Word: cracking
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...gang members use crack, the community's best-selling drug. Kids don't need to see TV public-service ads of a man frying an egg to know what crack does to the mind. They see it all the time on the streets and in their homes. "It makes people go out of their heads," says Edgar, 15. "My friends would stop me if I ever tried it." His mouth pursed with disgust, J.J., 15, says, "It makes people skinny and ugly." In South Central the only thing worse than a "basehead" is a "strawberry," a woman addict who trades...
...need. In Republican families, loyalty to the cause is instilled by grandparents, fathers, aunts; family scrapbooks are filled with snapshots of funerals and marches, and fading newspaper clippings of killings and arrests, not weddings and school recitals. But kids take to the streets primarily because it's "good crack" -- Irish slang for fun. To the kids, throwing stones and bottles is a game, an illegal act sanctioned by adults, and the best release from boredom. Six-year-olds will scoop up a stone and hurl it at a passing police van as smoothly as a beachcomber skips stones across...
...rumble forward. Then the etiquette of the riot begins, as predictable as it is dreary. Teenagers turn back and hurl more petrol bombs, the police reply with rubber bullets, and the rioters hide in alleys and doorways. One or two smaller boys reappear, picking their way through the narrow cracks in the violence. Brendan, 12, delivers a report. "Peelers coming up Sheridan Street." When the bomb tossing and running resume, he vanishes. The younger boys keep the danger in mind. "Rioting is good crack," Brendan later says sarcastically, "as long as you don't get hurt...
...Greenpoint operation was the biggest crack-vial factory ever discovered. Only two months earlier, Customs agents had found several warehouses in New York City linked to Teng and his cronies that were stocked with some $28 million worth of paraphernalia, much of it hauled there from Seattle and Los Angeles. The stash was so vast -- 107 million vials, 1.9 million crack pipes, 178 million polyethylene bags for heroin -- that 25 Customs agents took three days just to count and load the items into eleven 50-ft.-long tractor trailers. "That was more paraphernalia than we'd ever even conceived...
With the U.S. deluged by drugs, the accessory trade has become a multibillion-dollar industry. The profits are high -- a crack pipe that costs 3 cents to produce can retail for $8 -- and the risks of jail are low. Though a 1986 federal statute makes it a felony to import, export or conduct interstate trade in paraphernalia, no federal law bans its manufacture. Moreover, while all states except Alaska have passed laws to control the sale of paraphernalia, the crime is typically a loosely enforced misdemeanor. "These guys simply do not face an equivalent risk for the harm that they...