CRACK KEEPS GRIP ON LIVES, FAMILIES, CITY NEIGHBORHOODS

Twenty years ago, Roy put a crack pipe to his lips, flicked a
cigarette lighter and breathed the sweet-smelling combination of
powder cocaine and baking soda deep into his lungs.

A lifelong drug user who has struggled with addictions to marijuana,
heroin and alcohol since age 10, Roy said it was crack that took
over his life. He married and divorced four wives. Only two of his
five children speak to him. He lost every job he tried to hold
onto, and has been homeless on and off for years.

Today he's broke, financing his habit by scoring crack for other
addicts in exchange for a few pieces of rock.

"Crack cocaine is so evil," said Roy, whose last name is not being
used to protect his identity as a police informant.

"I've watched it destroy this city, neighborhood by neighborhood,
for the past 20 years. I've seen it ruin lives. I've lost everything
important in my life because crack mattered more. That's what crack
does. It makes you love it more than you love anything else,
including your own life."

It was the summer of 1988 when crack cocaine came blowing into
Pittsburgh, first popping up in low-income black neighborhoods. By
fall, the drug and its effects could be seen in nearly every city
neighborhood and had a hold on people from a wide range of
backgrounds and lifestyles -- many of whom never touched crack only
months before, said city police Chief Nate Harper.

"We knew crack was coming our way, because we were watching it
destroy New York, Los Angeles and other cities, and Pittsburgh is
usually a few years behind whatever is happening there," said
Harper, who was a sergeant in the narcotics unit when the drug
surfaced here. "It hit the streets so fast and cut a swath through
the city. You could see the destruction it left behind."

Today, crack still holds the top spot as the most abused and
sought-after drug in the city, Harper said. The problem isn't
isolated to Pittsburgh. Addicts from across Allegheny County and
surrounding counties travel into the city to score crack, Harper
said. Users have been known to take a bus from another county to buy
crack for several addicts, return home and sell it at a higher
price, said city police narcotics Sgt. Doug Epler.

Harper estimated that 95 percent of all crimes are somehow
drug-related, and crack is the underlying reason behind most.

The great equalizer

In the early 1980s, detectives mainly battled powder cocaine, heroin
and marijuana in Pittsburgh, Harper said. Most heroin users were
black, and powder cocaine was a drug of choice for wealthier white
people and successful businessmen, Harper said, because it was
expensive and considered an accessory of the Hollywood elite.

Crack became the great equalizer, said Craig Edwards, who retired
from Pittsburgh police as an assistant chief in 1995 after 27 years
on the force. He was working as a night watch commander in 1988.

"People who spent a lot of money on powder cocaine at first looked
down at anyone who did crack," Edwards said. "Then they heard how
intense and fast the high was from smoking crack, and before you
knew it, they were hooked.

"We saw crack addicts from affluent and poor neighborhoods, black
and white, old and young, mothers and fathers and people who had a
pretty good life before they picked up crack. It seemed like no one
was immune to it."

Police began seeing mothers on the street working as prostitutes
with their children nearby, and fathers out buying crack and
immediately smoking the drug while their sons and daughters sat
watching in the passenger seat of cars, said narcotics detective
Pete Grbach, who has been with the department since 1987.

"You had people who swore they would never do things like sell
themselves, or sell their kids for sex, but they were," Grbach said.
"There was no profile for a crack addict. There still isn't."

Addiction specialists were alarmed by how insidious crack was, said
Dr. Neil Capretto, medical director of Gateway Rehabilitation, whose
specialty is addiction psychiatry.

Crack delivers a powerful high that lasts fewer than 10 minutes,
followed by a hard crash that usually brings depression and suicidal
thoughts, Capretto said. A heroin high is less intense but can last
for hours, Capretto said, and heroin addicts tend to be more mellow.

Crack cocaine immediately flows to the center of the brain where it
stimulates production of dopamine, giving the user intense,
tremendous pleasure, Capretto said. Dopamine, a chemical similar to
adrenaline, affects the ability to experience pleasure or pain.
Neurons containing dopamine are clustered in the mid-brain.

Many first-time crack users experience an orgasm, said narcotics
detective Glenn Hairston, who has been with Pittsburgh police since
the late '80s.

"A really good piece of cheesecake might raise your dopamine levels
to 200, and the best sex you've ever had might raise them to 400 or
500," Capretto said. "Crack cocaine raises them to 1,000 or more."

Even rats get hooked

Capretto said studies involving caged lab rats found that, given
levers to press to deliver food, water or crack cocaine, it did not
take long for the rats to push only the levers for the drug.

"They would choose the lever for crack until the point of death,"
Capretto said. "Crack overrides the basic survival mechanism that
exists in every living creature. There's nothing else out there like
it, and that was shocking to us. Usually, someone will do something
destructive, but eventually they'll get back around to tending to
the basic things that keep them alive. But not if they're using crack."

Capretto said addiction specialists started seeing longtime heroin
addicts quit that drug for crack, which was hooking users more
quickly than any drug previously seen.

Crack addicts neglect hygiene, eating and sleeping habits, leading
to open sores on their skin, broken and missing teeth, severe weight
loss and numerous health problems, said narcotics Lt. Bill Mathias.

Because crack addicts chase that intense high all day, they become
agitated and desperate, Capretto said. They will do just about
anything to score another hit, including stealing from relatives and
strangers, Hairston said.

Dawn Littlejohn, 44, of Crafton has been hooked on crack for eight
years. Her adult rap sheet travels back 22 years and is a case study
in addiction, shoplifting and public drunkenness, with four
prostitution arrests since 2000. She was quickly pushed into
prostitution to feed her crack habit, she said.

According to court records, Littlejohn completed drug and alcohol
treatment in 2000, and finished another court-ordered round of
therapy in 2007. Shortly before her June 26 arrest by Pittsburgh
vice squad detectives on the Uptown corner of Moultrie Street and
Fifth Avenue, Littlejohn said she'd been sober for more than a year,
the longest span since she first picked up a crack pipe.

She started smoking crack again recently and within "three days" was
back out on the street, selling herself for crack money.

She credited Narcotics Anonymous with helping her fight the urge,
and pledged to go back to meetings to stay clean.

"I have no warrants. I've been going to meetings and stuff. I've
been staying away from here. But I don't need to go to one meeting.
I need to go to a whole lot more," she said.

New game, new rules

When crack surged into Pittsburgh, investigators saw a sharp
increase in crimes, particularly violent ones, Edwards, the retired
policeman, said.

"Crack changed the rules of the game," Edwards said. "There used to
be a code among drug dealers and users that they wouldn't do certain
things in front of children or elderly people, and there was a basic
respect underlying it all. Once crack hit, the rules went out the
window. They'd do anything in front of anyone.

"Crack made people very aggressive, and very desperate. Addicts got
violent, and dealers knew the addicts were agitated and that put
them on edge -- and before you know it people are shooting people
dead over crack, holding up stores at gunpoint and stealing from
their mothers. It was out of control."

Crack cocaine ushered in an era of younger drug dealers, Edwards
said. Dealers used to be a bit older -- not typically teenagers --
and the drug-dealing business in Pittsburgh was well-controlled from
within, Hairston said.

Crack "opened up the game to anyone" because the drug was so cheap
- -- a rock can sell for $5 and provide a high of about 9 minutes --
and easily made, Hairston said. A stamp bag of heroin costs about
$15 and provides a high for hours. Boundaries and drug territories
were up for grabs because crack was moving so rapidly across the
city and the demand was so high, Hairston said.

"Before you know it, we're pulling crack dealers out of middle
schools," Edwards said.

Lethal combination

It would be a few years before gangs began playing a stronger role
in organizing and controlling the crack cocaine market in Pittsburgh.

By 1993, Allegheny County had a record 118 homicides, 83 of them in
Pittsburgh. That year, the lethal combination of crack cocaine and
street gangs became a fact of life in the city's predominantly black
and poor neighborhoods.

Edwards recalled a 14-year-old crack dealer he arrested in the late
'80s in a now-defunct West End housing project whose mother was
strung out on the drug. The teenager was responsible for caring for
several younger siblings, who were in a home with no food in the refrigerator.

"Crack started to destroy entire generations," Edwards said. "The
mama was doing it and started making her sons sell it to feed her
habit, and no one is caring for the younger kids at all. But they're
watching all this and learning, and they think this is normal behavior.

"So they grew up to do the same thing, and the cycle was born. We
have crack addicts today who are grandparents doing it right
alongside their teenage grandkids."

In many ways, Pittsburgh in the late 1980s was ripe for crack to
take hold. The economy was depressed, as steel mills closed and
people found themselves out of work, Harper said. The job market was
changing; many people who came from generations of mill workers or
other skilled manual labor jobs found themselves unemployable, and
many became depressed, he said.

That combination is, in many ways, the perfect breeding ground for
drug addiction.

"When things in a person's life are that low and they're depressed,
if they tend toward addictive behaviors they might reach for drugs
or alcohol to help them escape," Capretto said.

In the late 1980s, people were fleeing the city for the suburbs,
leaving empty homes behind. Older people died or moved and left
their homes to adult children, some of whom became addicted to crack
and turned the homes into crack houses.

"Suddenly, there were entire stretches of streets in neighborhoods
with abandoned and dilapidated homes that were being taken over by
crack addicts," Harper said. "And the good folks who still lived
there ended up leaving, because they didn't want to live next to
that, but they couldn't sell their homes because no one else wanted
to live next to that either.

"So the vacant homes piled up and the businesses boarded up and
moved, and the destruction began."

There continues to be no solid profile of a typical crack user.

Another police informant, who first picked up crack in the early
1990s when his wife left him and took their young son, is educated,
holds a good job and has a nice home. He's not gaunt or sickly
looking and doesn't resemble the stereotypical image of a skinny,
jittery crack addict.

And he has a personal code by which he abides: He smokes crack only
on weekends.

"I'm pretty disciplined about it," said Bill, who agreed to talk
only if his last name was withheld. "Sometimes I even put it down
and walk away from it for a week or two, because I know if I don't,
I'll lose my job or be dead from it.

"But I always come back to it. Crack has a hold on me, and it won't
let go. Don't ever even pick up crack and try it. If you do, forget
it -- you're done. All of the chapters of the rest of your life are
written by crack. You'll never get back to where you were."