“Skiing on the beach tomorrow?”
“Late-night ski lift looking for a snow bunny.”
“Take a ride on the snow train.”
The come-ons in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist are as plentiful as they are obvious. Using a variety of euphemisms that have been around since Jay McInerney wrote about Bolivian marching powder, posters invite others to join them for a line or a lost weekend fueled by cocaine.
Some are especially bold. One recent Chicago posting — “Ready for the slopes?” — included photos of the poster wearing ski goggles and a close-up of a few lines of cocaine. Others pick a different poison: “It’s my birthday this upcoming Monday, and I was hoping to be able to locate some mushrooms of the magic type,” read an ad posted by a purported Lakeview resident.
While cocaine and drug abuse have faded somewhat from the headlines, it is still very much a part of the social scene — with cocaine in particular seeming to enjoy a renaissance in New York.
Evidence of that is popping up in music, TV and even theater. References and use are open, casual, even blatant. Drug-abuse experts say the blase attitude toward cocaine use is a result of “generational amnesia.”
“There seems to be less of a stigma about cocaine,” said Dr. Herbert Kleber, director of the division of substance abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan. “People don’t feel nearly as much the need to hide it. They feel that they can use it in a more open fashion.”
In Chicago, young people tend to be applying that same attitude to heroin, said Cheryl Piper, director of nursing for the adult facility at Rosecrance, a non-profit substance abuse treatment center in Rockford. While there has been a steady population of cocaine users, she said, over the last two years Rosecrance has seen heroin abuse “en masse” among 18- to 25-year-olds.
“It used to be that people would do [heroin] in closets and behind closed doors, and that’s not true today,” Piper said. “The taboo is gone. They don’t blink an eye to share the drugs.”
Piper said the Internet has facilitated access to street drugs and prescription drugs. She has patients who she said spent a lot of time in chat rooms and on Internet message boards finding suppliers and drug buddies.
“It’s not like they have to go to a crack house to find cocaine anymore,” she said. “Just go onto the Internet. It’s as simple as that.”
It seems it would be similarly simple to get caught. While he declined to be specific so as not to compromise opportunities for investigation, Chicago Police spokesman officer John Mirabelli said police “use various sources that are indicative of drug transactions.”
Investigators with the Drug Enforcement Administration also say they use “multiple open source and electronic data when investigating criminal organizations,” though they usually arrest people involved in criminal organizations at the highest level, said DEA special agent Gary Olenkiewicz (the name as published has been corrected in this text), who is in charge of the Chicago field division.
Illegal drugs are not the most nefarious things being peddled on Craigslist. Police around the country have used Craigslist to investigate and bust prostitution, including in January when the Cook County Sheriff’s police arrested two Chicago women and charged them with pimping underage girls on the site.
Sheriff’s police spokeswoman Penny Mateck said the department is aware of the drug postings on Craigslist, but it has not conducted any drug investigations through the site.
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said ads related to illegal drug use are rare on the site as a percentage of total postings, and they are banned.
“Although we do not monitor the content of individual postings, staff promptly remove illegal ads when they’re brought to our attention, and most of our users have little tolerance for such ads and will aggressively flag them for removal,” Buckmaster said in an e-mail.
Craigslist also appreciates and fully cooperates with police investigations of illegal activity on the site, Buckmaster said, but he added that he doesn’t recall any investigations specifically targeting drugs.
On the ground, meanwhile, some say hard drugs have become more socially acceptable than smoking cigarettes.
Teron Beal, 34, a New York-based songwriter and aspiring actor, said he encounters cocaine regularly and does it occasionally — and not only in clubs and bars. “When you’re in meetings and you’re in the studio, it’s offered like coffee,” he said. “If you say yeah, they’re cool with it and if you say no, they’re like OK, and they just go and do it in front of you.”
“Coke is the new weed,” he said. “Everybody says that.”
In Chicago, heroin may be the new cocaine. Years ago, heroin was a darker color, but these days it often is white and can be snorted like cocaine, Piper said. Heroin also is cheaper than cocaine, so the habit can be sustained for longer.
“To a young person who has never really heard about it, it’s like, ‘All I’m doing is snorting a line, and hey, no big deal,'” she said. “The lines are very blurred here when it comes to what this drug is.”
But as users increasingly need a stronger high, they turn to injecting heroin, which also has become alarmingly commonplace among young adults, Piper said. Heroin causes muscles to waste away, and Piper said she regularly sees young women with “breasts that sag down like they’re 80 years old” and young men who have no muscle mass in their biceps. Many female patients can never wear shorts or dresses because their legs are so scarred from IV use, Piper said.
“The first time I saw a woman with those legs, it took my breath away,” Piper said. “And I see it every day now.”
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Dirty reads
CRaigslist is rife with postings seeking drugs and drug buddies — some coy, using slang including “snow” for cocaine and “420” for marijuana, and some explicit. Under cover of anonymous e-mail addresses, posters can advertise such urges with impunity.
Perusing the Strictly Platonic and Casual Encounters sections of Craigslist is not for the faint of heart, but nestled among graphic photos and, um, descriptive ads offering to trade drugs for sexual favors were these printable postings. [ a.e.r ]
– “Who wants to smoke up and get naked?”
– “Two cool guys want to take a cutie skiing. There’s 420, too.”
– “Snowstorm in June?”
– “Ski instructor seeking bunny.”
– “French lesson for 420.”
– “Feel like a little wake and bake this morning?”
– “Looking for some green assistance.”
— New York Times news service and Redeye’s Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz contributed
