On a tennis court in Miami last fall, West Coast Bureau Chief Benjamin Gate commented to Caribbean Bureau Chief William McWhirter on the huge increase he had observed in the use of cocaine among middle-class Americans.

McWhirter responded by citing estimates on the growing traffic in the drug through his South Florida territory.

Says McWhirter: "We realized we were talking about two ends of the same pipeline. Like oil, cocaine had become a major commodity. I had the suppliers, he had the consumers." From there, under Gate's coordination, reporting this week's cover story on the epidemic spread of cocaine was fairly straightforward. McWhirter concentrated on the criminal activities of importers and suppliers and the law's efforts to control them. Washington Correspondent David Jackson talked with members of the Drug Enforcement Administration and other Justice Department officials. Gate and New York Correspondent Janice Simpson interviewed dozens of cocaine users, former users and dealers in an effort to put together a series of profiles. Says Gate of the experience: "Stitching together this grim and sorry story was not easy. Getting these people to discuss their habits, lifestyles and thoughts required the establishment of trust, and that takes time." In one instance, however, there was a reward: one young woman ex-user who confided in Gate later wrote him. "She told me that I had helped her look at herself in a way that she had never done before," says he. "That had to be some kind of first for me: the reporter turned therapist."

In New York, Simpson found the assignment "the most depressing I've had in my ten years as a journalist. These people were not stereotypical junkies; they were just ordinary people, the kind you would meet at a dinner party. And that made the stories they told about lying and stealing and spending every penny they could lay their hands on that much more frightening. I kept thinking this doesn't happen to nice people; we know how to keep these things under control. But it does, and we don't." Helping make that point with horrifying realism, New York Correspondent James Wilde went with a cash-laden couple on a Sunday drug-buying trip to "Alphabet Town" on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Wilde's report accompanies the cover story.

The cover was designed by Deputy Art Director Nigel Holmes and Design Consultant Tom Bentkowski. To fashion the "cokehead," they used nearly 100 one-gram packets of powdered artificial sweetener. "We found that it photographed the best," says Bentkowski. Just as well; obtaining the real thing not only would have been illegal but would have cost $10,000. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.