Crack 03.09
March, 2009—Amy Keenan, 25, sat in her faded denim jacket and blue jeans as the cold March wind blew. Her fair skin was pockmarked — red spots surrounded her forehead and mouth. She picked at her face when she smoked crack cocaine sitting on the rooftops of the Van Dyke projects in Brooklyn.
As she took a drag out of her pipe, she surveyed the scene from atop the building. The Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn lay before her—multi-story brown housing with off-white blankets stuffed into rectangular window panes; gray cement roads filled with old model SUVs; the yard of a pipe-manufacturing plant; a metal salvage yard with a three-storey-tall pile of rusted hubcaps and the backbones of schoolroom chairs; black polythene bags caught in the barbed wire fences; faded graffiti on the walls; a memoriam to a young man named “Peanut Head”.
Her hair was tightly tied back and ended in a bunch of small blonde curls sticking up around the top of her head like a crown. Her eyes were cyan-blue, big and glazed. Her lashes were long—she had pretty eyes. They helped her turn tricks in the primarily non-white neighborhood. They got her attention from the cops—hefty white men who hung out two to a block on street corners. When they saw an unkempt white girl walking down the street, they knew she was either an addict or a prostitute.
Amy was both. She wanted to be so much more, but she didn’t know how. She was stuck between her past, and the lack of a future. Crack, and sometimes dope, and sometimes whatever she could get—angel dust, tranquilizers—helped her turn away from a past of sexual abuse she said she had suffered at the hands of her older brother in her middle-class duplex home in Vermont.
When the cops moved away, the dealers occupied the same corners—two or three outside La Crema Deli or the Dominican restaurant. They knew her, too.
They knew she’ll “bust a head”—“bust head” is the new term for a “crack head because they will meaning service men for cheap—for $20 or a crack hit. Especially when she was on a binge. They tempted her.
“Hey, you want something?”
Sometimes, she ignored them, shouting, “Leave me alone.”
Most times, she took whatever drug or money was offered. With her income she supported Eric Irizarry, 33 (or “Eddie Machete”), her boyfriend of seven years, and their landlord—a phantom-like man who shared his living space with them for $10 a day and whatever amount of crack she could give him. She didn’t like sharing, but didn’t have much of a choice—it was better than being homeless.
She shared her crack pipe, her STDs—Hepatitis C, gonorrhea, syphilis; she used to share her needles when she had done heroin. She didn’t have HIV despite sharing a barely-sterilized needle with a HIV-positive man.
She sat at the edge of the roof, staring down, cocaine smoke rising around her. She had not been home in three days. She was in the middle of a crack binge, selling her body to satisfy the cravings of her mind.
Four days ago, she hadn’t smoked crack for a few days in a row. If she didn’t smoke in the morning, she’d be clean for the entire day. But Eddie had become impatient for money. The next day, he’d placed a crack pipe below her nose and woken her up. She’d smelled the drug and had to smoke. Then she’d left in search of highs bigger than the previous hit.
She knew she shouldn’t be with him, but she had nobody else. And ultimately, using drugs was her choice. She dragged him down as well, tempting him when he tried to stay clean. They dragged each other down.
Amy Keenan is one of approximately 2.1 million current users of cocaine aged 12 and older in America, and 8.5 million lifetime users in 2007, a number three times larger than the number of heroin injectors[1] [2]. Crack cocaine is widely available on the streets and is cheap. Although its popularity among the younger generation has declined since the late 1980s, about 350,000 people aged 12 and older smoked it for the first time in 2007.[3] And research has revealed that consistent users of crack persist with their addiction for a decade or longer.[4]
[1]2007 National survey on Drug Use & Health < http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k7NSDUH/tabs/Sect1peTabs1to46.htm#Tab1.1A>
[2] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies (2008). Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (NSDUH Series H-34, DHHS Publication No. SMA 08-4343). Rockville, MD: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nsduh/2k7nsduh/2k7Results.cfm#TOC
[3] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies (2008). Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (NSDUH Series H-34, DHHS Publication No. SMA 08-4343). Rockville, MD: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k7NSDUH/tabs/Sect8peTabs1to42.htm#Tab8.30A
[4] Falck, R. S., Wang, J., & Carlson, R. G. (2007). Crack cocaine trajectories among users in a midwestern American city . Addiction , 102, 1421-1431.