MR. AND MS. MINIVAN POWDER UP

The signature drug of the eighties is back on the table in the homes
of middle-class moms and dads.

Toronto -- Here's the scene: an old brick house in a gentrified
neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, elegantly renovated by the
architect who lives there with his family. A Volvo and an Astrovan are
parked outside. Indoors, six revellers are gathered around the coffee
table. Two women chat from matching overstuffed chairs. One is wearing
jeans and a wool sweater, the other sports Gap khakis; they are
comparing notes on the ear infections of their respective
four-year-old daughters. Bent over the coffee table, one of their
husbands is painstakingly scraping out lines of cocaine with a razor
blade.

Yes, cocaine. "We do it once or twice a month," says Rick, the man
with the razor blade. A product manager at a computer company, Rick is
30, married, and the father of one of those four-year-olds. When he
and his friends gather on a Saturday night, there is red wine with
dinner and, lately, cocaine for dessert.

"It's back," says Detective Rick Chase, of the downtown drug squad of
the Metro Toronto Police. "We're seeing more and more powder coke."
The snowy substance that fuelled yuppie excess in the eighties has
found a new following in 1999: Mr. and Ms. Minivan, with two kids, two
jobs, and serious stress.

"The minivan people need those drugs," says sociologist Diane Pacom,
who teaches at the University of Ottawa. "They are the ones with the
urgency: young middle-class suburban couples who need to take their
kids here and there. They don't sleep enough. People want things that
stretch their energy to the limit."

Patrick, for one, wants more. "The bungalow is not enough," says the
29-year-old investment broker, who sees cocaine at most of the parties
he attends these days. "We're all in middle management, making
$160,000 a year in combined salaries. Life is that much more intense,
the buzz has got to be that much greater."

Det. Chase's working hours are largely spent with a grittier cocaine
clientele, but he knows about the yuppie user. "Some urban guy gets in
his van, gets a gram, he can get five to 10 lines out of that, and it
will suffice for his Friday and Saturday night," he says. And compared
to hardcore addicts and dealers, he adds, "Those users don't bother
us."

Pacom says it was only a matter of time before cocaine came back.
"Drugs go through cycles of fashion just like anything else," she
says. Two years ago, heroin chic was the byword in the fashion world,
with icons like the emaciated Kate Moss and grunge star Courtney Love.
But that's old news, and now cocaine -- comparatively cheaper and less
scary to use -- is attracting all kinds of fans.

Take Nigel. A 30-year-old Toronto lawyer, married with two children,
Nigel buys a gram and a half every month or so, and snorts it with old
friends on the weekend. "Sure, it's glamorous, and it's fun," he says.
"But at the end of a week of working, and running around doing all
kinds of other things, it does give you an energizing lift."

Jane, 35, a Toronto real-estate agent, uses cocaine a few times a year
as a kind of mini-vacation. "You turn off the world and do it and have
a blast," she says. "And then two days later you go back to work and
your normal world and no one's the wiser." (Such patterns lead Jim
Sutherland, editor of Vancouver Magazine, to call this wave of coke
users "weekend warriors.")

Nigel's wife doesn't partake. She doesn't mind, he says, but she just
doesn't like cocaine. Bay Street broker Sean, 30, says that among the
white-collar cocaine users in his set, men far outnumber women. The
latest Addiction Research Foundation statistics (for 1996) report that
4.9 per cent of adults in Ontario have used cocaine at least once, and
men are twice as likely as women to have used. The 30-to-39 age group
had the highest rate of use, at 10 per cent, followed by
40-to-49-year-olds, at 6.2 per cent. People who are or have been
married were almost twice as likely to have used as those who've never
married (6.4 per cent versus three per cent).

Pacom says that despite its Miami Vice image, cocaine is a very now
kind of drug. "People want speed to face the nineties," she says.
"The sixties were more meditative -- people wanted to escape reality.
It's the opposite now. They need things to make them perform."

Cocaine also has a retro sort of appeal to those too old for rave
drugs like Ecstasy. Nigel says his crowd remembers cocaine as the racy
drug they first partied on in university, though they treat it
differently now.

"The perception may still be crackheads on the street or glamorous
users on the club scene," he says. "But it's when we're hanging out
and chatting." These days, Nigel is careful to use a moderate amount,
so he can still function the next day when he has to get up and take
his young daughter to dance class.

Det. Chase, who has been with the drug squad for 16 years and has a
breezy nonchalance about such subjects, predicts that cocaine will
never again dominate the drug scene as it did in the 1980s. "There are
so many other things out there," he says. "It's a much more
competitive market." Ecstasy has the college-age market sewn up (at
between $25 and $50 a tab), speed is making a comeback with the young
professional crowd, and LSD is also enjoying a solid resurgence in
popularity. Even heroin still has its fans -- although at $200 a gram,
it's much pricier than cocaine.

Cocaine is far cheaper than it was 10 years ago. A gram that went for
$150 in 1989 will set you back only $90 today. Sean gets his supply
from a friend who once dated a girl who lived across the hall from a
dealer. He says the drop in price is definitely a factor in a return
to occasional coke use.

And the cocaine available now is much purer than the stuff that dusted
the mirrors of the eighties. "Because there's so much more on the
market, the dealers know they can't cut it," Det. Chase says.
Cocaine's dark image in the eighties stemmed in large part from its
addiction rate, sometimes estimated as high as 50 per cent after first
use. And even for people who use on a purely recreational,
one-weekend-a-month basis, the addiction factor adds to the cachet.

"The fear is still there, for sure," says Sean. "You never know if
this is the time, the time you'll do it one time too many and wind up
addicted."

Nigel, too, covets the frisson of danger that comes with every little
plastic bag. "I absolutely love the ritual," he says -- the mirror,
the razor, the lines. "That is very addictive in its own right, the
sense of danger and the forbidden."

But this is not the birth of a coked-out free-for-all. Both Nigel and
Sean say there are clear lines about what kind of use is acceptable,
and anything resembling addiction is taboo. "I'm cautious about
introducing the fact that I occasionally use cocaine with people who
don't already know," says Nigel. And the party powder has a long way
to go to displace the gin and tonic. "In most social settings it would
still be highly inappropriate," he says. "I don't know if it will
ever become the totally acceptable suburban drug."

CAVEAT EMPTOR

While the police have more to worry about than the weekend cocaine
buyer, it's still illegal, and Toronto criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby
points out that penalties are stiff when users are caught.

First offenders, given a summary conviction, face fines of up to
$1,000 and/or six months of imprisonment. A judge might be persuaded
to let an "upstanding citizen" off with a conditional discharge,
meaning probation and community service, Ruby says. But penalties for
subsequent offences range up to $2,000 and/or one year in the Big
House. And, as Detective Rick Chase points out, you could never take
the kids to Florida for March break again.

For conviction by indictment, the penalty is up to seven years
imprisonment, though Ruby says only the most serious cases would be
indictable. However, trafficking and possession for the purposes of
trafficking are indictable offences, punishable by up to life
imprisonment.

According to Det. Chase, a trafficking conviction is unlikely if a
user is caught with cocaine only, and not the paraphernalia of a
dealer ("scales, pager, debt list"). But Ruby reminds people that
buying drugs for pals is still trafficking and "it happens" that
yuppie buyers get nailed.

"For cocaine, they do go after you," Ruby said. "The dangerous point
is when you're buying. They won't go after your home in Forest Hill.
But if you buy in a bar or a restaurant, they watch those. And then
it's your bad luck."