Turning Increasingly to Cocaine

Among women, abuse of "the champagne of drugs " is growing

Christina, 33, a successful actress, began using cocaine to bolster her selfesteem. Too often she felt like a victim, but free-basing three to eight grams of coke a day, she recalls, "made everything all right." Her $3,000-a-week habit left her deep in debt, and after two years, she had her first attack of "coke bugs," a standard problem for free-basers, or smokers of cocaine. Her skin felt as if it were alive with fleas. She took four showers a day and rubbed her skin raw. A doctor, concerned about her hallucinations, warned that cocaine was severely affecting her nervous system. Last fall, after hospitalization for a coke seizure, she started free-basing again, but the thrill was no longer there. She is now enrolled in a drug-free program.

Many of the women who have been turning to cocaine share Christina's profile: upwardly mobile, less interested in thrills than in coping with job pressures or nagging problems of competence and selfesteem. Although two-thirds of the nation's 4.1 million cocaine abusers are male, the number of female users is rapidly climbing.

Dr. Beatrice Rouse, an epidemiologist with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says that cocaine use among women has recently increased by almost one-half in U.S. households (from 6.4% in 1979 to 9.3% in 1982). In California, according to the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, the number of women checking into cocaine treatment centers has jumped 73% in the past two years, the number of males 60%. Of 150 recent calls to the Women's Resource Center, a nonprofit drug referral service in Los Angeles, 60 were from cocaine users. At Manhattan's Phoenix House, a quarter of all addicts treated are women, but in the night program, set up for drug abusers who work during the day, 40% of those treated are women, almost all of them cocaine consumers. Says Kevin McEneaney, Phoenix House's senior vice president: "This is an almost unheard-of statistic. Traditionally, women have made up one-fourth to one-third of treatment-clinic populations."

One undoubted reason for the increase is that women find the image of cocaine attractive: heroin is a grubby street product, and PCP, an animal tranquilizer known as angel dust, is the "unemployment drug" because it relieves depression. Some women seem to think that cocaine can bring better orgasms. Says Charlotte Wolter of the Women's Resource Center: "Cocaine is thought of as the champagne of drugs."

In fact, coke is believed to be the drug most abused among women, outstripping Valium, which has come under fairly strict controls since the mid-1970s, when it was the No. 1 prescription drug. Under pressure from drug-abuse experts, Valium's manufacturer, Hoffmann-La Roche, has dramatically cut production of the drug, and many doctors have stopped prescribing it for simple anxiety. In 1975, 60 million prescriptions for Valium were written in the U.S., compared with 25 million in 1983. Says McEneaney: "Since two out of three Valium prescriptions are written for women, presumably many females who cannot get Valium have switched to coke."

Many women consider cocaine an aphrodisiac. Says Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine: "Women respond more euphorically and ecstatically than males to sex with coke and rate their sexual experiences with cocaine much higher than males do." Others in the drug field, however, say that such a response occurs among highly suggestible people and is mostly a placebo effect.

A final contributing factor to the rise of coke use may simply be the follow-the-leader syndrome: whatever substance men abuse is often later taken up by women. "It has worked that way with every drug, including cigarettes," says Psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon of the Harvard Medical School. "That makes the women's market the growth area for cocaine abuse."