Santa Clara's underground coke scene

Santa Clara's underground coke scene
Cocaine use largely secretive at Santa Clara, where student dealers profit off expensive drug habits
By Jeremy Herb
Issue date: 4/19/07 Section: News
Originally published: 4/19/07 at 12:51 AM PST
Last update: 4/19/07 at 1:35 PM PST

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Four cocaine rocks, worth approximately $600, sit next to a $100 bill on a student dealer's kitchen table.
Media Credit: BY SOPHIE ASMAR--THE SANTA CLARA
Four cocaine rocks, worth approximately $600, sit next to a $100 bill on a student dealer's kitchen table.
[Click to enlarge]
Editor's note: All students' names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Christine Swift tells Sean Cowher to change the song on iTunes -- she knows the perfect one to listen to. Sean switches the song on his dorm room computer from a slow hip-hop tune to one with a bass-heavy beat.

It's Friday night, and Sean and Christine are getting high. Not just the typical, smoke-a-few-blunts-and-get-stoned high -- it's the intense but short-lived high that comes from snorting an 8-ball of cocaine, 3.5 grams worth.

A minute later, Christine tells Sean to find a new song. This time it's a rap number. Another minute, another song. One more minute. One more song. This one, by The Format, gets Christine out of her chair and dancing. Sean sits beside her, watching her arms and hips sway to the beat.

Then she drops to the floor.



Her dancing continues, Sean recalls. At least he thinks she is dancing. But really, Christine is having a seizure, arms and legs convulsing to the beat as she loses consciousness. Sean still doesn't think anything is wrong until Christine starts foaming at the mouth. Sean leaps out of his chair, shaking her, trying to wake her, but her eyes just roll into the back of her head.

"I thought at one point about where we were gonna have to dump this body," Sean recalls. "I didn't care at the time because I was so messed up. If I wasn't, I would have been freaking out."

Before Sean can come up with any plans to ditch Christine's body, she comes to, 10 minutes after losing consciousness. She sits silently the rest of the night, still, mumbling occasionally.

Christine survived the night, despite snorting nearly 10 grams of cocaine that day. But the experience hasn't stopped her or Sean from using coke. In fact, they are at the center of a secretive, underground cocaine scene at Santa Clara, where students use coke as a way to get a quick high, be social and push limits that alcohol and pot can't reach. But unlike alcohol, and even marijuana, cocaine isn't out in the open. While getting drunk at a party is accepted at Santa Clara, using cocaine is not, and those who do stay hidden.

"It's popular, but underground," explains Sean, a junior at Santa Clara who has dealt on and off for two years. "As soon as one cokehead knows you do coke and you're cool, they let you in with their other friends who do coke. It's little cocoons of cokeheads around campus. But they don't want to reveal themselves. You have to get to know people first to get in with them."

It's difficult to determine the actual number of cocaine users, not only at Santa Clara but nationally. Different national surveys say anywhere from 4.9 to 15 percent of college-age students have used coke. One survey of Santa Clara students reported that 4.1 percent of students -- about 200 of 4,900, or one in every 25-person classroom -- have tried coke. And interviews with 10 coke users and five dealers reveal this is likely a conservative estimate, because many use the drug but won't admit it.

"It's not something I want people to know, that I take the drug, because they put it in a negative light," says sophomore Lindsay Merced, who uses cocaine recreationally.

Jeanne Rosenberger, vice provost for student life, says she is concerned if students are using cocaine, but it isn't high on her radar compared with alcohol and marijuana. That's because none of the 41 drug violations this year through winter quarter have involved cocaine, and only 6.8 percent have been cocaine related in the past two years.

Sean says a majority of his approximately 25 cocaine customers would use the drug occasionally, like Lindsay. But some, like Christine, would buy coke nearly every day, abusing the highly addictive stimulant. Cocaine provides an intense high that can quickly turn recreational use into dependence, according to Ike Grozier, executive director of Recovery Connection Treatment Services in Santa Clara. Cocaine artificially creates dopamine, the body's pleasure-producing chemical, causing the body to stop producing it naturally. When a regular user stops taking the drug, the body has no way to get dopamine. This results in irritability, depression and, ultimately, a dependence to recreate the missing pleasure. Dependence leads to addiction.

"The problem is, with young adults, tolerance seems to be like a good thing. It's like a badge. The problem is, it's not a good thing at all," Grozier says. "All the way around, it's damaging. You're flirting with something and have no concept of what you're about to create. You may not have problems now (when you start using), but if you flirt with it too long, it can create dependence."

Fulfilling the dependence isn't cheap: A gram of coke, which one person can use in a night, costs around $50. At Santa Clara, there are plenty of students with money -- money some use on the expensive drug -- no matter what the cost.

*

Lindsay Merced sits at the table in a brown towel and bathing suit, her black bikini top exposed. She takes an Access card and starts chopping up the cocaine on the sunburst-colored tabletop in her friend's apartment, where a handful of people are gathered. She cuts off a line from the small mound of white powder sitting beside two black and white iPods, an empty Red Bull can and a box of Parliament cigarettes. Lindsay puts down the Access card and grabs a dollar bill, rolling it into a tight cylinder. She sticks it up to her nose, bends down and snorts the three-inch line. She throws her head back, inhales and picks up the remaining powder on her finger before rubbing it on her gums.

It's Thursday night and Sean is hosting a 21st birthday party for his roommate. There are nine people in the small living room, eating desserts from Bon Appetit and taking shots of Jagermeister. Poker pros are battling in a high-stakes game on TV, while two-thirds of the room takes turns snorting the gram of coke on the table. Lindsay gets up from the seat closest to the kitchen and Courtney Lions takes her place, grabbing the Access card and unrolling the dollar bill. She's also in a two-piece bathing suit, blue straps stemming up from her white towel, partially hidden by her shoulder-length brown hair. Courtney re-rolls the bill, breaks off a line from the pile of cocaine, and, without hesitating, snorts it.

"Hey, let's go in the hot tub before it closes," Lindsay says to Courtney as she finishes inhaling.

"Oh yeah," Courtney responds, getting up to check the message on her phone -- it's a text from her mom.

"Hey mom, my boyfriend you don't know about is here, and I just did a line of coke off the table," Courtney jokes.

Only minutes later, Lindsay's phone rings. "Ha, it's my mother, how ironic is that?" Lindsay says aloud, before answering the phone. "Hi Mom," she says calmly, walking down the hallway.

When Courtney arrived at Santa Clara, she was "an angel" by Lindsay's standards. She had never tried drugs or alcohol before settling into the dorms her freshman year. But after entering Santa Clara, Courtney started drinking, like most freshmen, before moving on to pot and then cocaine this quarter. "Just out of curiosity," Courtney explains. "You're drawn to a thing you know nothing about. There's no reason not to be."

"I knew I'd try it eventually," Lindsay says matter-of-factly. "It's in my personality. I love to party, socialize and have fun. As much as people don't want to admit it, we're at the age to be ridiculous. Our behavior is risky. We live on the edge because danger sparks people's interest. You think, 'Oh my God, I have no idea how this is gonna feel.' "

Courtney vacates the seat and Sarah McKenzie hops in, preparing her line.

"Play something epic," Sarah tells Sean, the DJ behind the computer. "Cuz this is an epic experience."

Sarah rolls up the dollar bill and hands the Access card to Max Harding, who puts his finger over the powder still on the card and rubs it on his gums.

"That's my favorite part," he says of rubbing coke on his gums to numb the membranes. "Snorting is still cool, though."

Sarah rolls up the dollar bill and takes her line, throwing her head back while inhaling. She grabs the black iPod from Sean and tells him she wants to play the song she listens to whenever she has a hangover. The Replacements' distorted guitars blare from the speakers, drums pounding on each downbeat, as the lead singer yells, "All I want to do is drink beer for breakfast!"

"There's an age you shouldn't be doing things," Lindsay says over the roar of the guitars. "You have to have a certain mindset. It can be dangerous, life-threatening the first time. But if you're at a mature level and willing to take the risk, that's OK."

She pauses, then adds that it's important to be with people you trust.

"The first time we used E, I've never felt closer to Courtney," Lindsay says. "Drugs change the way you feel. The fact that you're not in a regular state of consciousness makes it that much cooler."

Sarah gets up and Max takes the seat, cutting off a large line of coke. "Cut it in half," Sarah tells him. "You don't want to do that. Your nose will bleed."

"No it won't," Max says, bending down to do the line.

While Lindsay talks with me, Courtney walks outside on the patio to kiss her boyfriend, Tim Morgan, another dealer who is not a student but moved to Santa Clara two months ago. When the two started dating, Lindsay says even she was concerned.

"He may not have the best track record on paper," Lindsay says. "When Courtney told me, it was a big red flag. But I told her, if you trust him and he treats you right, that's legit, even though you're walking on thin ice. People say to her, 'Why are you dating a loser?' First of all, why do you say that if you haven't met him? I didn't trust him at first, but I got to know him, and he's a legit human being."

Lindsay says Courtney's boyfriend isn't the only one who gets a bad rap. Cocaine isn't talked about at Santa Clara, she says, because coke users are judged harshly, whereas pot smokers and drinkers are not.

"People say, 'You must be a bad kid -- you're a hard user,' " Lindsay says of students' perceptions of coke users. "But it's not all negative. I don't think it should always be considered so bad. No, it's not good to use it all the time, but it's OK just to play with it."

Still, Lindsay says it's not something she advertises.

"I don't think it's safe to even talk about with everyone," she says. "If someone is uncomfortable with it, all they have to do is tell a CF. Cops won't break down the door over an eighth of weed. They will do it for coke."

Courtney walks back into the room from the patio and asks, "Anybody got a cigarette?"

"What?" Lindsay blurts out. "You're gonna go do cigarettes?"

"No, it's for someone else."

"Oh, OK," Lindsay says, before turning to me. "I know, we'll do coke, but we won't do cigarettes."

*

Sean leans forward in his dining room chair, adjusting the volume on his computer as he lays down a beat. Beside the computer is an 8-track digital mixer on the table and a blue Stratocaster guitar that two of Sean's friends, students Trent Joseph and Alex York, pass back and forth.

The beat continues, and Trent strums chords resembling a Matisyahu song while Sean takes it all in digitally on some of his $6,000 worth of music equipment, partially purchased with drug money. While Trent continues strumming, Frank pulls out an orange medicine bottle containing an ounce of weed. He then pulls out a multi-colored, foot-long bong. He packs the weed inside and takes his first hit. After a second one, he trades the bong for the guitar and picks up strumming where Trent left off. Trent takes two puffs and directs the bong in my direction.

"No thanks," I tell him. Without questioning me further, Trent motions to Sean seeing if he wants a hit.

"No, I got a drug test coming up," Sean responds.

Sean, wearing a Santa Clara hoodie, has a slender build, a baby face and wavy, uncombed hair. When he arrived at Santa Clara, he smoked weed but didn't think anyone did coke. That changed when a girl convinced him to split an 8-ball with her. Sean was hooked.

"I love drugs," he explains. "I love that feeling. Your teeth go numb. Your heart beats really fast. It's awesome."

*

After trying coke for the first time, Lindsay remembers just one thing was on her mind the next day.

"I woke up the next morning and thought, 'Holy shit, I want to do it again -- tonight,' " Lindsay recalls.

Grozier, who runs a drug treatment facility in Santa Clara, says the body's natural reaction after using cocaine is to want more. "When you stop doing cocaine, the body already has stopped producing normal chemicals," he explains. "Now, nothing's there, and that's where you get irritability, mood swings, depression."

Lindsay says she quickly recognized how dangerous the drug is. "I realized the next morning, and that thought scared me. And I'm glad it scared me. I have an addictive personality. If I like something, I'll keep doing it. But if it's dangerous, I'll limit myself."

Lindsay says she hasn't noticed any effects from her occasional cocaine use, but Tim and Sean have seen them firsthand.

"Girls ask me if I want to do it on a Tuesday night," Sean explains. "And I say, do you seriously want to see the sunrise? Because if you take E or too much coke, you're gonna watch the sunrise. You wish nothing more in the world than to fall asleep, but you can't go to sleep. It's not possible."

Tim says he's been woken up by a knock on his window at 4 a.m. -- a knock for coke. "This one girl was like, 'Tim, can I have a gram?' " Tim explains. "She kept touching her legs, and I realized I sold her a gram earlier that night. She was coming down harder than anybody. It's no roller coaster ride. It's just a straight drop down."

Grozier, whose facility treats nearly 30 percent of his patients for cocaine addiction, says that college students, especially at universities like Santa Clara, are less likely to go in for treatment. "No one in the upper-middle class wants to let on there's anything wrong, so they're going to hide it all the better," Grozier says. "They're going to work much harder, making it look on the outside like nothing's wrong, when inside they're suffering, starting to struggle. They cover it up even more (at college) because of the social influence. They don't want to let on they can't keep up, that they're losing ground."

At Recovery Connections, cocaine treatment requires a minimum 45-day stay in a residential program and can last up to six months, meaning college students would need to drop out of school for treatment. At Santa Clara, Larry Wolfe, director of Cowell Health Center, says it's unlikely Cowell will be treating anyone for a cocaine problem at any given time. At most, they'll likely treat one person each year for cocaine. While he knows there is some usage on campus, Wolfe says cocaine is a much smaller problem at Santa Clara than alcohol and marijuana.

Phil Beltran, assistant director of Campus Safety, says cases involving cocaine are rare, most likely because the cost of the drug makes users more careful and secretive.

Lindsay says she doesn't worry about becoming addicted to cocaine because she hasn't let herself get to that point. It's sporadic, she explains. "It's not like I say, 'Well, today's the second Friday of the month, today's coke day.' But as long as I'm not a user, I'll use it recreationally."

Grozier warns that the line between recreational use and addiction is blurry. "If you develop tolerance, you develop dependence," he says. "And if you develop dependence, you're developing addiction. That's a natural process you can't stop. It continues to go and go and go, unless you abstain completely. That's the only way to stop it."

*

While Sean says he loves doing drugs, he wasn't hooked on the cost.

"It came to the point where, do I want to spend $50 on an eighth (of weed) everyday, or do I want to smoke for free?" Sean says, explaining his rationale for dealing drugs.

During Sean's freshman year, he was denied access into parties, he says. That changed once he started dealing. Sean became everybody's best friend: a friendly, approachable source.

"I'd go to parties, have a backpack with coke, ecstasy and weed, and I'd shout out, 'Who wants to buy drugs?'" Sean says. "Nobody could mess with me because I had 20 people in there who were my best friends because I got them drugs. I could go to work and make $8.25 an hour at Old Navy, or I could sit on my ass and make 10 bucks selling weed, or sell a sack of coke or an 8-ball and make 70 bucks. It makes school 20 million times more fun."

Sean, along with two of his friends, started dealing weed and ecstasy, but the moneymaker was cocaine. "The game," as Tim and Sean explain coke dealing to me, is a food chain of dealers. They are the lowest rung, buying ounces from the guy with kilos of coke, who Sean describes as someone who deals for a living, a "30-year-old skeezer." He then buys from the guy with bundles of kilos, and it goes up from there. No one reveals their suppliers. But everyone makes a profit buying in bulk.

It costs around $50 for a gram, Tim explains to me. A half-ball, or "teener," which is 1.7 grams, costs $75 to $80. An 8-ball, 3.5 grams, costs around $150. An ounce (28 grams), the amount Tim and Sean would buy, is about $550 to $600. The way dealers like Tim and Sean make a profit is by buying half an ounce (14 grams) for about $300. Then, they'd sell six grams for $50 each, making back the $300 and leaving eight grams left over. "That's 150 percent profit," Bryan says. "That's fucking beautiful. That's cocaine."

In just a little over two months in Santa Clara, Tim, despite not attending the university, has already racked up about 20 customers, mostly by word of mouth. He is a skinny, 22-year-old with an unshaven face, wearing baggy clothes and a red sweatshirt. He says he has a nine-millimeter pistol in his room -- just in case. Tim talks quickly, always with something to say, moving around Sean's kitchen like he's on a stage, one hand on the bottom of his sweatshirt, the other switching between a bottle of alcohol and a cigarette. His phone rings, and he declares, "I'm 'bout to get paid," before answering.

"What's up," he answers. "You want $20 worth? I don't deal in that. You gonna need at least a G for me to make the trip."

He hangs up, no deal. "Man, motherfucker wants $20 -- that's not even gonna last him 45 minutes," he says, annoyed, before turning his attention back to me. "The customers, the clients, are nuts. They're crazy," he says. "They call the phone over and over again, bothering you. Over and over. You're driving home and they call, 'Are you home yet?' You say no, then they call 100 more times. With yayo, when it's gone, that's not when it's gone. Money (customers) didn't even think about spending -- now it's the only choice."

Nearly all of Tim's customers are Santa Clara students. He says more than half will call every other Friday, but the others call nearly every day. "They're gonna get it somewhere," Tim says. "No, it's not right. We be killin' people. You turn somebody into a cokehead -- it's disgusting."

"See, I didn't have that kind of conscience," Sean responds, explaining he didn't feel guilty dealing. "If you don't, someone else will supply them if the need exists."

But Tim says even though he feels bad about what effects the drugs he sells may have, he's too addicted to "the game" to stop.

Sean stopped dealing after fall quarter because it took too much of his time, nearly two to three hours each night. He sold around $1,000 on his best nights, dealing "QPs" (a quarter pound or 4 ounces) of weed and 8-balls of cocaine. A few weeks into his first quarter dealing, he went home with close to $2,500 in profit. In his phone, he had codes signifying weed and coke next to his customers. Sean made a name for himself by selling with a unique angle: offering students direct delivery to their dorm rooms.

"Money isn't really that much of an issue for me," Sean tells me. "It's just so fun dealing drugs. I'd go into a shoe store, buy two pairs of sneakers and bust out a fat roll of cash."

*

Cocaine isn't a new drug on college campuses. According to the Monitoring the Future study, which has tracked drug and alcohol use among high school students for 30 years, cocaine reached its peak in 1985, when 17.3 percent of 12th graders had used it. By 2000, the number had fallen below 9 percent, and it has hovered between 8 and 9 percent since.

Another survey says fewer people use cocaine in high school. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, however, the number of people who have tried coke increases more than six-fold upon entering college, from 2.3 percent of 17-year-olds to 15.1 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds. Two other surveys, the National College Health Assessment and the Core Institute, claim nationally only 6 and 4.9 percent of college students have tried cocaine. The National College Health Assessment is the only gauge of Santa Clara students, which says 4.1 percent have tried the drug. Tim and Sean say that number is too low.

"The thing about Santa Clara is it's behind closed doors," Tim says. "I show up at a party, and I go in a corner and say 'come here,' " he explains, gesturing with his hand. "I gather up all my little custees and get my money and bounce. You won't find me passed out on the floor. Motherfuckers buy coke or sell coke. You either a hustler or a customer. You can't blur the line."

I ask Tim if he does coke, and he smiles, before saying, "I do coke when I'm drunk. With Hennessey. Straight."

"Yea, but you drink Hennessey straight every night," Sean responds with a laugh.

"Regardless if I'm as worse, or worse than everybody else, how do I still make money? The difference is a coke fiend is out of money. They come begging you to front 'em. I've been addicted, very addicted. But my addiction is answering the phone and getting the dollar in my pocket."

Tim's dad died when he was a child, and his mom has been in and out of rehab, he says. Tim started dealing to survive; it's his source of income. But not Sean.

"Drug money is play money for me," Sean says, adding the biggest perk of selling is the kickbacks -- free drugs. Sean does coke at least once a week, he says. When we finish our interview, he gets out of his chair and says, "I think I'm going to use drugs right now," as I head for the door.

*

The high Sean got from dealing drugs stopped suddenly during finals week spring quarter with a knock on his friend's door. It was Campus Safety.

Campus Safety was knocking because they were about to search his friend Chris Gonzalez's room, and Chris had a safe with drugs inside.

"My heart just dropped," Sean says when he heard his friend got busted.

Sean painstakingly recalls Chris telling him, "They were there for an hour and ransacked the room, opening up tea packets -- they searched through everything. The week before, Chris had bought a safe because he got jacked for $1200. Finally, they realize the giant footstool with a tablecloth over it. One of them tried to move it and it didn't move, and they found it."

Beltran says Campus Safety found a "large cache" of drugs inside the safe -- enough to call Santa Clara police.

Chris was arrested and spent the night in jail before his parents got him out on bail. While he avoided jail time, Chris had to go through rehab and is now living in a halfway house. He was also kicked out of Santa Clara. "You never think you're gonna get in trouble till you do," Sean admits.

Even though his friend was taken away in handcuffs, Sean started dealing again during the fall before stopping winter quarter this year.

"In the end, my conscious crept up," Sean says. "I'm conscious that my parents pay for college. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. And this is how I'm repaying them? As soon as my parents find out I'm selling coke, there goes college."

Sean says he stopped dealing, but he started liking coke more because he didn't have to think about making money. Still, he isn't worried about getting addicted.

"I think I'm the exception to the rule, because I enjoy using drugs, but I get homework done," says Sean, who has a GPA above 3.0. "But if I have nothing to do, I'm always down to do drugs."

He still gets free drugs from his friends who deal, but when he stopped he lost his social access.

"It's a big ego boost dealing, but as soon as you stop doing it, you realize all those people weren't your friends," Sean says. "I know it sounds dumb, but it hurt my feelings -- people who'd let me into parties now don't."

While Sean stopped dealing, Tim says he has no plans to slow down. But during spring break, Tim was pulled over for speeding and arrested for driving without a license. Sean hasn't heard from him since.

Lindsay says she now realizes how much Tim influenced her.

"I wouldn't have done as much had he not been here -- I would have taken it a lot slower," she says. "But it was accessible and easy for me to try it, and I was curious, so I thought I might as well. Now that it's come full circle, I see it's all fun and games, but drugs can fuck up your life. You've got to be so careful and in-tune with yourself."

A week before Tim is arrested, he takes a drink and says to me, "Someday, real life's gonna hit. But now, if you're a doctor or a lawyer, I'm right there with you, paying for dinner, tipping $25, $50, no problem. Maybe not for the long haul, but for the night anyway."

Tim then sits down beside me, looks at me sincerely and says, "When I get out, I'll be a happy soul. Till then, it's slavery. I feel like a slave, trapped, the game sucked me in. I have to work extra hard to make it. The game is what it is. It makes you who you are. Once I get out, then you'll see who I really am."

Contact Jeremy Herb at (408) 554-4546 or jmherb [at] scu.edu.
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