CRACK GAINS HOLD ON SOUTH AFRICA

Ashen and bleary-eyed, John Funkumue and Diane Gordon roam the Johannesburg
flophouse's dark, dead air like vampires in a crypt, afraid of the sun. The
couple awoke with the worst hunger, but without money to pay any of the
drug dealers posted on the street corners outside. Through luck, larceny or
hard labor, they will find a way. Ever since Funkumue took his first slow
drag from a crack cocaine pipe five years ago, then turned Gordon on to it,
the vapor has become their life.

"When we're together, we're either high or looking to get high," said
Gordon, 21, edgily sizing up a car pulling slowly into the hotel parking lot.

"We're like dead men walking," said Funkumue, 27, his hard stare giving way
to a half smile. "I used to go and steal for it. I can't deny that. We've
tried to get off it and we come back [from treatment] with our cheeks all
fat, but then we go right back to it. The crack dealer gets every dime I
lay my hands on."

Six years after the fall of apartheid ended South Africa's international
isolation, the nation has developed a dangerous taste for crack, the
pellets of cooked cocaine that began poisoning poor, black neighborhoods in
the United States in the mid-1980s.

South Africa's reopening to the global community -- including its drug
trade -- came just as crack usage in the United States was beginning to
plummet. Searching for new markets, the international drug cartels found
one in this country of 41 million people, with its world-class airports and
banks, affluent whites and a poor, black majority with just enough
desperation and cash to buy the addictive offering.

'Sweets, Sweets'

Virtually unseen in South Africa seven years ago, crack use is growing
faster there than that of any other illicit substance. As they did in the
United States, the small rocks are beginning to vaporize lives and
families, transforming inner cities in tragically familiar ways. But unlike
the U.S. crack trade, made murderous by gunfights among rival gangs, drug
trafficking in South Africa is largely peaceful, perhaps because dealers
are so close-knit, law enforcement officials say.

In the crowded Johannesburg slum known as Hillbrow, young black men stand
on bustling street corners at midday shouting "sweets, sweets" to passersby
and to white suburbanites who buzz by in minivans, slam on the brakes, then
speed away after a brief exchange. In hotels for transients that charge by
the hour, prostitutes sell their services for roughly $8, the going rate
for a rock of crack. Break-ins, carjackings and muggings are the currency
of crack junkies, pushing a soaring crime rate even higher.

At the gleaming Mimosa Hotel, dealers park their luxury cars and retreat to
the bar for a sip of champagne and whispered conversations with scantily
clad women. South African police seize roughly $8,000 worth of crack
cocaine each week but acknowledge that they aren't even scratching the surface.

"When I first moved to South Africa in 1995, there was no crack here," said
Ted Leggett, a former New York City police officer and Los Angeles
prosecutor who is a professor at the University of Natal's School of
Development Studies in Durban. "But now crack has really taken off."

Police in South Africa recorded their first arrest for crack distribution
in 1995. They arrested 230 suspected dealers in 1997 and nearly twice that
number last year. Seizures of crack tripled from 1998 to 1999, and the
amount of raw cocaine confiscated grew nearly 10 times between 1994 and
1998. Still, officers say their understaffed department uncovers only a
fraction of the crack cocaine that flows in through Johannesburg's airport.

Nearly 10 percent of those arrested at an inner-city Cape Town police
station tested positive for cocaine, according to a survey conducted this
year. At Phoenix House, a counseling and rehabilitation center in
Johannesburg, 88 percent of people admitted this year have singled out
crack cocaine as their primary addiction, said assistant director Adrie
Vermeulen. The center did not treat a single patient for crack addiction
before 1994.

With their popular brand of homemade beer and potent homegrown marijuana
known as dagga, South Africans remain far more likely to abuse alcohol and
pot than any other substances. A synthetic depressant drug known as Mandrax
has also been popular there since the '70s.

But patterns changed when apartheid's collapse increased the number of
immigrants and refugees from elsewhere in Africa and visitors from the
West, including Latin America.

Drug rings led by Nigerians, active for years in global cocaine and heroin
markets, targeted South Africa as profitable new turf, according to law
enforcement experts, academics and recovering crack addicts.

Luring Customers

First lowering the price to entice South Africa's poorer population, drug
traffickers recruited prostitutes in Hillbrow and in inner-city
neighborhoods in Durban and Cape Town to try crack. Often providing the
drug for free initially, traffickers hoped to wean prostitutes off Mandrax
and addict them to crack.

"You give her your best stuff her first time, the really strong stuff,"
said Jeremiah Okoye, 34, who moved to Johannesburg from Nigeria four years
ago and said he has dealt crack from time to time to make ends meet. "But
then when she came back you'd give her some rocks that were not quite as
strong, and the next time you'd give her some that was even weaker still.
Then you've got her chasing that really good high that she got the first
time she smoked and she's yours. It's all about creating volume," he said.

Once a prostitute was hooked, Okoye and others said, a dealer could rely on
her to share her habits with her customers.

Crack in South Africa was initially used almost exclusively by white
prostitutes, their white suburban customers and then the customers' friends
and relatives.

"When I first started using, I'd look around the hotel room and there was
nothing but white guys lighting up," said Billy Gowanes, 29, who started
smoking crack four years ago but recently completed an inpatient recovery
program, his fourth attempt at rehabilitation. "But there is just so much
demand for crack now that the hotels in Hillbrow are a real rainbow nation."