A Taste for Luxury

By Caroline Wood

Few of us like being accosted by a drug addict. How many times have you stepped onto public transportation or simply walked peacefully down a city street without a crusty, strung-out old man yelling at you, preaching to you about race relations in an obscure and disorienting fashion, demanding to use your nonexistant lighter, or even peeing on you? I hate to admit it, but the majority of these people are cocaine users.
Why not try something a touch classier? Why not consider a drug that will erase your pain rather than make you paranoid, one that offers euphoria rather than stress? Not only is heroin more addictive than cocaine, this prince of drugs is also exponentially more expensive and more dangerous. And as we know from prostitutes, military strategies, and rock concerts, these are both major plusses. Delivery is the soul of style, and rest assured that medium plays an indispensible role in heroin's elegence. In all fairness, both drugs, unlike many of their pitiful hallucinagenic and prescription-abuse counterparts, are available in a myriad of forms, whether smokable, snortable, or just plain loveable. Don't doubt that we Woods debate only the best and most versatile. But we must consider the norm, and there's simply no contest: shooting up is sharper, cleaner, classier, and sexier than snorting. And, of course, more expensive and more dangerous.
The banality of cocaine is evident in her low price, high availability, and shocking popularity, but the most glaring shortcoming of all is pedigree. Heroin, needless to say, is a member of the illustrious opiate family, a dynasty whose romance and exoticism are legendary. While the sunparched fields of Columbia might be mysterious in the same way as, perhaps, a grainy photo of your grandmother, the opium dens of the east are the stuff of lavishly gilded fantasies. How can barely rumbling pick-up trucks compare with the Thai golden triangle? How can dessicated coca leaves match the fume of poppies?
I admire cocaine's success in America, and I'm willing to invest my own resources to improve her reputation. But until there's such a thing as "cocaine chic," until blistered nostrils grace designer ads, until I discover long-buried poems by romantic poets mesmerized by crack, I really cannot compromise.
Oh, yes, drugs kill. But we simply must go out in style.