Cocaine: A Club Drug Becomes Enemy No. 1

To look at Nancy Lopez—a short woman with graying hair and glasses—you could never guess that this unassuming-looking 56-year-old was at one point a "Colombian" drug dealer herself. Though she isn't Colombian, she took over that role in the early 1980s when her boyfriend, a real Colombian drug lord, was locked up.

Lopez was a wholesaler, and for the most part, it was an easy way to make a lot of money. Though some of the people she dealt with were armed, it never struck her as overly dangerous. Her boyfriend's connection provided her with the cocaine, and she passed it on. "There were only two or three Colombian women I had to make contact with," she says.

Lopez comes from a typical middleclass family and grew up in Rego Park, Queens. Some of her brothers knew what she was up to, but no one made a big deal about it. She stayed away from doing coke herself, and with the money that poured in, she bought expensive jewelry, clothes, a Mercedes and a BMW. She went clubbing and did whatever she wanted. "It was a very luxurious life, a lot of power, a lot of money," she says. "It was the good life, I'll tell you. I lived the good life."

That is, until her connection made a deal with an undercover cop in 1985, leading to Lopez's arrest. She eventually pleaded out, served four years in state prison and was on parole for another three. At Bedford Hills prison, Lopez says, a huge majority of the women she did time with had drug problems. "I've got to say, that made me feel guilty, seeing all these people locked up because of drugs," she says.

Since getting out of prison 20 years ago, Lopez has worked with the Fortune Society, helping prisoners get jobs and housing and obtaining other services to help them re-enter society. "That's just how it happened," she says. "No excuses. It was my decision, just the wrong decision."

According to the DEA website, sometime in 1975, Colombian drug dealers, who were already well established in the world's marijuana market with their high-grade Colombian Gold, wrested control of the cocaine importation business from Cuban crime organizations operating in Florida and New York. By then, cocaine was making inroads into heroin's dominant yet declining market position in New York City. But cocaine had not yet attained the sinister status it would in subsequent years, especially when it was used to make crack, a derivative that had a predominantly black user population.

"Pinstriped Wall Street lawyers take it from 14-karat gold spoons at elegant parties. Ghetto kids huddle in tenements and sniff it off matchbook covers," a 1977 Newsweek article titled "The Cocaine Scene" read. "Graduates of a North Miami high school hold a reunion every December to take it at a ‘White Christmas' bash, and a California corporate president dishes it out as a holiday bonus to his favorite secretaries. Some aficionados use nothing but silver straws from Tiffany & Co. while others sniff it through rolled up $100 bills. Cocaine—‘the Cadillac of drugs'—was once known as the plaything of jazz musicians, kinky movie stars and the dissolute rich. No longer. To the delight of some and the alarm of others, cocaine is regularly bought, used and lavishly praised by hundreds of thousands of Americans."