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In the summer of 1983, B.J. Plasket and I were working on a book, and we were worried.
We had a hot topic that had just made the covers of Time and Newsweek. Book publishers, however, move with the blinding speed of glaciers, and our manuscript wouldn't be published until 1985. We feared that public interest would peak before then, and our work would go instantly to the remainder table with Aerobic Solutions to Rubik's Cube and Oil Futures: Sure Ticket to Wealth. We'd never become rich and famous.
B.J. and I escaped the best-seller list, but there must have been other reasons, for as it turned out, we had written about an enduring issue: America's cocaine problems.
No matter now many schools Nancy Reagan visits, no matter how long the prison sentences, no matter how many clinics and therapies, no matter how often talented people die early, the problem gets worse.
It gets worse because our society gives only lip service to eliminating the cocaine menace. There is a way. We could take cocaine as seriously as we have taken nicotine, a far less potent drug.
America has declared a social war on smoking, but making it difficult to find a place to light up, by treating smokers like disgusting pariahs and by spreading acres of information about the harmful social and physical effects of smoking.
Is nicotine addictive? Anyone who's ever tried to quit smoking will tell you that it's easier to quit eating, but now it's official. A recent study shows nicotine to exceed opium in addictiveness. So also does cocaine; monkeys given a choice preferred cocaine to heroin, sex or food, until they starved to death.
Does smoking shorten life? The statistics certainly show that. But nobody dies after smoking just one cigaretted. People have died -- Len Bias may have been one -- from their first bout with cocaine.
There is no such thing as a safe does of cocaine. Used as safely as possible -- as a local anesthetci in minute quantities under close medical supervision -- cocaine kills about 100 Americans a year.
Are tobacco companies a social menace? Perhaps, but they do pay taxes, their money stays in the legitimate economy, and they don't murder rivals in order to maintain their market share. None of that can be said of cocaine merchants.
Is diffused cigarette smoke so terrible that all workers should have a right to a smoke-free environment? I can speak only from my own experience, because I haven't seen any conclusive research. During one of my previous experiments with quitting smoking, I was sometimes annoyed by passive smoke. But the fumes were no problem at all, compared to having to get up before noon and wear a tie, neither of why my employer felt any compulsion to alleviate.
I work at home now, and I live with a smoker. I can
handle it. But I do wish I could live in a cocaine-free
environment.
Instead, I have had to deal with wired-up
agents who can't remember where they put proposals they had
been nagging me to finish, with glased-eyed editors who
babble endlessly on my telephone bill and can't figure out
what they want to say, with resort-town magazine publishers
who can't pay me on time because their dealer comes
first.
The social war against smoking is succeeding; cigarette consumption has declined 20 percent in the past decade. By any reasonable standard, cocaine is far worse, but does anyone try to fight cocaine with these successful tactics?
Smokers, no matter how productive or faithful, now are treated with disdain and digust in the workplace. Cocaine users, if the experts' recommendations are followed, receive sympathy and understanding, and often a chance to clean up at company expense.
Smokers face public contempt for their stupidity. Cocaine users often come across as dynamic and brilliant.
Perhaps it's because they talk so fast that no one realizes that they're complaining about processed food and its toxi additives while ingesting a refined white powder that my contain 85 percent Borax or Ajax. Or they want to boycott South Africa, but not cocaine, whose vicious importers and thuggish dealers make Pieter Botha look like Mother Theresa.
Our society has ample supplies of disdain, disgust and contempt. Can't we spare some for cocaine? Or is it easier to just keep picking on smokers while marveling at how all these horrible cocaine stories keep showing up in the news?
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