COCAINE: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

SKIING on the beach tomorrow?"

"Late-night ski lift looking for a snow bunny."

"Where are the cool Brooklyn ski bums? I've got tons to
share."

"Take a ride on the snow train."

The come-ons in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist last week
- - or any week - are as plentiful as they are obvious (and cheesy).
Using a variety of euphemisms that have been around since Jay
McInerney wrote about Bolivian Marching Powder, posters invite others
to join them for a line or a lost weekend fueled by cocaine.

The cheeky openness of these ads is hardly anomalous. While cocaine
and drug abuse seem to have faded from the headlines, with coverage
limited to the not-so-veiled references surrounding the exploits of
waifish celebrities, it is still very much a part of the social scene,
especially in New York.

Evidence of that is popping up in music, television and even theater.
Indeed, for a generation that has not had its John Belushi to drive
home the dangers of drug abuse, references and even use are open,
casual, even blatant.

"You do see it," said Noel Ashman, an owner of the Plumm, a hotspot
near the meatpacking district. "We're pretty tight at the club with
drug use, whenever we see it we kick it right out. But it has popped
up more than it did five years ago."

And like the red flash of a Louboutin pump, it is easy to
spot.

"It's definitely prevalent in clubs, bars, parties - everywhere,
basically," said Cristiano Andrade, 26, a Brooklynite who manages a
wine shop and goes out in the city once or twice a week.

Drug-abuse experts say the blase attitude toward cocaine use is a
result of "generational amnesia."

"There seems to be less of a stigma about" cocaine, said Dr. Herbert
Kleber, director of the division of substance abuse at the New York
State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan. As part of his oversight of
research into cocaine addiction and treatment, and in his private
clinical practice, Dr. Kleber hears stories about the drug's use.
"People don't feel nearly as much the need to hide it," he said. "They
feel that they can use it in a more open fashion."

The visibility of cultural markers - and the absence of cautionary
tales - leads to the assumption that coke is not as harmful, say, as
heroin (which was associated with the high-profile overdoses of River
Phoenix and Kurt Cobain in the 90s), or methamphetamine, whose recent
popularity in the gay community has led to a targeted campaign against
it, said Perry N. Halkitis, a professor of applied psychology at New
York University who studies behavior, the AIDS epidemic and drug abuse.

"If you're a 19-year-old and you go out and party and you're offered
meth, you say no because you've heard these bad things," he said. "But
you're offered coke, you say yes because you assume it's safe." And,
he added, as the authorities crack down on meth, "people are going to
tend to go to cocaine, which has similar, if not identical properties"
as a stimulant.

NOT to mention that the supply and the price of cocaine, about $25 to
$30 on the street for a half-gram bag, have remained stable for
several years, said John Galea, director of the street studies unit of
the New York State Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services. (In
rare cases, a large bust can affect prices. Chief James P. O'Neill,
the commanding officer of the New York Police Department Narcotics
Division, said the authorities seized a record 20 tons of cocaine off
the coast of Panama in March, and wholesale prices rose in the last
few weeks.)

A prevalence among young people is not entirely borne out by national
statistics. According to an annual survey by the federal Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, lifetime cocaine use
remained stable between 2002 and 2005 among 18- to 25-year-olds. (Data
before 2002 are noncomparable.) But the study - which estimates
national rates based on a poll of 67,500 people - recorded a 20
percent increase in past-month use among that age group in 2005 from
2004, the last period for which data were available, said Joe
Gfroerer, the group's director of the division of population surveys.
(There was no change in usage rates among people over 26.)

The Police Department has not recorded an increase in drug-related
arrests at clubs recently, Chief O'Neill said. But, he added, "It
doesn't mean if you're doing drugs in a club you won't get caught."

But in interviews over the last five months with people in the
night-life, entertainment, media and finance industries, all said that
cocaine is a prominent part of a night out. Teron Beal, 34, a
songwriter and aspiring actor, said he encountered cocaine regularly
and does it occasionally - and not only in clubs and bars. "When
you're in meetings and you're in the studio, it's offered like
coffee," he said. "If you say yeah, they're cool with it and if you
say no, they're like O.K., and they just go and do it in front of you."

"Coke is the new weed," he continued. "Everybody says
that."

Tom Sykes, a former night-life reporter for The New York Post who
chronicled his alcohol- and drug-fueled life in the memoir "What Did I
Do Last Night?" said that cocaine is more socially acceptable than
smoking. "You could go into a swanky party in New York and do a line
and nobody would notice," said Mr. Sykes, who is now sober. "Pull out
a cigarette and people would think you'd pulled out a gun."

And cocaine is not only popular in New York. "When I go to travel
somewhere else, people think I do it and they're so eager to shove it
up my nose," said Roxy Summers, a party promoter and D.J. who goes by
the name Oxy Cottontail.

Mr. Beal, who is old enough to remember the drug wars of the 80s, said
the perception of the drug has changed. "When I was growing up, it was
like a VH-1 'Behind the Music' moment whenever anyone talked about
their cocaine habit," he said. "It was like rock bottom, coke is
crazy." Now, he said, it is merely flashy fun.

Dominic Streatfeild, the author of "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography," who
is based in London, where according to recent government studies, use among
young people has tripled since the late 90s, had another theory. "In a
culture obsessed with celebrity," he said, "the fact that cocaine makes you
feel rich and beautiful - it's the perfect drug for our times."

With Wall Street surging and a 24-hour global economy, young
professionals have the money and the incentive to stay constantly wired.

"I do it every day," said Kristoff, a European transplant to New York
who works in finance and would not give his last name. He said he pays
$150 for two grams of cocaine. "If I have to work at 6 in the morning
and I have to be on top of the game, I'll do it. I'll take a gram of
coke and make half a million dollars."

That cavalier attitude carries over to pop culture, where references
to cocaine are as prevalent as the 80s fashions that accompanied its
previous heyday. Cocaine rap is a recognized genre in hip-hop, as
Sasha Frere-Jones noted in a December 2006 article in the New Yorker;
the platinum-selling rapper Young Jeezy made his name rhyming about
his days as a dealer and adopted a menacing-looking snowman as his
logo. In the last few years, the drug has been the subject of multiple
anthologies, some of them flattering.

Recently the comic Todd Barry, a staple of the downtown comedy
circuit, used a conversation he heard at a bar - when one man called a
friend to remedy his "nose problem" - as the basis for a new joke in
his act. And on a recent episode of NBC's "30 Rock" when two go-getter
writers attribute their success to cocaine, it was a laugh line, not a
rebuke.

Even Broadway is not exempt: In "Talk Radio" and "Jack Goes Boating"
(starring Liev Schreiber and Philip Seymour Hoffman, respectively),
the characters do lines and carry on.

When Gridskipper, a travel blog, ran a post in March about the top
bars in which to find cocaine in New York, the response was so
overwhelming - the list of places named was like a taxonomy of "it"
joints on the Lower East Side, the meatpacking district and
Williamsburg - and the comment section so lively that the editors
pursued the subject for several more days.

"Drug use tends to be cyclic," Dr. Kleber said. "If you have a really
dangerous drug, the generational remembering will come back quickly.
If it takes time for the casualties to add up, the epidemic will last
longer." Referring to the drug's last heyday, he added, "As some of my
colleagues said, John Belushi had to die before people believed that
these drugs were really dangerous."

Besides its addictive potential, cocaine can cause elevated blood
pressure, seizures, stroke, cardiac arrest or other heart problems,
particularly in people with a pre-disposition. Combining it with
alcohol, as many do, increases its toxicity, particularly in the
liver, said Dr. Thomas Kosten, a professor of psychiatry and
neuroscience and the director of the division of addictions at Baylor
College of Medicine.

But these negative effects are overshadowed by the drug's glamorous
image, which is perhaps best personified by Kate Moss. After a brief
furor when photographs of Ms. Moss apparently snorting cocaine
appeared on the cover of a British tabloid in 2005, she entered rehab
for a short time and emerged more successful than ever, with bigger
advertising contracts and her own line of clothing at Topshop, the
British retailer.

"You never hear about the addiction, you just hear about exclusive
photos of wild parties with cocaine, " Mr. Streatfeild said. "The
dangers of cocaine are without a doubt very real, but it's never
dispelled that Champagne image."

IT took the death last February of the skateboard star and downtown
bon vivant Harold Hunter, who died at 31 of a heart attack and whose
wake was attended by friends like Rosario Dawson, for Ms. Summers, the
D.J. and promoter, to rethink her own behavior.

"Harold's death really affected me; I know the ways in which he
treated night life," she said, adding that she "never touched" cocaine
again. Likewise, she said, people in her community of downtown
skateboarders, musicians, artists, and D.J.s went into hiding with
their drug habits. "But," she added, "that only lasted six months, if
that."