COCAINE IS MAKING A COMEBACK WITH THE WELL-TO-DO

NEW YORK - There is a nice little jazz bar in the East Village. The drinks
are a fair price and the mix of people is good. The only problem is that
it's tough to get into the bathroom.

This agitated a silver-haired college professor named Jason who was in the
bar on Thursday night. He crossed his legs. He uncrossed them. Reaching the
point where he could wait no longer, the professor walked out onto 13th
Street and ducked behind a trash bin. He had to have that snort of cocaine.

``It's getting harder and harder to use the toilets in the bars because
there are so many people in the toilets doing everything except using the
toilets,'' said Jason, 45, who said he first tried cocaine two years ago at
a Manhattan party. ``If you dope-tested the top of every toilet tank in the
city, I bet half would test positive for cocaine.''

At a time when the names of increasingly popular pharmacological drugs -
most notably MDMA or Ecstasy - and a few of the old standards such as
heroin are in the news, little attention is being paid to the drug that is
re-emerging as the narcotic of choice among New York's
pinstripe-and-cocktail set. Cocaine.

While a good many cocaine users and experts maintain that the drug never
really went away, and national surveys and other numbers suggest that
cocaine use is at least holding steady, there is strong anecdotal evidence
to suggest that powder cocaine use is edging up as it undergoes a
renaissance among the well-dressed and well-fed in New York City.

Daytop Village, the largest drug-rehabilitation program in the city,
reports that 45 percent of its 2,000 white- and blue-collar outpatients
were treated for using powder cocaine in 1999, up from 30 percent in 1990.

Cocaine-related emergencies in New York City increased by 21 percent from
1990 to 1998, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network. Jonathan
Porteus, a clinical psychologist at Daytop, said those emergencies range
from heart palpitations to lethal overdoses.

``Cocaine is back for the 30- and 40-year-olds,'' said Avery Mehlman, the
deputy bureau chief of narcotics for the Brooklyn district attorney.
``Crack is considered to be highly addictive and synonymous with people
down on their luck. Powder cocaine, due to its higher price, implies a
certain social strata. It's become the drug of choice for the so-called
recreational user.''

If anything has changed, it is the culture of cocaine. It is not bought on
a shady street corner anymore, and its use is less and less clandestine.
``Every bar's got a coke dealer, and everybody has a delivery service,''
said Andrew M., an independent filmmaker who sat in the corner of a bar in
Chelsea sipping a cosmopolitan and snorting cocaine from the palm of his hand.

``And then you have your spots that sell cocktails and coke,'' he said.
``The coke bars are becoming the people's choice, because you don't know
who's monitoring your pager anymore.''

Andrew M. was referring to the cocaine service that he could beep to have
drugs delivered to his apartment. That is until federal agents from the
Drug Enforcement Administration broke it up in January, arresting four
people and seizing a notebook that listed the names, addresses and phone
numbers of more than 2,000 customers all over Manhattan. The addresses
included major financial institutions, and apartments in affluent parts of
the city.

``It's a bunch of yuppies mostly,'' said an agent with the federal drug
agency. ``Lawyers and business types. White people with too much time and
money on their hands. I've got to say, though, it was a pretty smooth
operation.''

The rebound in cocaine use can be traced to two causes, and both have their
roots in money, said Rick Curtis, a professor of anthropology at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice, who studies patterns in urban drug use.

Not surprisingly, Curtis said, the boom times on Wall Street have spurred
the use of the drug, and so have falling cocaine prices. There is a
worldwide glut in the cocaine market, and when the authorities confiscate
1,500 pounds, as they did this month in the Bronx, it makes the newspapers,
but it hardly makes a difference in the supply or the demand.

Two decades ago, a kilogram of cocaine sold for a wholesale price of
$40,000, experts say. Today it goes for $20,000 to $25,000 wholesale.
Translated into consumer prices, half a gram costs $25; a gram, $50; and an
``eight ball,'' 3.5 grams, $150. The average price for a gram of cocaine in
1990 was $100, Curtis said.

``It's the dot-com crowd driving it,'' he said. ``It's the hip
art-and-money crowd, the Wall Street people looking for a kick. There is
new money to burn, and it's the 30- to 40-year-olds who remember the kick.''