Conversation with a Crack-head
Bristol TN/VA Winter 99
Bristol TN/VA is a town divided. Divided right down the middle of Main Street, where the border between Bristol Tennessee and Bristol Virginia runs “smack dab” through. At 1 am on a Saturday when the bars close on the Virginia side you walk across the street to enjoy Tennessee hospitality for another hour. Plus, they have a little car race there every year at night with a few hundred thousand folks in attendance. Yes the race is on the TN side so they can run it later into the night.
Nancy is an attractive waitress, tall, willowy, with long black hair, pleasant enough to look at and talk to as she waited on me as I dined either in Tennessee or Virginia. It really didn’t matter as I ate another nondescript meal, chatted with an attractive waitress as another dinner in a distant city ended. As I left she told me to have a good night and I the same to her.
One hour later, leaving a bar on the Virginia side, I saw Nancy, alone, on the street, very agitated.
“Hi, Nancy, you waited on me tonight, Pete.” I greeted her.
“Oh wow man, thanks, can you give me a lift? My ride left without me”
“Sure, I guess where you going”
“I need to get a dime”
She’s not talking money. Crack cocaine, $10 worth, a dime. Crack Cocaine, the scourge of the inner city. Wiping out a generation of urban blacks. Laws were such in the ‘80s and ‘90s that when a white banker got caught with a gram of coke he got a slap on the wrist, a black teenager caught with a dime of crack served 1 year mandatory. The judge has no discretion, the consequences; jails filled with minorities and not white lawyers, or bankers.
NOTE: Coca is a plant native to the sub tropic regions of South America. When chewed, the leaves of the coca plant act as a stimulant. Up and into the 1900s, the derivative of the coca plant, cocaine, was a popular recreational and medicinal drug. Cocaine was first introduced into the western world around the mid 1800s as an additive to wine. Cocaine then was synthesize into a form to be taken orally or introduced directly into the user’s vein.
Parke -Davis sold cocaine, needle, syringe and all, via mail order or Sears catalog. Their advertisements extolling; “supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and … render the sufferer insensitive to pain.” All that and 5 cents worth of postage. Those benefits like making you feel you’re king of the world, made it grow in popularity over the ages. Mostly overlooked by society in the early 1900s, it was legal, addictive and easy to get.
Leave it up to racial morals of the early 20th century where the stated facts were, “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain” as stated by one Dr. Christopher Koch of Pennsylvania’s State Pharmacy Board. The facts are, Dr Koch did not live in the south and there was little evidence to support this claim. That being the case society reacted with the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act of 1914, a law that for the first time in US history told its citizenry what they could and could not ingest. The law labeled cocaine as a narcotic. Cocaine is a stimulant.
Mislabeled, based on prejudice and hysteria, laws were created that destroy more lives than the actual drug itself did. Doctors were now being thrown in jail, careers ruined because of which once was a virtue is now a vice. Good to know that Congress has progressed little over the past 150 years.
Crack Cocaine is a solid, smokable form of cocaine. It is a freebase form of cocaine that can be made using baking soda in a process to convert cocaine hydrochloride (powder cocaine) into methylbenzoylecgonine freebase cocaine. There you have it.
Since I knew what she was talking about my first reaction was.
“Sure, let’s go.”
OK I am crazy, but not stupid. I just knew that her “ride” was her connection that had not shown up, also the chances of her scoring any crack downtown was not going to happen.
“Man, how much money do you have on you” she asked as she nervously scratched herself, a sure sign she was in withdrawal.
“Fiver, why?”
“We can split a dime”
Split, as in you get it all and I pay for it, I thought
“You cool with that.”
“Here take it, not into crack” I responded
She reached out to grab the five and then let her hand fall to her side.
“I shouldn’t be” she sighed
Our conversation at the restaurant earlier was pleasant, as I said. I knew she was married, with a 3 year old. Her husband had just got out of the Navy on a hardship. Now I know why, her drug habit.
“I hate myself” she said as we walked down the street towards my car.
The withdrawals were taking over and the cravings started. The need for the high, not a want, not a desire but the gut-burning need was taking over her body.
“Don’t do that to yourself, why would you hate yourself” I asked
“I got to get some crack. You don’t understand. I have to have it”
“Now you do. You know the cravings will stop for awhile. Can you ride this one out. My car is around the corner. We can drive around, let you cool off and then get you home”.
We got to the car and started driving around for a while. Mostly in silence with a direction or two from Nancy.
“Maybe we could go to a teller and you could give me a gift of some money. I would show my appreciation in a very special way.” She half said desperate breaking the silence.
“I know you would and it would be a treat, but NO. If you need the money to feed your kid, I will go buy you groceries, but I am not going to let you whore yourself out for crack. You know Nancy, your better than that”.
There was a short pause and then I added.
“But if you want to have sex for free, I am into that.” I said smiling.
”Hell, I don’t even have sex with my husband. Maybe you two should get together”.
She said with a whisper of a smile.
I laughed, then added, “Krispy Kreme is open. Want to get something just as good as crack? A raspberry filled glazed donut”.
“Sure, thanks I feel a little better, almost feel like I can do this”.
Krispy Kreme donuts are basically fat fried sugar so they are great.
We sat there and talked for a short while.
“What got you started ?”
“Bored, I guess, my husband was the first to get me hooked, after the baby was born. Shit I will just give it a try, can’t hurt, just once. Now.”
“Must be an intense high”
“Brother, you got that right. You can binge on it for days. No sleep, no eat, wired to the max. Knew a dude that was high for a week, then killed himself, paranoia got to him, (expletive) couldn’t hang.”
“Do you want to quit ?”
“No, even if I could don’t know that I would.”
“Not preaching here but you know your choices, quit or prison more than likely.”
“Your cool man, forgot a third choice, dying.”
“What if cocaine was legal?”
“Whoa, don’t even think I could comprehend that, sure would make my fucking life easier. Mean I wouldn’t have to worry about where I was getting my next high from. Be cheaper. Hell I would do it everyday probable be a hard core addict.”
“You are an addict, you just would have a better way of dealing with it.”
“Yea, but that ain’t goin to happen now is it? People want to throw us partiers in jail, think it is their moral obligation to punish us. Jail is the answer, to much money in that, then legal junk.”
“It was legal at one time, sure lots of addicts but they had a ready supply, could work and buy their junk from Sears if they needed it”
“Probably good stuff, better than the shit that is on the streets, shit I just be left with two options, stay hooked or quit. No prison, No dying”
Dying would still be an option, overdosing is still a real problem in rural white America. The CDC reported that in 2004 there were 19,000 fatal accidental overdoses or posionings as it is offically listed. The vast majority of them legal prescription drug abuse by whites between 15 and 25 years of age. Illegal drug deaths have not increase over the years they have remain a small portion of the overall drug culture in America. The big bad drug of the world is smoking, which is a contributor to over 400,000 deaths a year according to the CDC. This year we will spend on tobacco subsidizes ($49 million) and the DEA budget ($2,200,000,000) that is $2.2 billion and Nancy will still be on the corner looking her next dime.
