CRACK GAINS A HOLD ON SOUTH AFRICA

JOHANNESBURG - Ashen and bleary-eyed, John Funkumue and Diane Gordon roam
the 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, this 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 cheap, addictive offering.

Virtually unseen in South Africa seven years ago, crack use is growing
faster here than that of any other illicit substance. As they did in the
United States, the gumball-size rocks are beginning to vaporize lives and
families, transforming inner cities in tragically familiar ways. But unlike
the U.S. crack trade, made murderously violent by turf battles and
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, buff young black men
stand on bustling street corners at midday shouting "sweets, sweets" to
passersby and to conspicuous 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 an already 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 or cognac and whispered conversations with
young, scantily clad women. Police here recover roughly $8,000 worth of
crack cocaine each week but acknowledge that they aren't even scratching
the surface. So awful is Hillbrow's disintegration that many residents have
taken to calling it "Hellbrow."

"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. . . .
I've gotten to watch what happened in New York City and Compton happen all
over again."

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,
which last year surpassed Cairo's as the busiest in Africa.

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.

"There was nothing going on in the way of cocaine or crack trafficking in
1991," said Larry Frye, the first agent assigned by the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration to South Africa. "Now we're seeing crack
everywhere."

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 here 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.

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 their
reliance on 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. "Prostitutes have a lot of
reasons to turn her john on to crack," Leggett said. "Foremost, if she can
get the guy to smoke crack, it's less likely that she'll actually have to
have sex with him."

Said Sgt. Kriban Naidoo, a spokesman for the Hillbrow Police District:
"These guys are good businessmen, real clever entrepreneurs."

While crack cocaine in the United States was from the start popularly
linked to poor, inner-city blacks, 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."

Unemployment hovers above 30 percent here, the HIV infection rate is among
the fastest-growing in the world - and the proliferation of crack could
accelerate both.

At 21, Steven Myers has lost everything to crack. He started using a year
ago when his father unexpectedly joined him and his friends as they were
smoking dagga one weekend afternoon, produced a crack pipe and said: "Here,
try this."

Within months, Myers said, "I had sold my car, my television, my clothes. I
even sold my shoes and my bedclothes."

When his girlfriend tired of his habit and the loans that he never repaid,
she threatened to tell his parents. "Tell my mother," he said, hoping to
bait her, "but please don't tell my dad."

She did just that, which led to a family meeting in which Myers's
girlfriend and mother confronted him in front of his father. Myers's father
promised that he would clean him up, and then, when everyone left the room,
father and son broke out their crack pipe and laughed.

"I know now that he introduced me to it because he didn't want me to tell
anybody about his habit," said Myers, who is one week into a six-week
inpatient rehabilitation program.

Neither Funkumue nor Gordon plan to try again to kick their habit. "The
pipe and I are stuck with one another," said Funkumue.

Funkumue said he has lost everything to crack, including two teeth when he
fell during a crack-induced stupor. He tore ligaments in his knee two days
later. "Man, I was flying," he said.

"I used to be a handsome guy, had a good job [as a construction worker].
I'm a mess now, I know that. Hillbrow is a mess now."

"Tell them in America that crack is the devil, brother."