Heights. Two young women have joined Skinner and Julio. They sit smoking the “blizzard” (white smoke of crack-freebase) from three-pronged glass pipes. Joan, the cook, dispenses the drug in small dosages to the waiting crackheads. “I never want to see this drug legalized” she tells me. “I don’t see what good it is to smoke this and have nothing else to do but look for something that ain’t there (the habit of looking for crack particles, referred to as ghost-busting). I hate this drug--but I love it. I’ve been on this pipe for seven long years and nothing is worse or better than my hit.”

The 17-year-old girl sharing the “high” with Joan lives in the crack house with four others; they have become her adopted family. Her real family she hasn’t called in two years. T.Q. has prostituted herself, sold her “lips” for $20 and now refuses to have sex until she’s seen “Scotty” (had her cocaine high). Now T.Q. is “bugging out” in a corner because she says she wants to kill herself every time she takes a hit. “I’ve been on the (George Washington) bridge three times with the pipe in my hand, and I keep saying I’m gonna do it one of these days. Why do I smoke? I must want to die.”

The loss of self-esteem, self-control and the guilt and confusion that come from the degradation depicted by T.Q.’s words are part of the real human cost, especially for young people. When poverty and lack of opportunity are added, drug legalization, whatever its form, would seem to be almost diabolical in its effect on the T.Q.s of America. It would be tantamount to denying the social conditions and values that lead to the quick-fix, artificial euphoria of drugs. To prescribe legalization is to mistake the symptom for the cause--proof of a complicity among political and economic “doctors” not to probe too deeply but, by advancing drug legalization, to let the social disease spread.