Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 6 Of 41

ACT I: INSANITY

The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over but
expecting different results

- - Popular adage in recovery circles

For years, police and prosecutors across the country thought they could win
the drug war with conventional weapons, such as putting more officers on
the street to make wholesale arrests of addicts and dealers.

Now reality has begun to sink in.

"The police, if they wanted to, could probably arrest 500 addicts for
possession a month. It wouldn't be that hard," says Newport News
Commonwealth's Attorney Howard Gwynn. "The question is, 'Would that make an
impact on the drug trade in Newport News?' The answer is, 'Of course not.' "

But for years this was the strategy, as police and prosecutors in Newport
News locked up addicts at an astonishing pace. From the late 1980s to the
late 1990s, drug arrests in the city soared from less than 500 a year to
more than 2,300.

The city jail, built to house 248 prisoners, has seen its average
population balloon from 350 inmates a day to more than 600 in 2001.
Two-thirds of the prisoners report having a substance abuse problem,
according to the Sheriff's Office.

During that time, the number of officers assigned to exclusively battle the
drug trade has more than tripled, rising to 35.

Yet Police Chief Dennis Mook knows they can't win the drug war on their own.

"We'll never arrest our way out of it," he says. "The only reason drug
dealers are out there is because people are buying drugs. It's a business."

There was a time, prior to the mid-1980s, when the drug war was a more even
fight - in Newport News and elsewhere.

But that was before crack cocaine.

Snorted in its powder form, cocaine gives its users an adrenaline-like rush
and a feeling of invincibility. It packs an even stronger kick if it's
injected or smoked. Few coke addicts, however, have the stomach for needles
and - before the 1980s - the only way to smoke cocaine was in its dangerous
free-base form. Free-base cocaine was typically made with volatile
solvents, such as ether, which can explode when ignited.

Then someone figured out a method to concentrate cocaine into small,
smokable chunks. They combined the coke with a little water and baking
soda. They heated it until the water evaporated and a hard rock of cocaine
remained. This new form of the drug was dubbed "crack" because it made a
crackling noise when lit.

These rocks turned out to be the drug dealer's dream. Crack packed the
punch of free-base cocaine without its potential to explode. Usually after
one hit, the customers started lining up.

Newport News police say they found the first seeds of the coming epidemic
at the Chantilly Apartments, an East End housing project, in 1986. Drug
dealers from New York had taken over several homes, where they had begun
selling this new, highly addictive form of cocaine.

By then, crack had already burst on the national scene in major urban
areas, and the big-city dealers had been looking for fresh markets in
smaller towns. At Chantilly, the New Yorkers could sell a $5 crack rock for
$10.

With crack's high potency and high profits, the drug spread quickly. It
took root in the low-rent hotels along Jefferson Avenue, such as the Patton
Motel, which became one of the city's most notorious spots for drugs and
prostitution.

Soon, more out-of-town drug dealers were headed for the Peninsula. Separate
crews from Florida set up shop in the Aqueduct Apartments in Denbigh and
along a strip of boarding houses on 40th and 41st streets in the East End.

Local dealers, such as Alonzo "Cut" Wooten, also got into the act. Police
say he eventually ran a $1 million-a-month operation at 23rd Street and
Chestnut Avenue.

Meanwhile, rival drug dealers, many of them young local men, sparked an
escalation of violence as they battled over drug territory. In 1992,
Newport News suffered 33 murders, breaking a decades-old record.

The police responded with more officers and more arrests. In 1989,
then-Police Chief Jay Carey promised the City Council a 50 percent increase
in drug arrests - to 700 a year - if they raised taxes to pay for more
narcotics officers. The taxes were raised, the officers were hired and the
arrests were made.

And the problem still grew.

In 1993, Carey again turned to the City Council, this time asking for $1.5
million to hire 20 additional officers. He promised a 20 percent decrease
in major crime with the new officers. By 1998, City Manager Ed Maroney
estimated that 100 new officers had been put on the streets, but most
crimes had not dropped.

The extra police simply pushed the dealers from well-known drug corners to
houses and other clandestine areas. The strategy had helped to spread the
epidemic. Not just in Newport News but across the country.

"It's in every neighborhood and locality in our society," Mook says. "I
don't care if you're rich or poor, it's in every neighborhood."

Many of the first dealers to hit Newport News sold drugs for profit. But
now many dealers are addicts themselves, peddling crack to support their
own $200- to $300-a-day habits, police say.

While the big dealers remain, a significant portion of the crack trade in
Newport News now consists of these small-time peddlers who have cultivated
their own sources in New York, Texas and Florida.

In recent years, violent crime has subsided somewhat, leading some people
to speculate that the crack wave has crested. Local detectives disagree.
Instead, they say, the market is now big enough for the dealers to share
the customers more peacefully.

They say crack and other drugs have now been woven into the fabric of our
culture.

"We're used to it," says one detective. "It's ingrained now."