It would be popular, cheap, and the cause of anti-social behavior.

And it would be despised by people who had worked long, hard years to obtain that same mental state without resorting to the drug. It would be attractive to the poor, and wildly popular among those who had no prayer of ever achieving that comfortable station in life.

What if there were a drug (I inquired of the mirror) that could chemically induce feelings of upper-middle-classness. Before it is too late, I muttered, dragging comb through my hair. They are the ones, I thought melodramatically, who should-who must!-smoke crack. I mused about the weird apparatchiks who wage war on drugs and who claim vindication in the fact that drug use is declining among the middle class. I woke up tired, alert, still a little buzzed, filled with an urgent desire to get to work to make up for the nightвЂ™s decadence. I feared that an air conditioner was going to fall on my head. Like weed, itвЂ™s stupefying like coke, itвЂ™s conducive to paranoia.ДЄfter my night of crack, I went home and fell into a light sleep with the lights on. You get high and before you know it youвЂ™re coming down again, thinking maybe crack combines the worst of other drugs. (Yeah, right.) So he finally gets you a rock but chips off a little for himself. Or he wants you to give him your money and heвЂ™ll go get the rock from his friend over there. But he wonвЂ™t sell to you because he thinks a white guy must be a cop. If all you have in life is bad choices, crack may not be the most unpleasant of them.Д®ven at two in the morning, you can find a guy whoвЂ™s got a rock. You can be a moral tourist in the land of crack and still get a sense of how the drug can make sick sense to demoralized people. You want your next rock, you want to get off, get out of this world-or at least transform it for a few minutes. When youвЂ™re back outside prowling the lunar landscape of post-Reagan urban America at two in the morning with your high fading and your heartbeat racing, youвЂ™ll begin to learn that crack is both a mental and a material phenomenon. The silence ends when that last sliver of rock is gone and you want to go out and find another $25 rock. An individualistic drug, crack is often enjoyed in silence. You may start to notice other aspects of the crack experience. You may find yourself in the company of experienced crackheads as you smoke your fourth rock. Having been through the experience, though, may facilitate a certain realism about the conflict in question. And I certainly wouldnвЂ™t argue that crack isnвЂ™t hazardous or that anyone should try it. Now, I wouldnвЂ™t argue that you have to smoke crack to understand the war on drugs-any more than you have to kill someone to understand the war in Vietnam. Nor has anyone who regularly reports or comments in the media on the ravages of crack capitalism.

Probably no one making our governmentвЂ™s drug policy has ever smoked a rock of crack cocaine. Even heroin is not utterly unknown to the opinion and policy classes.Д«ut crack is something else.

Virtually all came of age before the dawn of zero tolerance. Both pencil pushers and paper pushers have been known to snort the occasional mound of cocaine. So have many of the rugged young officials now in charge of said hostilities. Most of the journalists covering the so-called вЂњwar on drugsвЂќ have at least tried marijuana. When it comes to crack, politicians and pundits literally do not know what they are talking about. вЂњUsing it even once can make a person crave cocaine for as long as they live.вЂќ -Peter Jennings, вЂњABC World News Tonight,вЂќ September 8

Things crack heads say