A Very Expensive High

Cocaine--coke, flake, blow and lady, the white crystalline compound that Sigmund Freud made famous in 1884--is also called snow; and now at the beginning of 1975, a blizzard of cocaine is blowing over us, little spoons hanging from our necks like crucifixes, snorting noises in the next room coming from people who don't have colds, people working 20-hour days who used to work four. The United States Bureau of Customs seized only six pounds of illegal cocaine in 1960, but 907 pounds in 1974, and the bureau estimates that each figure accounted for less than five percent of the traffic. Both estimates are probably low. In the past two years, cocaine has spilled from the ghetto and the mansion to become the illegal drug of choice, second only to marijuana, of many prosperous middle-class Americans. At $60 to $90 a gram, one user's evening's worth, it isn't likely to replace Jack Daniel's or Chivas Regal on the side table, but it is being used, socially and privately, in every major American city. Illegal laboratories in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Argentina are working overtime to satisfy the growing North American demand, a demand that must seem all the more surprising when you consider that cocaine is classed, inaccurately but legally, as a hard narcotic and is subject to the same Draconian penalties as heroin. Who, even as recently as five years ago, would have guessed that otherwise straight people, doctors, lawyers and merchant chiefs, would take such risks? And what are we to make of that?

• • •

Late afternoon in a friend's apartment, the door locked, the sunlight slanting through the windows. I've never tried coke before, have hardly even smoked grass, am apprehensive, feel the tension of this fiercely illegal act in my arms and at the back of my head. The tension shapes itself into an uncontrollable grin, the facial equivalent of a giggle, a child's response to the forbidden, playing dress-up in Daddy's shoes. I grinned so when news of another friend's suicide reached me years ago and was appalled until I understood that we sometimes respond by opposites, grinning with fear, crying with joy. My friend isn't grinning; he is grim with tension after a bad day at the office.

From the locked drawer of a low table he removes a glass one-ounce vial and a miniature spoon. The vial is half full of a powder not quite white, a tinge of brown to its white. The spoon, its bowl smaller than the nail on my little finger, has a ring attached to its handle and could be worn on a chain around the neck, though my friend prefers not to advertise his interest in cocaine by so wearing it. Others do, perhaps even some who don't use the lady, as once, as teenagers, we carried a condom in our wallets when we had no ladies to use.

"This is it," he says, holding up the vial. "It's fantastic stuff. It can do things nothing else (continued on page 170)Very Expensive High(continued from page 131) does. It doesn't send you off into a corner and it doesn't fuck up your head. You can use it and then go on with an ordinary day and all that happens is that you feel normal, feel straight. I'm tired right now and I'm pissed off and I'm down. After the coke, I'll be ready for the evening." He unscrews the lid and dips into the cocaine with the spoon. "This is premium, better than you can get on the street. It's maybe seventy, eighty percent pure. I had it tested. It's cut with lactose. It's good shit." The spoon comes out of the vial mounded with the powder and in the late-afternoon light, suddenly it sparkles, the small flat crystals catching the sun. My friend sniffs to clear his head and then raises the spoon to one nostril and with a loud snort sucks the coke up his nose. His expression doesn't change, but his eyes widen and he lets his breath go slowly out. His motions now more serious, more deliberate, he dips the spoon into the vial and withdraws another mound of coke and snorts again, then leans back in his chair and is silent, abstracted, as I have been silent and abstracted by the first taste of a fine wine. He returns from that distance and looks at me.

"That was a full hit," he says, more quietly than before. "You should probably start with less. Be careful not to breathe out as you bring the spoon to your nose or you'll blow the stuff away." My hands are trembling, but not enough to spill the coke. I dip the spoon into the vial, tapping it against the side to level it, bring it to my nose and snort hard and feel a flare of powder brushing inside my head and then feel it dissolve and disappear. Carefully I return the spoon to the vial and scoop another hit and tap it level and bring it to my other nostril and snort again, spilling a few grains this time into my mustache. I hand the vial and the spoon back to my friend and settle on the couch, watching the motes of dust moving in the sunlight, watching what is happening to the inside of my nose. My friend comes out of his silence to ask me my favorite music and I say Bach, Mozart. He unwinds from his chair and finds a record and puts it on his stereo and returns and sits down. "Chopin's concerto number one in E minor," he says, smiling. The motes of dust in the sunlight remind me of times as a boy when I lay in the loft of the barn on cool autumn mornings, the alfalfa sweet beneath me, sparrows chirping in the peaks of the rafters, random lines and tubes and bands of light coming down from holes in the roof, dust from the hay dancing complicated patterns that I could change with the slightest motion of my little finger in the light, complicated patterns that played like silent music before my eyes. My head clears, my lungs, burred with smoking, clear, and I am breathing mountain air in a city apartment in the late afternoon. A taste I've never tasted before appears at the top of my throat, a taste bitter and medicinal but not unpleasant, the taste of cocaine, and I realize without concern that it's a taste I'll never forget.

So, we sit, in the late afternoon, our pupils dilating, listening to Chopin and the light, and when I come back from wherever I went, I realize that the tremor in my hands is stilled and the grin has disappeared, I'm calm. I'm myself within myself, my friends has gone gentle, the way I enjoy him most, and after a while we take another hit and leave for an evening of good food and good talk in the company of good women. But I wonder, before I go, if the change came from the coke or from the shared peace and music-framed silence, or from my relief at having done what I feared to do. My friend says the change comes from the coke, but that, after all, is why he uses it.

• • •

Coca--not cocoa but Erythroxylon coca, the native South American plant from which cocaine is refined--grows on the eastern slopes of the Andes, grows best between 1500 and 6000 feet in the zone of the mountain climate called the Cinchona, the zone Peruvians call the Montaña. It is an evergreen zone, cool, humid, frost-free, the mean annual temperature between 65 and 68 degrees with little variation from day to day, mists blowing across the slopes, mists curling around the coca bushes in the small cleared plots, the cocals, that the Indians cultivate--Carmel weather all the way. Coca, in the language of the Incas, meant tree, without qualifiers, the primal tree, the pre-eminent tree, and left unpruned, the cultivated plant would grow as tall as ten or twelve feet, but the Indians prune it down to three or four feet, keeping it within reach and forcing it to thicken and bush outward, forcing it to produce more leaves. The leaves, not the flowers or the berries or the bark, are the coca plant's crop, glossy-green on one side, silvery-gray on the other, varying in size and shape, depending on their maturity and on the subspecies of E. coca to which they belong but generally oval and pointed, one to four inches in length, half an inch to two inches in width. A prominent central vein runs from stem to point; pseudo veins curve on each side of it from stem to point; between the pseudo veins and the central vein the venous system is denser than on the margins of the leaf; held to the light, a coca leaf appears to harbor a ghostly miniature of itself, a leaf within a leaf, at its heart.

Manco Capac--rich Manco--and Mama Ocllo, who Inca legend insists were white, appeared one day on the shores of Lake Titicaca, Manco Capac holding a golden wand in his hand. The wand was a divining rod and the two mysterious white people followed it north all the way to the site of Cuzco, where it struck and buried itself in the ground. "And here," writes a historian, "was built the palace of the first Inca." The year was 1021. Coca was there before the Inca rulers came, but they took possession of it; the Inca was divine and coca was divine; coca came from God and God was the Inca; the Inca controlled the coca, collected it in tribute and dispensed it for devotion, like the body and blood of Christ. The Inca had a thousand concubines and wore a headdress of gold surmounted by two white feathers. The people were divided by regions, north, south, east and west, and within regions were organized by tens, ten families making a Chunca, ten Chuncas making a Pachaca, and so on up to 10,000, each rank of tens under an appointed leader who was responsible to the leader above him, the ultimate leaders responsible to the Inca himself. So the kingdom was orderly, the Inca stern but benign. The kingdom flowered into golden ornaments and fine woolen tapestries, palaces and aqueducts of unmortared stone, exotic festivals and bold celebrations, and on the hillsides of the Montaña, the soil held in place by narrow terraces like steps down the mountain carved for the feet of God, the coca grew.

Francisco Pizarro, a soldier's bastard son, said to have been suckled by a sow, came down sniffing gold and destroyed the kingdom by lopping off its head. The administrators who followed him suppressed the Indian use of coca until they understood that without it the Indians could not perform their slave labor in the gold mines, and then they supplied it contemptuously, a slave's furtive pleasure, a weakness of brown and lesser men. The poisoned gold floated across the sea and inflated Europe. Sickened by it. Spain grew arthritic, Spain grew old. The Indians abided and eventually broke free. They use coca now, 8,000,000 of them, as they used it then, in moderation, as a tonic, part of the continuity of their lives. They pick the leaves, dry them carefully over a fire or in the sun, chew them mixed with a paste made of ashes. The paste, which is alkaline, may serve to sweeten the leaves or it may liberate their alkaloids. At least 14 alkaloids have been isolated from coca leaves, of which cocaine is one. The Indians prefer the sweeter leaves, and the sweeter leaves contain less cocaine. Cocaine is not the essence of coca but merely the most potent of its decoctions. The other alkaloids may temper it, moderate its effects: So little research has been done on coca that no one knows. The Indians know. "They carry an herb, the leaves of which can sustain them two days without eating or drinking, by merely carrying these in their mouths. This herb they call coca." That is a Spanish chronicler. writing in 1535. They still do today.

Coca came to Europe about the same time as coffee and tea, two far more jagged tonics. Why it failed to achieve their popularity the record doesn't explain. The record registers a search for essences, for vital principles: To master the complexity of the natural world, young science sought simplicity. If man had an essential soul, psychoactive plants must have an essential secret ingredient. A German named Gaedcke isolated an alkaloid from coca in 1855. He named it Erythroxylon. A German named Niemann purified the alkaloid in 1860. He named it cocaine. It was white as the driven snow.

• • •

Cocaine--cocaine hydrochloride in its legal and most of its illegal forms--is benzoylmethylecogonine, an ester of ecgonine and benzoic acid, chemical formula C17H21NO4. In its refined state, it is a crystalline compound, the crystals long, prism-shaped, needled. It is a powerful local anesthetic and a subtle general stimulant, two characteristics that sound antagonistic but aren't. It isn't much used for local anesthesia anymore; that effect, discovered by a colleague of Freud's in 1884, was hailed as a boon to mankind, but the eye surgeons who were the primary recipients of the boon soon discovered that cocaine damaged the cornea and excessively dilated the pupil of the eye, and switched to procaine and other man-made anesthetics when they were developed in the early 20th Century. Ear, nose and throat men still sometimes use cocaine for nose surgery, spraying it onto the mucous membranes or applying it in liquid form, just about the only official medical use left for what was once a wonder drug.

Cocaine is usually described as a central-nervous-system stimulant, its stimulation beginning in the higher centers of the brain and, with increased dosage, working downward to the lower. That description doesn't distinguish cocaine from the amphetamines: It differs in its more generalized effect on the brain and doesn't wire users up, string them out, as amphetamines do. Some researchers believe it also works by suppressing whatever in the body is responsible for depression, fatigue, the blues, bringing the body up to normal rather than raising it to high. "The psychic effect [of cocaine]," Freud wrote, "consists of exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which does not differ in any way from the normal euphoria of a healthy person. The feeling of excitement which accompanies stimulus by alcohol is completely lacking; the characteristic urge for immediate activity which alcohol produces is also absent. One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work; on the other hand, if one works, one misses that heightening of the mental powers which alcohol, tea or coffee induce. One is simply normal, and soon finds it difficult to believe that one is under the influence of any drug at all."

Freud was describing the effects of a .05-to-.10-gram dose. In such moderate doses cocaine increases pulse rate, blood pressure and respiration, dilates the pupils and suppresses appetite by anesthetizing the lining of the stomach. Freud took cocaine by mouth in liquid form, and so did not notice the effects that users today, who generally snort cocaine in powdered form, look for and cherish: the freeze that comes when the powder anesthetizes the mucous membranes of the nose, the flash that comes when the powder, dissolving in the nose and the upper throat, rapidly takes effect, the deep, open breathing that comes when the cocaine shrinks the mucous membranes and clears the sinuses and the bronchi. Before it became illegal, cocaine was enthusiastically endorsed by the Hay Fever Association. Despite the fact that it is an extremely effective vasoconstrictor, slowing down and even stopping the local circulation of the blood wherever it is applied to the mucous membranes, it is a short-acting drug, which helps account for its reported seductiveness: Most people who snort it are up and down again in 40 minutes, and therefore thinking about another hit.

• • •

Freud began experimenting with cocaine in Vienna in 1884, when he was 28 years old. It lifted him from depression, he wrote at the time, steadied his mind, suppressed his appetite, strengthened his hand, and it seemed to him a wonder drug. He thought it might cure morphine addiction, one of the more grievous problems of his day, and he tried it on an addicted friend and it did. He thought it might cure neurasthenia--the condition he later called neurosis--and he tried it on neurasthenic patients with some success. He was young, working to arrange his life and his income so that he could marry the girl he'd been courting, and he hoped that cocaine might be a means to that end, a means to success and acclaim and the improvement of his prospects. He wrote to his fancée, Martha Bernays:

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.

By July he had finished, and immediately published, his "song of praise," a paper titled "Ueber Coca"--"On Coca" (Freud used the terms coca and cocaine interchangeably). "Long-lasting, intensive mental or physical work can be performed without fatigue," he wrote; "it is as though the need for food and sleep, which otherwise makes itself felt peremptorily at certain times of the day, were completely banished." He suggested the use of cocaine as a general stimulant, to treat digestive disorders of the stomach, to treat severe malnutrition, to treat morphine and alcohol addiction, as an aphrodisiac and as a local anesthetic.

In his enthusiasm for the drug, Freud all but ballyhooed it, sending doses to Martha, pressing it upon his friends. Only later, after he had taken his public stand, did he discover that the friend whom he had removed from morphine addiction with cocaine had begun using the new drug in massive quantities, had become, in effect, a cocaine addict, although cocaine is not addictive in the strict, medical sense of the word. Freud published five papers on cocaine between 1884 and 1887, in one of the later papers defending himself from charges that he had loosed "the third scourge of humanity" (alcohol and morphine being the two others) upon the world. He acknowledged that cocaine didn't cure morphine addiction after all, but he argued, in effect, that the fault lay not with the drug but with the head of the user--an argument as valid today as it was then, though in the 1880s it hardly added to his popularity. He also admitted that the drug turned him off: "There occurred more frequently than I should have liked, an aversion to the drug, which was sufficient cause for curtailing its use."

Between Freud and Carl Koller, the colleague who first used it as an anesthetic in eye surgery, cocaine became famous, and from 1884 until it was brought under government interdiction in the United States and in Europe in the early 20th Century, it achieved such popularity that the era has been described by some medical historians as "the great cocaine explosion." Doctors in the U.S. enthusiastically reported cures of alcohol and morphine addiction, usually within a few days after withdrawal was complete and usually without follow-up. Cocaine parlors opened in major cities and catered to a genteel clientele. Patent-medicine companies had a field day, packaging cocaine or coca extract or coca leaves in syrups, tonics, cordials, tables, capsules, hypodermic injections, cigarettes, cigars and nasal sprays. Bartenders dropped pinches of cocaine into shots of whiskey for a little added zing; salesmen sold cocaine preparations door to door. Soda fountains first appeared in drug-stores for a reason: Among the many patent medicines devised in those days that contained cocaine, one remains famous. (continued on page 262)Very Expensive High(continued from page 172) our very own Coca-Cola, which was flavored with coca extract, "The pause that refreshes," until 1903, by which time a growing body of medical opinion held that cocaine was a dangerous drug and the Coca-Cola Company decided to use only dealkaloided coca extract and substituted caffeine for the cocaine. Coca-Cola is still flavored with coca extract, by the way, though the cocaine is missing from the brew.

Freud never became "addicted" to cocaine, but others of his era used the drug to such excess that it hampered their work and their health. The pioneering surgeon William Halsted, of Johns Hopkins, developed nerve-block anesthesia, the kind of regional anesthesia dentists practice today, using cocaine, but spent three years on a long sea voyage and confined to hospitals trying to free himself from his craving for cocaine, and then succeeded only by becoming a morphine addict. Arthur Conan Doyle was probably a user, and so was his alter ego, Sherlock Holmes, whom he portrays, in The Sign of Four, shooting up a seven percent solution as a counter to boredom: " 'My mind,' he said, 'rebels at stagnation. . . . I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.' " Robert Louis Stevenson used cocaine as a tonic against the tuberculosis that shortened his life--his wife, Fanny, carried some in their medicine chest when they sailed to Samoa--and he may have been taking it when he wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a story of bizarre personality changes induced by white powders and blood-red liquids: He produced the first draft, a manuscript of 60,000 words, and rewrote it in six days, without benefit of a typewriter. Cocaine was cheaper in those seldom-chronicled days when Popes and princes turned on: An ounce came over the counter for $2.50.

• • •

Another apartment in another city. I am the guest of a psychologist and his dark, beautiful wife. Call them Aaron and Mara. They have another guest; all three are sitting in the living room of the apartment when I arrive; the second guest is also a psychologist: Call him Jim. They are willing to talk about coke; we will do coke together through the evening and the night. The chairs in the living room are by Eames, the couch is black leather, and on the walls hang framed drawings that are the work of a young schizophrenic who was also a heroin addict. Aaron got him off the heroin, but the schizophrenia remains, flowering in drawings that might be the work of children.

Aaron had had some coke in the apartment but had casually left it on the dresser that morning and the maid had as casually thrown it out. "Or took it home," Aaron grins. So the dealer is coming to visit us. The dealer is Santa Claus and he carries a shoulder bag stuffed with snow. Waiting for the dealer, we talk, checking one another out, but I have come with good credentials and Aaron eventually says I'm cool. Mara listens intently, but her eyes are far away. Women, I've been told, are mystical about coke: I've never seen a woman use coke before. This woman is small and lithe: She wears a pullover I can see through, see the dark nipples of her fine breasts that repeat on a somber octave the dark pupils of her eyes. An air conditioner hums in the window and beside it green plants grow.

The buzzer sounds and Aaron goes to the hall door and releases the downstairs lock and Mara and Jim look up and footsteps beat the stairs and the door is flung open and Santa Claus bursts in, two Santa Clauses wearing shoulder bags. Dave is tall, big, young, blond. Noah is dark, trim, a shadowed James Coburn. Both are animated, jazzed, talking fast, doing the amenities even as they move into the living room and they are seated before I realize they're already coked up, having sampled their wares on the way over.

Dave isn't hurried and Noah isn't hurried and the two talk to their acquaintances, their clients, about the good old times and then about dry times in the summer when the coke gets low, when it's harder to shop south of the border because the tourist ranks are thin and an American stands out from the crowd. Dave just got some coke in, not a lot, not as pure as he'd like but good enough to stuff up his nose, good enough to share if anyone wants to share and does anyone want to share? Yes, we all want to share. Then is there a gram scale in the house? Yes, there's a gram scale in the house, coke people all keep gram scales in their houses and many of them keep test kits, too, to see to the purity of the coke and the nature of the cut, which might be lactose or speed or even the Italian laxative, mannite, caro mio. Dave takes up his bag and Mara shows him to the next room and no one is hurried, what's there to be hurried about? And then Dave, his eyes now merry, is back in the room with a little bag of white powder and he looks around the room and his eyes light on a schizophrenic drawing hanging on the wall and he asks Mara for a kitchen towel and she fetches it and he takes the picture down, the frame 16" x 20" and the drawing covered with glass, and dusts the glass and sets the picture on his lap. He pulls his wallet from his hip pocket and extracts from it a $50 bill and his American Express card and puts the wallet away and dumps a pile of powder, a gram of white snow, onto the glass and begins to meticulously chop it up with the edge of the American Express card, a fine touch that: Lesser souls use a single-edge razor blade. There are rocks in the coke, and I have heard that rocks mean good coke--so says the dealer in Richard Woodley's book Dealer--but Dave disagrees. The coke gets lumps in it, he says, and the lumps aren't necessarily lumps of pure coke, just lumps, like lumps in damp sugar, but this is fairly good coke, he says, good enough for him to stuff up his nose and share with his friends.

As he talks, Dave scrapes the pile, most of it, out flat and begins to divide it into little lines, an eighth of an inch wide, an inch or an inch and a quarter long, looking up briefly to count the number of people in the room, looking back down to make 12 expert lines each the same length, spaced half an inch apart in the center of the picture. "Bobby would like that," Aaron says with amusement. "He'd like us using his drawing to lay out the lines. He's off heroin, but it would still make him feel good." Dave finishes the lines, leaving a small pile of powder in one corner of the glass. He balances the picture on his knees and rolls the $50 bill into a tube the diameter of a soda straw, tucking in a corner to keep it from unrolling, and then with the reverse good manners that obtain among those who use illegal drugs, for which there is no guarantee of quality or even of safety, he takes his own two lines first, deftly snorting through the rolled bill, not even setting his finger beside his nose, and up the chimney it goes.

Mara is waiting, expectantly, and Dave passes the picture to her and she curls her feet under her on the couch and settles the picture in her lap. She pulls back her hair with one hand, takes the $50 bill in the other, and then notices that I am watching her and seems to suppress a shudder, as if I were a rapist staring at her across a narrow street, which of course I am, though it is not her body that I am urgent to know. She looks at the lines again and forgets me, looks at the lines as if they were the oldest and most intimate of friends. The friend is back and quickly she bends to it and sniffs it up, one line, the other line, and breathes deeply and widens, widens her eyes, and then almost nonchalantly wets her finger and cleans the dust of the two lines from the glass and presses it to her tongue.

She passes the picture to Noah, who takes his hits casually and passes it to me, and I am clumsy with it and embarrassed by my clumsiness, finding I have to hold one nostril shut to make the other one work, as my acquaintances do not. And the picture goes round, people pulling back into themselves after they take their hits, letting the coke work. Someone will say to me much later, in another town, someone who has never done coke, that snorting it up your nose sounds inelegant, but she did not see the ritual around the room that night, as formal in its own way as a tea ceremony, the expensive people who were also good and decent people, wives skilled at love, healers of the addicted and the mentally ill.

Dave and Noah compete through the evening, perhaps because I am there to find a story to tell, perhaps because they just compete. The talk is guarded, the route of acquisition never explained except that Dave says he doesn't smuggle and Noah hints that he is off to South America soon. Most coke comes through Florida, some of it through Syndicate channels, much of it through the Cuban community in Miami, a little of it, according to a Cuban doing time for coke, on Bebe Rebozo's yacht, but coke is so portable and its value so high that individual operations go on continuously, women often serving as couriers, stashing the powder in bras and girdles and vaginas. A man tried to bring coke through by swallowing it in plastic bags, Noah says, but one of the bags burst and he O.D.ed on pure cocaine--panic, convulsions, all the synapses firing, terminal man, death. The coke comes from Peru, the coke comes from Colombia, you take risks all the way, but it isn't risky if you have a good plan; so says Noah, who has a good plan. The picture drawn by the schizophrenic former heroin addict goes round the civilized room again.

Risk taking, Jim says, finding reasons for cocaine's growing popularity, and Aaron says getting out of your head once in a while, though it's a seductive drug and he's had to pull back from it because he found it becoming too interesting, consuming too much of his time, but tonight is the night before a holiday and patients get demanding before holiday-time, and what a pleasant way to come together with friends. A little water then for our noses, dipping a finger into a glass and sniffing the water to rinse the nose, help the snow melt, my gums numb where I had rubbed the dust from my lines up above my front teeth, the coke working its anesthesia and my head high in the mountains again with the mountain air. "The Indians chew coca to help them fight the altitude," someone would tell me later, "and we snort coke to help us fight the city air." And the city stresses, banshees, collywobbles, the city blackass, though coke has its blackass, too.

And the picture goes round and the night goes round without dinner, without drink except for cold grapefruit juice and iced tea, and Aaron takes off his shirt and Mara curls and curls on the couch. Dave says his money is carefully laundered, but the IRS audits him every year nonetheless, and Noah says he knows a dealer who sometimes has so much cash that he can cover his living-room floor with it to the depth of six inches in small bills, and who sometimes has nothing at all, who has no septum in his nose and would drown if he stuck his head under water, the coke having eaten the septum away. Dave says he made his first connection dealing grass with his tuition money, running grass up from Texas to his Great Lakes college town. He didn't smuggle and he didn't deal on the street, he liked arrangements like tonight, high-level people who used coke socially and made their connections privately and could be relied on, he is filling a need, he likes to be around good people, likes to help them acquire this pleasant and, in moderation, entirely healthy and decent high, and what could be more harmless than a night like this one in the lives of busy, responsible people? And everyone is doing it, he says, from teenagers to elder statesmen, he wouldn't be surprised if there had been coke in the White House in the Watergate days, not Nixon, maybe, but the gang around him. He had heard of a judge, a distinguished judge of 70 years, asking a busted dealer if he'd been dealing in coke, and when the dealer said yes, the judge said, well, coke was indeed the queen of drugs. That's where it's at, Dave says, whatever the laws. And the picture goes round, and I notice myself measuring the small variations in the size of the lines, debating taking two of the larger ones and then rejecting the thought as unworthy and taking one large and one small, as the others seem to do. Joints are passed around, too, as the night goes on, and later Noah feels strung out and borrows a tranquilizer, and I consider a drink and reject the idea.

Morning, the sun just rising, the light pulling up through blue to green, and Dave has to leave to pick up his wife and take her to work and it's time to settle accounts and does anyone want a gram to take along? Some of us do, and with the four we'd done that night, four grams among six people, that almost makes up a quarter ounce, so someone says he'll take the rest to fill it out, and while Dave in the other room weighs the carry-out orders, Aaron cuts squares from the cover of a medical journal, fine thick calendered stock, and folds them into small precise origami envelopes, and in the other room Dave pours the coke in, and at $60 a gram, for four people, since Dave and Noah are partners, it comes to $420, $105 each, and because I was there as an observer and had my mental cameras running, I never left the room, I got no kick from cocaine.

• • •

After cocaine became effectively illegal in the United States, with the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914 that erroneously classified it with true narcotics, cocaine disappeared from sight, surfacing again in the Twenties and Thirties as the favorite drug of musicians and actors, going underground again during World War Two, turning up again among musicians in the rock years and among entertainers and film people since, so that Sammy Davis Jr., for example, the same who hugged Richard Nixon at the 1972 convention rally, wears a coke spoon (though a lot of people who use no cocaine wear spoons), and the nasal sprays some of the better-known rock stars flaunt onstage contain not phenylephrine hydrochloride, like yours and mine, but liquid lady.

Why cocaine has returned to vogue, and especially why it is becoming popular with otherwise straight people, no one really knows, but the reasons people give are interesting, if only because they say so much about the people giving them. The official line of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal agency that in 1973 replaced the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, is that cocaine came in to replace heroin when the BNDD successfully shut down the heroin supply. Well, the BNDD didn't shut down the heroin supply, so street peoples say, and the likelihood that a junkie would exchange a $100-a-day heroin habit for a $60-a-gram cocaine habit isn't very great. The DEA is tooting its own horn and ensuring its survival: If it stopped all the heroin, which it hasn't, it would thus have prepared the ground for a campaign against cocaine. The DEA thinks that one drug leads to another, and it thinks that with bigger budgets, more manpower, faster planes and better informants, it could control the traffic, which is approximately what organized crime is thinking these days, though of course we understand that the control is to different ends.

Jerry Strickler, a trim, snappily dressed official at the DEA who is in charge of Latin-American enforcement operations, offers his own theory to explain cocaine's growing popularity. "We saw an increase starting in the middle Sixties," he says, "when Cubans settled here in large numbers. Cuba had the greatest per-capita use in the world. Very little cocaine came into the United States before then. But the Cubans brought their habits with them, and some of the political groups that opposed Castro found that they could finance their operations by selling the stuff." Snorting coke thus becomes an act of defiant anticommunism. In the next breath, Strickler makes a statement I've heard before from a cocaine dealer, drugs making strange bedfellows: "Where drugs are concerned, demand creates supply." Which doesn't exactly jibe with the theory that dissident Cubans turned America on.

Chilean couriers, Strickler says, used to bring coke to the Cubans in Miami, but when they saw the money the Cubans were making, they decided to cut out the middleman and deal themselves. By 1971, Federal narcotics agents were arresting more Chilean dealers than Cuban. Then the traffic shifted again and the DEA found itself arresting more Colombians than Chileans. Today a new shift is under way. "In the last two years," says Strickler, "we've begun seeing the gringo going down to buy a kilo or two and we find white American middle-class types active in organizations. They may also deal in hash, heroin, marijuana, they think in terms of running boats, good communication systems, they're at home anywhere in the world. But most of the mules, the couriers, are foreign nationals. They account for one third of our arrests." Strickler describes the eccentric routes couriers take to avoid an obvious approach to United States ports of entry: Chile to Argentina, for example, and then Argentina to Senegal, Senegal to Spain, Spain to London, London to Canada, where they are frequently met by Colombians from New York. But the point of the changing nationalities of suppliers is Strickler's second point--that demand creates supply--and that point returns us to the original questions, why the increasing demand?

There is an increasing demand for all drugs in the United States. The two most important factors in that increase are probably affluence and education. Alcohol consumption is up, tobacco consumption is up, marijuana consumption is up, why not cocaine? People of affluence, having been turned off alcohol, the most dangerous psychoactive drug of all, by marijuana, would turn to cocaine logically enough. One drug doesn't necessarily lead to another, but people do search, some people, when choice is available, for their drug of choice. We are all learning to dose ourselves anyway, now that the doctor no longer comes to our door, now that his armamentarium consists largely of pills, pills that purge disease, pills that purge melancholy. I haven't met an adult American in years who didn't have his own little pharmacy stashed in his medicine cabinet--tranks, sleeping pills, nose drops, antihistamines, antibiotics, aspirin, you name it--and liquor on the side bar and sometimes grass in the freezer. Having learned that alcohol isn't the only game in town, having learned that chemicals can change our moods up and down and sideways, ought we to be surprised that some Americans believe that the locked medicine cabinet of the physician and the pharmacist is the gateway to paradise? Ah, God, the nation's becoming a head shop, and did you know you can get a megalomaniac high on intramuscular cortisone? That a heart transplant can make you feel immortal?

• • •

As with all psychoactive drugs, what cocaine does to the head depends on the head. Effects have been reported ranging from nothing at all to euphoria, excitement, a conviction of great mental clarity and physical strength, on down the tunnel to paranoia and hallucinations. Early users and researchers such as Freud were generally enthusiastic about cocaine's mood-changing properties. Modern writers manage to convey a sense of discomfort and even peril, though how much that sense relates to the drug and how much to 60 years of official, legal and medical condemnation remains to be seen. It's clear from the literature, at least, that there's no such thing as an unbiased opinion where cocaine is concerned.

I found no unqualified praise of cocaine after 1920. Bruce Jay Friedman's celebrated story Lady, for example, begins:

When it was good, it was of a smooth consistency and white as Christmas snow. If Harry Towns had a slim silver-foil packet of it against his thigh--which he did two or three nights a week--he felt rich and fortified, almost as though he were carrying a gun.

But ends:

But anyone who stuck so much as a grain of that white shit up his nose on the actual day of his mother's funeral had to be some new and as yet undiscovered breed of sonofabitch. The lowest.

Thomas Skelton, the hero of Thomas McGuane's novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, thinks of "that pale cocaine edge pale like acetylene flame," but he also worries about "that voluminous hollow rush inside, that slippage of control systems, the cocaine express. Mild enough on the face of it, he had known it in other days to be the first step on the ride to the O.D. Corral."

William Burroughs, in Naked Lunch, says of cocaine: "When you shoot coke in the mainline there is a rush of pure pleasure to the head. . . . Ten minutes later you want another shot . . . intravenous C is electricity through the brain, activating cocaine pleasure connections. . . . There is no withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain alone." But Burroughs has spent his later years proselytizing against all drugs except the apomorphine that he believes cured him of heroin addiction.

A young East Coast writer I talked with told me that for him cocaine was Walpurgisnacht, the witches' Sabbath--"Pure evil, man," he said, grinning, but he described nights that started with coke and graduated to whatever he could find at hand to drink, smoke, swallow and snort: Those would be witches' Sabbaths, indeed, and he said he had spent a hard year fighting the feeling and had finally come through, though his girlfriend, there at his side asking for my astrological sign, inquiring after my karma, dealt coke.

Or consider Paul Kantner in Rolling Stone:

Cocaine is a really great drug, it's a great way to feel good, and you can function and work clearly on it, like for 12 or 15 hours straight, without losing your perspective the way you do on uppers or speed. But it's not controllable. It's not that you have an increased need or tolerance, it's that it's so pleasant you can't control your use of it. And when you're heavily into it, it makes you cold toward people, in the sense that you're thinking of so many other things that you can't possibly accomplish them all, and you're thinking of how to do all the things and you don't think about the people you're around. . . . Also, it can get you physically fucked up.

Which is one of the more ambivalent testimonials I've seen.

Think what you will of these qualified wisdoms, of this wonderful chemical that is too wonderful to be good; the fact of the matter is that at the beginning of 1975, in the words of Dr. Charles R. Schuster, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Chicago, "We really don't know much more about cocaine than Freud did." Here at least is what is known about cocaine's effects on the body and the body politic:

• Cocaine, as it is used recreationally in the United States, has not been responsible for any reported deaths by overdose in recent years. A few deaths have occurred during medical administration of the drug, and any drug, taken in sufficient quantity, can cause death. Dr. Robert Byck of the Yale School of Medicine, who is studying the acute effects of cocaine in man under a 1974 contract from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and who is qualified to be called the leading U. S. expert on cocaine, said in a recent trial affidavit, "There are probably more deaths each year attributable to aspirin overdose than can be attributed to cocaine throughout history." There is certainly a lethal dose of cocaine, but none of the experts I talked to were willing to put a number on it, because they didn't know what that number would be. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, alcohol killed 15,326 people in 1969, heroin killed 454 and cocaine killed 0.

• Cocaine takes effect most rapidly when it is injected, slightly less rapidly when snorted or packed (rubbed into the gums or the lining of the nose), least rapidly when swallowed, because the stomach immediately goes to work breaking it down. In recreational use in the United States, most people snort or pack cocaine. Injection of an illegal drug is always risky, since users rarely know its purity or its cut and seldom know how to maintain the sterility of the equipment.

• Long-term snorting of cocaine can destroy the tissue of the nose, especially the partition that divides the two nasal passages, the septum. Cocaine can also produce some of the nastiest sore throats known to man. I had one and it felt like the hole left when a tonsil is removed.

• A small percentage of people who try cocaine are likely to be allergic to it and will react by going into fatal or near-fatal anaphylactic shock. So will a small percentage of people stung by a bee or injected with penicillin.

• Like all stimulants, cocaine is not addictive. It is also not habituating, nor do users develop tolerance of its effects. There is no evidence that cocaine produces, even in heavy users, any physical "craving," though users may well experience a psychological craving, as do some users of alcohol, money, sex, food and fingernails.

• It has been an axiom of antidrug literature for more than 50 years that long-term cocaine use results in paranoid psychosis. The most reliable U. S. experts on cocaine have not found, in hospital admittance records and in the memories of clinical psychiatrists operating psychiatric wards, any instances of psychosis directly attributable to cocaine. The best that can be said, on the evidence, is that psychotics who use cocaine are likely to be psychotic.

• Similarly, traditional antidrug literature emphasizes that coke users frequently experience deep and even suicidal depressions when they run out of coke. Such depressions have not been reported within recent experience even among Colombian users who consumed coke daily for years.

• Many users report a dramatic sexual rush, though users of almost every drug report a dramatic sexual rush at one time or another, and it's likely that the rush comes from set and setting, not from the drug. Men consistently told me that women turn on for coke, but the women I talked to were vague on the subject. If coke gives some users a sexual rush, the reason may be that it loosens their inhibitions: After you've shared some coke, after you've set yourself up for five to life in the penitentiary, why be modest?

• In the days before Masters and Johnson reported a simple mechanical method for developing ejaculatory control, some men applied cocaine to their glans to anesthetize it and thereby extend intercourse. Some men, not knowing any better, still do.

• Coke cures hangovers, sort of, relieving the headache and nausea and attendant general depression, but the trade-off is temporary, especially since coke suppresses appetite and discourages sleep, and food and rest are still the best hangover cures known to man.

• Illegal cocaine is usually cut, though it cannot be cut as drastically as heroin without losing most or all of its effect, which is so subtle in the first place that many people don't recognize it until it's pointed out to them. Street coke, sold by the spoon--a spoon is about a gram--may be cut as much as 80 percent, which means it will do very little more than numb your nose, and $50-$100 a gram is a high price to pay for a numbed nose. Better-grade coke may be cut 25 percent or less; the price usually goes up accordingly, as does the quantity you must buy. Lactose, milk sugar, is the best and safest cut commonly used. Dextrose is sweeter than lactose but equally safe. Various amino acids, simple proteins, are safe and have no taste, but they're harder for dealers to come by and aren't often used. Mannite, the Italian laxative, may add to the diarrhea that cocaine sometimes causes. Quinine lowers body temperature, but not significantly in the quantities anyone is likely to blow. Procaine--Novocain--and Lidocaine are occasionally used as cuts because they increase the freeze, but their presence is reason to suspect the quality of the coke. Amphetamine cuts are worst of all, causing burning in the nose and watering in the eyes, and more reason to suspect the quality of the coke, because amphetamines mimic the effects of cocaine.

• Cocaine is made by packing coca leaves in gasoline drums with kerosene and other solvents and allowing the alkaloids to soak free. After the soaking, the fluid is drained off and the leaves removed, leaving behind a brown paste that smells like tobacco. Since the leaves contain about .5 to 1.2 percent cocaine by weight, one kilo of paste to 100 kilos of leaves is considered a good extraction. The paste is subsequently converted to crystalline cocaine by reaction with hydrochloric acid. One hundred kilos of leaves sell for about $110, producing one kilo of paste that sells for $600; a kilo of cocaine, 90 to 98 percent pure, delivered in Latin America, sells for $3000 to $4000; cut to 50 to 80 percent and delivered in New York, a kilo of coke sells for $30,000 to $40,000--the kilo is expanding, of course, with the cut. Cut to 20 percent and sold in New York by the spoon, the same kilo might earn as much as $200,000 to $250,000. Illegal cocaine returns better profits than legal diamonds, which is why the DEA and the Bureau of Customs and probably God Himself can't stop the cocaine traffic. Cocaine has been smuggled in artificial legs, banana boxes, wine bottles, brassieres, girdles, vaginas, rectums, diplomatic pouches, baby carriages, plastic tubes, false-bottomed suitcases, mouthwash bottles, shampoo bottles, Instamatic packs and water skis, to name only a few, to name only the containers that didn't work. Cocaine can be smuggled as a liquid or as a powder. No one has yet got round to smuggling coca leaves. Like marijuana, they are bulky and they have a characteristic smell that dogs can detect. So does cocaine, by the way, and recently Customs has been training dogs to do so. The dogs are very alert and easily work 20-hour days.

• In America's major cities, an ounce of cocaine sells for anywhere from $400 to $1200, depending on its purity (an ounce contains 28.3 grams). In Latin America, an ounce of 85-percent-pure cocaine costs from $50 to $100. A gram dealer in the United States sells 40 to 50 percent coke, an ounce dealer 70 to 80 percent coke, a pound dealer 85 to 98 percent coke. There is no simple way to determine precisely the percentage of the cut.

• Blacks have been into coke a long time, Latin Americans even longer. Before coke became illegal, Southerners feared black use of coke as much as Westerners feared Chinese use of opium, believing without evidence then or since that coke would lead to uprisings of plantation workers and attacks on white women. Blacks in big-city ghettos maintained the continuity of coke use through the dry years of World War Two and after, and coke is the drug of choice today among black dealers, hustlers, pimps, musicians and entrepreneurs. That world is described in Woodley's remarkable Dealer. The scene is changing now that New York has installed its severe new laws: Dealers there now carry guns and intend to use them against police, since life imprisonment makes the issue one of get the cop before he gets you.

• Controlled, scientific research on human responses to cocaine began only last year, 1974, 115 years after cocaine's discovery. The best available evidence is that cocaine in moderate use is a mild drug, similar in action to the amphetamines but without their more serious effects. It is certainly not in a class, in terms of any clear and present danger, with heroin, alcohol or the barbiturates. Several lawsuits are under way in the United States that ask the Federal Courts to remove cocaine from its present classification as a dangerous narcotic, subject to the most severe penalties, and place it in the same classification as the amphetamines or marijuana, subject to far more moderate penalties. Those lawsuits have been supported by affidavits from distinguished scientists and physicians, all of whom emphasize that cocaine is not a narcotic, some of whom emphasize that cocaine is a mild drug and some of whom also emphasize what is today the central fact about cocaine: that despite its growing popularity on the one hand, and its condemnation and prohibition as a dangerous drug on the other, very little is known about its effects on human beings. Cocaine can kill you; so can aspirin. Cocaine acts on the central nervous system; so does caffeine. It's possible to overstimulate the central nervous system, and you can't do that forever without damaging it. Cases of cocaine "addiction" were reported in the past, usually among patients being treated for morphine or alcohol addiction, hardly the most reliable test population, and are not reported today. Cocaine psychosis and suicidal depression upon withdrawal were reported in the past and are not seen today. Violent assaultive behavior by cocaine users was reported in the past and is not reported today. At least two conclusions seem reasonable: that the greatest danger connected with moderate, recreational use of cocaine is legal, not chemical; and that not nearly enough is known about cocaine's effects on human beings.

• • •

If, as it appears, cocaine in small doses is only a moderate euphoric, but if, as is certain, it comes with severe criminal penalties attached, how are we to account for its increasing use by the middle class, which has so much to lose by conviction? And how account for the seductiveness of cocaine that users so frequently report?

Cocaine's effects may match some pre-existing cultural bias, a point made nicely by Drs. Gay, Inaba, Sheppard and Newmeyer of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinics in a recent paper:

In its pharmacologic action, cocaine, perhaps more than any other of the recognized psychoactive drugs, reinforces and boosts what we recognize as the highest aspirations of American initiative, energy, frenetic achievement and ebullient optimism even in the face of great odds.

A more pedestrian possibility is that cocaine use is increasing because the Federal Government has succeeded in dramatically reducing the illegal supply of amphetamines in the United States The amphetamines got tight about the same time that cocaine began coming in, and cocaine is, among other things, a "better amphetamine."

Cocaine may be increasing in popularity because, besides producing a state of mind that users perceive as pleasant, its dosage can be controlled. Because it is a short-acting drug, cocaine doesn't blow people away as marijuana and LSD notoriously do. Middle-class users, accustomed to controlled doses of alcohol, apparently perceive controlled doses of cocaine to be a less physically disruptive high.

But the seductiveness of coke may be the seductiveness of danger. Unwilling to risk physical addiction by playing with heroin, but willing and even eager to risk breaking some very stiff laws for a new high they perceive as desirable, middle-class coke users may like the heavy taste of the illegal that is part of coke's thrill, may like the smell of fear mingled with the caresses of the drug itself. It cannot be without significance that coke came into fashion in the later years of the Nixon Administration, when respect for law and order reached a new low. As risks go, those seem to me to be among the more useless and even infantile, but my opinion is only one. I took a few infantile risks of my own coming down snow mountain.

• • •

Here, see: coming down snow mountain: In a large Eastern city I meet a married couple, Bill and Sherry, for dinner at my hotel. Bill knows coke; he's been a dealer, been busted, been in jail and back out again on parole, isn't dealing anymore but knows the street. Sherry is just in from an out-of-town party and hasn't slept for 28 hours, doing coke, and looks as fresh as morning, a knockout woman in a halter top and jeans who reduces the waiters to adolescence: They bring our orders one at a time, one waiter per order, to get a close-up of her. We eat, drink wine, talk coke. Bill says there's no shortage of coke on the East Coast, because more people than ever are dealing it up from Florida and South America. Who's doing coke? I ask him, and he says men do it to give them that extra surge of power, that extra flush of confidence. "It's like taking a deep breath," he says. "If you look at these different industries where coke is most used, they're all high-pressure, superfast industries--music, the garment business, film, entertainment, basically. And then unpleasant businesses. Prostitutes do a lot of coke. Pimps do it for the glamor of it. But with women, it's different. It really has a mystical effect on women."

I ask Sherry if it has a mystical effect on women and she grins. "Yeah," she says, "look at me. Mystical tonight."

Up to my room after dinner and Sherry produces a small bag of coke and a bag of grass. Bill isn't doing any coke, because he gets a surprise urinalysis every now and then, part of the terms of his parole. He's feeling good anyway from the wine and the joint now going round. Sherry produces a small black compact that opens up to a mirror, a compartment for a single-edge razor blade and a compartment for a silver soda straw, the kind they sell at Tiffany's, and she dumps the coke onto the mirror and pulverizes it with the razor blade and lays out six lines. She does two and I do two through the silver straw. The joint and the coke work together and the boundaries of the room begin to shift and wobble, but despite the warping of the grass, I also feel completely clearheaded, thinking fast, concisely, even profoundly, but noticing that I forget Bill's words as soon as he says them, they go through a tunnel and don't come out.

We talk on and smoke on. Bill shows me a vial of white, crystalline amino acid and asks me to taste it and I do and it has no taste at all. He says it's the best cut for coke he's ever found, adds bulk without any taste or effect. Sherry says more than once that her coke supply is almost gone and begins to hint that she might stay after Bill leaves and Bill asks questions about the people I've seen while working on this piece, who and where and when, and I think about Sherry's staying and what that might be like and I know where I can get some coke and then I think about a husband's going off and leaving his knockout wife with a near stranger in a hotel room and I think about Bill's questions and suddenly I'm struck with the absolute certainty that these two people are entrapping me and I sit up straight and the urge to giggle I've been feeling goes away and I tell them, Bill and Sherry, that either I'm having a paranoid trip or they're narcs.

Embarrassed, flushed, Bill asks what's happening and why I think that and Sherry becomes silent, both of them reacting the wrong way, it seems to me, with my conviction racing around my head, reacting with embarrassment when I would have reacted with anger to a similar charge, and their responses convince me that I'm right and abruptly I stand up and say that, trip or narc, the party's over and it's time to leave. Bill quickly snorts the two remaining lines of coke, he's that nervous, and at the door, following Sherry, he says he's really sorry, and I say so am I, but I have to trust my instincts, and then they are gone and the door is closed and I slip the chain lock and collapse into my chair with the room still blowing back and forth like a bellows and the certainty still certain and then the whistle, the whistle like the song of the meadow lark on the telephone wire outside my apartment back in Kansas, begins sounding in my ear, the whistle that says I know where I can get some coke and the coke might bury the enormous load of anxiety I'm suddenly carrying and I listen to the whistle, the bird song, the coke song, for ten minutes by the clock before it occurs to me that if my guests were narcs and they thought I had coke in my room, they could come back and break down the door and I'd be off in the pokey for years and years and who would support my children while I was away? And coke lost its enchantment then and forevermore and I went to bed, knowing that the worst part of the entire experience, whatever the experience had been, was the fact that it took me ten long minutes to get beyond the feeling that the coke would set me free.

The next day I call people who need to be called, going carefully to a pay phone in case my hotel phone is tapped--Bill made some calls and took one on my phone during the evening; he could have installed a tap--and I end one call from the pay phone abruptly when a black man enters the next booth and I don't hear the money ring in the slot and as I leave the booth, I glance warily at him and he glances warily at me. Only when I am home a week later, when I have thought about the experience, when a mutual friend has supplied reasonable proof that Bill and Sherry aren't narcs, only then do I decide that my reaction was paranoid, a bad trip, and even then I'm not entirely sure, they could have been narcs, the other people I met could have been narcs, my next-door neighbor could be a narc, anyone could be a narc, couldn't he, couldn't she?

I decided even later that my reaction wasn't to the coke at all but to the joint. And I decided later yet that my reaction wasn't to either: It came from my head, as all reactions do. Apologies to Bill and Sherry, wherever they may be.

• • •

Between dark and dark we float free. Dreams consume us; the simple perception of the natural world dazzles our eyes; we comprehend edges, corners, boundaries, lines, and beyond them we sense spaces and times larger than Leviathan, more teeming than the sea. Out of signals, cues, sets, codes we construct a reasonable world, knowing and trying to forget that our construction is only approximate, reduced, is not substance but modality, is not form but a screen before form. Every ecstasy we know, every art we have devised, points to rents in the screen, points out beyond the flesh and the stage and the page and the canvas to the ultramundane where we are lovers and murderers, children and ancient crones, athletes and paralytics, dead and unborn, rock and fish and fowl, where we are also forms out of flesh, where we sail forever to Byzantium. We go mad through the screen and come back towing gods behind us. We go burning through the screen and come back flayed and spent and still. We go toying through the screen and come back brimming with the formulas that activate the stars. We are not the only race of creatures that thinks, but we are the only race of creatures that voluntarily, periodically and perhaps necessarily seeks out disorder, madness, chaos, knowing that only through those terrifying passages can order, sanity, creation be enriched and sustained.

The ecstasy of the dream, the ecstasy of sexual union, the ecstasy of art are merely orders and suborders of the greater ecstasy all of us glimpse spiraling at the boundaries of our structured perceptions, and we have searched since the beginning of time for substances that would produce that ecstasy upon demand. The search is quixotic: The essence of that ecstasy is that it cannot be induced, because it comes from within. But it is the work of years to learn to call it out, and we are busy at other work; we would have our ecstasies scheduled and ordered, like the other parts of our lives, though ecstasy cannot be partitioned, because it is not part but whole. So we drink and smoke and snort and fire, playing with our minor magic; and the play brings a sort of relief, but it is the relief of substitution, as a neurotic symptom is a relief of substitution: Anything that any drug can do for you, you can do for yourself, as the mystics of East and West have demonstrated for thousands of years. Chemicals seem to imitate because, using them, we permission ourselves to let go, but it is the letting go more than the chemicals that turns us on. We all of us sense that and use the chemicals anyway because their limitations are known and socially accepted, so to speak; turning on without them, we fear, may be limitless: That way, we fear, madness lies, and sometimes it does.

Perhaps the drugs can lead us. Good men have suggested that in more trusting societies than ours, they do. They cannot take us all the way. There we must go alone, or go accompanied by others who have been there before us, and that is not news: It has always been so. Art has served such purpose, and religion, and sexual initiation, and every kind of learning. "What man is he that liveth," John Donne asked the king and the court in a sermon long ago, "and shall not see death?" That is one side of the coin of our lives, but Donne might equally have asked, "What man is he that liveth, and shall not see transcendence?" The question we struggle with today is what quality that transcendence shall be. Freud concluded eventually that the great requirements for life were love and work: The man who once thought cocaine might redeem us discovered later that reality was the most extraordinary of all highs. It still is.