The coke spoon was lying in the alley behind my apartment. Less than two inches long, it had a metal shaft about the width of a bobby pin. It could have been the head of a screwdriver, and a year ago I wouldn’t have looked twice at it. But it was too small to be a screwdriver, and I picked it up.
My education about coke began slowly. Freshman year, cocaine was still in the heroin category – totally illicit, taboo. Sophomore year it was a distant reality, the secret behind why some older girls suddenly got so skinny. It wasn’t until junior year that I first saw it, and then it was far from Northwestern – a designer’s loft in downtown Manhattan around 5 a.m.
But when I returned to campus that winter, coke was the gossip: A lot of my friends had been doing it, one might have a “problem,” cliques had realigned on the basis of who did it and who did not. I mentioned the rumor to my neighbor, whom I’d assumed had never tried the drug, but he shrugged it off. “We’ve only done it six or seven times,” he said, referring to himself and his girlfriend.
Suddenly, coke was everywhere. It was in bathrooms, on mirrors, under tables at clubs. It was where my friend really was when she didn’t tell me. It came in all different kinds of geometric shapes – lines and key bumps – and sizes – grams, eight-balls and baggies. You could snort it, sniff it, rail it or blow it; it’s something you could “do” or “use” in a way far different from marijuana.
My limited experience with coke seemingly had more to do with my obliviousness than its actual presence; if I’d never seen it, I’d been avoiding it. Even my sister, a Weinberg freshman, saw it in a frat house within a few weeks on campus.
In 2006, the Core Alcohol and Drug survey found 2.2% of the 312 NU students polled had used cocaine in the past 30 days, just below the national rate of 2.4%. Dr. Michele Morales, NU’s director of Health Education, said she has not seen cocaine at all this year. “But I do believe that it’s on campus,” she said.
It’s here – even at the Keg – but people speak about it differently than pot. It’s something done clandestinely, at odd hours at night. People whisper about it because it’s illegal and because its price tag provokes stinginess, a reluctance to share. I learned lots of code names, from “blow” to “white” to “yay” to a nonverbal scratching of the nose.
“It makes you feel glamorous,” someone said. “It just makes you more social,” said someone else, who used it to stay out all night.
Were there downsides? “The addictive properties are higher,” Morales said, but she believes alcohol is a more dangerous problem. “It’s pretty rare that someone is going to snort so much cocaine that they are going to go into heart failure the first time they try it,” she said. (This happens more commonly due to alcohol, she said.)
Until recently I had never even thought about trying coke, but now it’s always the question. It’s what “Do you like to party?” really asks, and behind the words of a girl during rush who asked about my house, “Is the reputation true?” “No,” I said, wondering to whom that rep really belonged. After all, someone in my building had used that spoon, so coke couldn’t be far away.
Medill senior Jen Wieczner can be reached at [email protected]
