The New Law Hell's Gates / 27 votes More

Dutchmassive I Want Her / 27 votes More

FATGUMS X BAMBU Gunslinger / 26 votes More

Boognights Get to Know Me / 187 votes More

Soundsci Remedy / 27 votes More

BEST BBQ VIDEOS

by Adam Figman

Interview :: MIIKE SNOW

by Travis Hayden

Michael Jackson Tributes

by URB Staff

INTERVIEW: Amazing Baby

by Som Khamsaysoury

Gross Domestic Product :: Be it crack rap or cocaine jewelry, the coca plant's byproducts made a mark in 2006—and not just that rash under your nose

By The Gray Kid   Photography by Jennifer Haskins

04/09/07 :: URB 142

Right now, I'm on Cocaine; and it's  pretty sweet. Not cocaine as in sniff sniff; Cocaine as in gulp gulp. It's a drink again, and it's pretty sweet. Too sweet, if you ask me. It tastes one part cherry, one part sticky and two parts waiting room. A company called Legal Distributors produces it,  and it's billed as "the legal alternative" to cocaine proper. I finished mine about 15 minutes ago and I'm still experiencing the lingering tickle of whatever high-speed ingredient has a side-effect called Intolerable Throat Burn. Inositol?  L-Carnitine? D-Ribose? Somebody snitchin'.

On the whole, though, I think it's working. I was just head-nodding wildly to a Juelz verse, trying to figure out how on earth we, as a society, got to this point. We've begun to name our beverages after our drugs, and suddenly I'm thirsty for a pint of Heroin. My knees are starting to lock up and I have to go to the bathroom, but that might be due to the fact that I'm driving 75 with the windows open in Jordan shorts. I can't really tell, sort of like with real cocaine. Sort of like the real thing, baby.

Currently limited to select retailers in New York and California, Cocaine (capital "C") is a sign of the times. Our sprawling subculture of Metropolia that spans Ludacris to Gondry and Ibiza to Harlem-mixing and matching its influences to discover anew the breadth of possibilities in the digital age it helped create-seems increasingly okay with the "soft white." 2006 alone was responsible for the Cliffs' Notes of coke (an indie flick called The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down), the weight-pushing anthem of a lifetime (Rick Ross' "Hustlin'") and the performance, for the first time in many years, of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" during his live sets. Then there's the ongoing stranglehold the Dipsetters have on East Coast eardrums with their textbook crack rap and the faddish popularity of the "Enjoy Cocaine" T-shirts. Down the line it goes.

Not that cocaine ever went away after its pronounced emergence in the '80s—in 1993, 634,000 Americans were first-time users of the drug; 143,000 of those were under 18 years of age—but cocaine use, abuse and prevention aren't exactly headline news today. Strikingly, new user statistics for 2004 reached their second highest since 1987, with 1,094,000 initiates 12 and over, while a record-nearing 14.2 percent of the population reported having tried the drug in their lifetime.  

So why the lack of attention? Perhaps our misperception of the "war on drugs" has let us down. Some feel the drug trade, coke and crack in particular, was enabled by the aggressive government clamp-down of the Reagan era that created a voracious black market (not unlike Prohibition) in which dealers control supply and price so firmly that the inner-city poor have little choice but to crumble under the weighty socio-economics of an incredibly violent, profitable, addictive and high-profile industry. This is a complicated debate. What is clear is that the "war" began long after the "drugs," and it would have perhaps been more prescient to expect major government action to simply hinder the expansion of coke and crack, to contain their negative effects, than to actually wipe them out. It accomplished containment, which may explain why, once the damage that the substance could do to the population plateaued and dropped anchor post-'80s AIDS party, the people acquiesced.

It may not be true acceptance on the part of the masses, however, that we're witnessing. Our relationship to cultural goods is particularly lenient, not always rooted in definable criteria of merit, ethics or principle, but more so in fleeting attention-grabs and common denominator entertainment values. Brooklyn-based jeweler BijulesNYC, who began her line emphatically in 2004 by rolling out "Coke Straw" cuff links, points out that it's important to "put out a product that grabs attention, negative or positive. Make a statement and the reaction gives it momentum." In the creative world, this is a double-edged matter since audiences, in theory, want to link intimately the message of the art with the message of the artist. Bijules notes the limitations of that approach: "It's nothing personal. It's not necessarily what I'm saying. Voicing something that a whole subculture is embracing, marketing a lifestyle, that's valuable."  

What then with rap music, a genre with a history of authenticity battles and realness concerns? "I don't know if they've done it [deal drugs]," Bijules continues, "Nobody even knows if I've done it [sniff drugs]. People are gonna judge you no matter what you do, but stirring curiosity kills all those cats."