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But a clear trend has developed that few public officials predicted: Crack has become a drug used primarily by older people.Įmbraced by one generation, crack was spurned by the next. The cheap, smokable form of cocaine gives its users a quick high and often leaves them wanting more. The drug that was held up as the scourge of New York is still around, of course, and so are its consequences - broken families, battle-scarred neighborhoods, crimes both petty and large. ''Something clearly happened to change the attitude among youths,'' Mr. ''This happened over a period of time when Washington had fewer officers on the street, the police made fewer arrests for drugs, and the mayor himself was indicted for smoking crack,'' said Bruce Johnson, a New York social scientist who has conducted extensive surveys of crack use across the country for the National Institute for Justice. In Washington, however, the drug arrest rates actually declined in some of the peak crack years - and the city still recorded a steeper drop than New York in the percentage of its young residents using cocaine from 1990 to the present. We had to take this city back block by block.'' Safir said, comparing drug dealers to cockroaches. ''You can spray them once, but they come back,'' Mr. ''But we're no longer the crack capital of the world.'' He attributed the change to a policy of zero tolerance for anyone using or selling drugs in the open. ''I'm not ready to say we won,'' Police Commissioner Howard Safir said recently. The police consider the transformation of parts of Harlem, Washington Heights and Brooklyn something of a miracle, emblematic of New York's determination to beat back the drug tide that many people thought would overwhelm it. ''People look down on them so much that even crackheads don't want to be crackheads anymore.'' ''If you were raised in a house where somebody was a crack addict, you wanted to get as far away from that drug as you could,'' said Selena Jones, a Harlem resident whose mother was a chronic crack user. Perhaps most telling, there was a generational revulsion against the drug. At the same time, the violent drug markets settled down, as dealers and users fell into retail routines. In New York, the use of crack stopped growing as its addicts became known as the biggest losers on the street. It came on strong, appearing to rise without hesitation, and then broke, just as the most dire warnings were being sounded. Drug-use surveys, arrest statistics and the personal narratives of scores of users, dealers and street-level narcotics officers point to the same pattern: The crack epidemic behaved much like a fever. Nearly every major American city plagued by the drug has matched New York's rise and decline in crack use, regardless of how law enforcement responded. But a broader look at the arc of the crack years suggests that it was not the incarceration of a generation, or the sixfold increase in the number of police officers assigned to narcotics, that turned the tide in New York, which the police called the crack capital of the world. Almost a third were for using and selling crack. Over the last 10 years, the New York police made nearly 900,000 drug arrests - more than any other city in the world. On the surface, crack has all but disappeared from much of New York, taking with it the ragged and violent vignettes that were a routine part of street life.įor example, a little triangle of land near Bushwick, where crack dealers used to stage midnight fights with their pit bulls, is now a community garden. Today, in communities that used to have more open-air crack markets than grocery stores, where children grew up dodging crack vials and gunfire, the change from a decade ago is startling. But the change in his life is the story of the decline of crack in New York - done in by age, boredom and new opportunities. ''I've got to quit these cigarettes,'' he said, shaking his head in a cloud of smoke. Still, the plum-colored marks on his arms are the trademark of another drug that he does use - heroin.
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He simply grew tired of the drug, he said. But it was not the many times he was arrested, nor the year he spent in prison, that changed his attitude. Rios, 36, said he no longer used crack, either. ''I can make more money selling these,'' he said, pointing to a stack of the jackets inside his cramped kitchen, ''especially on Friday nights.''
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So now he deals in Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs. Rios used to sell crack in the neighborhood, but street-level drug dealers are hard-pressed to make a living these days, he said. Giuliani went to Brooklyn to tout the renewal of the Bushwick neighborhood, once considered one of the most notorious drug bazaars in the country, Pipo Rios opened a 40-ounce malt liquor and contemplated his business not far from where the Mayor spoke.