Crack in Cape

Aug. 6, 2009

Dear Pat,

Tom is a health-care professional who first tried crack a couple of years ago, just to see what it feels like. He liked the way it made him feel. Soon he was spending $100 for some weekend fun. Except the places he went to buy and smoke crack weren't anything like the family recreation room. They were filthy houses and apartments in Cape Girardeau, some with no electricity or working plumbing, where as many as 15 crack addicts at a time spent hours getting high together.

The brokers who provide crack want customers to come to their place to smoke it because they are expected to share some of their drugs with those who provide the ambience. It's called tribute.

Eventually Tom began spending much more money on crack and getting high more often. That's the thing about crack, he says. "You always want more." Sometimes he drove to St. Louis to find it and drove home high. But most often Cape Girardeau could provide.

He missed work a few times because of crack. It also had him writing checks he couldn't cover. When his parents gave him $7,000 to pay off his credit card debt, he spent most of it on crack.

Tom is certain many of the landlords who own crack houses know illegal acts are transpiring on their property and don't care as long as the rent is paid. Prostitution was occurring in some of the houses, he says, sometimes right in front of him. One night he drove a woman who was a regular at the crack houses to a destination where she had sex in exchange for money to buy crack. He waited outside in the car in the middle of winter, unable to turn on the heater because she didn't want to alert the neighbors.

He has been shaken down, and someone at a crack house drove off with his car. Police found his vehicle weeks later in south St. Louis. "People had been living in it," he said.

Eventually Tom realized crack and its effect on his life were more than he could handle. People had stopped cashing his checks. One day he went to a crack house to find a huge hole had been punched in the front door during a police raid that had just missed snaring him.

Tom stopped using crack about a year ago. He never sought treatment. "I just quit," he said. He has been diagnosed with ADHD and wonders if he was self-medicating with crack. Now he's taking prescription medicine that controls ADHD and is thinking about going back to school.

Drugs were unknown to him until he joined the military. There he discovered that some of the people in the infantry with him had been given the choice of military service or jail time. They introduced him to marijuana, cocaine and acid. He thinks marijuana and even powdered cocaine should be legalized. But not crack.

Tom is not this man's real name. He introduced himself at a restaurant a few weeks ago, saying recent concerns in the city about homelessness weren't addressing the kind of homelessness he had seen, the kind where people float between crack houses.

This week he guided me through a drive-by tour of crack houses in the city, cautioning that they move around and might or might not still be operating. One is less than a block from my house. One is an apartment building where students live near the university. Another is in a house three blocks from the building where I teach at the university. One is on Broadway, once the city's commercial center. One is nestled behind the city's junior high school. In the space of a few minutes we drove by seven crack houses in the center of the city. Tom said he's been to crack houses on the newer west side of the city, too.

We drove through an area in the south side of the city where Tom sometimes went to find crack. When he was hunting for crack, he would slow as he drove by someone on the street. A small flip of the head told him they could help. Sometimes he'd still ask if the person knew where he could score. Some of those people told him they have nothing to do with drugs. Some gave him directions to the nearest dealer.

Like most beautiful and livable cities, Cape Girardeau has an underbelly that isn't as pretty to look at. Look we must.

Love, Sam

sj-blackwell@att.net<I>