TEN BUCKS A HIT ON THE OVERTOWN 'ROCK RUN'

The use of crack cocaine in the United States is moving from cities into
the countryside

The 'rock run' is from the edge of Miami Beach into Overtown, a low-slung
sprawl of poor housing that passes for the description of 'ghetto'. When
the sun goes down on Overtown, so they say, 'the streets come up'.

Jimmy knows how to operate the rock run well enough - he's done it more
times than he can count, if he still can count.

You drive only so far, to the 'safe house' two blocks before an avenue
across which it just isn't supposed to be right for a honky to venture. Or
so the keepers of the safe house say - it could just be a way of
maintaining the 25 per cent commission the 'runner' takes, plus tips for
the look-outs on the street corners.

From the house, the runner goes to get the gear. Eighty bucks for powdered
cocaine, 20 for heroin but only 10 for the thin, brown-ish chip that Jimmy
prefers, aka crack.

The notion that all crackheads are young and carefree goes to the wind
inside the safe house. There's a man sitting on a stool who says he's 63,
and been smoking 'rocks' for 15 years. There's a tragic 'keeper' of the
place called Janey with an arm full of holes and a figure from Auschwitz.

Every now and then, Jimmy says he will go clean, and sometimes he does. But
he always seems to come back. He disappears for a while during parties,
only to emerge from the bathroom jittering about. When he invites you back
to his place on the beach to meet his latest girlfriend, the score, by both
of them, is as automatic as a peck on the cheek.

The reason? Simple: 'Think of what an orgasm is like. Y'know what I mean?
Now imagine that going on for 10 minutes. For 10 bucks.

'Trouble is,' Jimmy continues, 'you bum out afterwards, but not like after
screwing. And when you go down you want to go up back up again, but if you
go back up you got twice as far to fall next time, and when you want to get
back up you can't and it does your head in.'

And not only in the immediate aftermath. Jimmy is the kind of person who
will arrive an hour late or not at all. He will insist on borrowing your
rental car for an hour and bring it back next day, if at all.

He has strings of (invariably sassy and beautiful) girls but is incapable
of holding on to any of them for more than a few weeks, for all their
dedication to his effervescent personality. Because Jimmy is bright: he
works clubs by night and by day tries the best he can to hustle a path into
the film industry.

But everything has been going wrong lately - television producers give him
the runaround, various club projects falling through, DJ contracts the same
- - Jimmy blames the world, but in a quiet moment he will admit: the 'rocks'
are killing him.

And as crack has come to be killing quite a few other Americans again of
late. Statistics show heroin to be declining and crack, scourge of the
1980s, on the rise again. The new phenomenon is that crack is fleeing the
big cities, into smaller towns and the countryside.

'We've seen drugs and crime migrate to the rural areas in the past several
years to get away from law enforcement,' says Tony Soto, director of the
Gulf Coast High Intensity Drug Trafficking project in New Orleans. 'It's
happening all over the United States, as dealers and gangs go deeper into
the rural areas.'

Crack is more widely used by 8th to 12th graders in the country than in cities.

Crack means easy money for people to whom money comes hard. Pastor James
Bentley, who tries to fight the dealers in West Palm Beach, where many have
moved from Miami, says: 'It can mean jobs. $20 for a 13-year-old lookout on
a bike, $4,000 a night for a 20-year-old street dealer. Kids can take care
of the family, neighbours.'