AGE AND APATHY FACTORS IN DECLINE OF CRACK USE

DRUGS: The rise and fall of the drug's popularity in New York is
echoed across the nation.

NEW YORK- On a day when Mayor Rudolph 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.

Rios used to sell crack in the neighborhood, but street-level drug
dealers are hard-pressed to make a living these days, he said. So now
he deals in Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs.

"I can make more money selling these," he said, pointing to a stack of
the jackets inside his cramped kitchen, "especially on Friday nights."

Rios, 36, said he no longer used crack, either. But it was not the
many times he was arrested or the year he spent in prison that changed
his attitude. He simply grew tired of the drug, he said. Still, the
plum-colored marks on his arms are the trademark of another drug that
he does use - heroin. That, plus tobacco and alcohol.

"I've got to quit these cigarettes," he said, shaking his head in a
cloud of smoke.

It is unlikely that Rios will ever get invited to City Hall. But the
change in his life is the story of the decline of crack in New York -
done in be age, boredom and new opportunities.

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. 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.

For 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. It was a great year for tomatoes.

Over the last 10 years, the New York police made nearly 900,000 drug
arrests - more than any other city in the world. Almost a third were
for using a selling crack. 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.

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. 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. It came on strong, appearing to rise
without hesitation, and then broke, just as the most dire warnings
were being sounded.

In New York, the use of crack stopped growing as its addicts became
known as the biggest losers on the street. At the same time, the
violent drug markets settled down, as dealers and users fell into
retail routines. Perhaps most telling, there was a generational
revulsion against the drug.

"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.
"People look down on them so much that even crack-heads don't want to
be crack-heads anymore."

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 though would
over-whelm it.

"I'm not ready to say we won," Police Commissioner Howard Safir said
recently. "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.

"You can spray them once, but they come back," Safir said, comparing
drug dealers to cockroaches. "You have to keep going after them. We
had to take this city back block by block."

In Washington, however, 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.

"This happened over a period of time when Washington had fewer
officers on the street, the police made fewer arrest 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.

"Something clearly happened to change the attitude among youths,"
Johnson said. "They deserve a lot of the credit."

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. The cheap,
smokeable form of cocaine gives its users a quick high and often
leaves them wanting more. But a clear trend has developed that few
public officials predicted: Crack has become a drug used primarily by
older people.

Embraced by one generation, crack was spurned by the next. The level
of crack use has remained steady for more than a decade.

According to an annual survey of drug use among people who are
arrested, 35.7 percent of all males over 36 who were arrested in New
York last year had used crack recently, but barely 4 percent of those
15 to 20 years old had used it.

National surveys of the general population show the same decline in
crack use among the young. And among all age and race groups, the most
startling decline has been among young blacks - the very stereotype of
the urban drug user.

A new drug cycle, this time following new ways to ingest familiar
drugs like alcohol, marijuana and even heroin, which is cheaper and
more plentiful than ever, has taken hold. Among many young people in
New York, the rage is a "40 and a blunt" - a 40-ounce bottle of malt
liquor and a hollowed-out cigar packed with marijuana.

"You don't find much crack use among the young," said Jean L. Scott,
who has worked with drug abusers for 30 years at Phoenix House in New
York, the nation's leading treatment center. "These people saw a whole
generation go bad on crack. They stick with their 40 and a blunt."

Crack, she said, the drug that so scared America that it prompted
major changes in the judicial system, in prisons and in police
tactics, is barely spoken of among the young in New York - except with
disdain.