Running on empty, they dial.
800-COCAINE, may I help you?
Some hang up most hang on. Twenty-four hours a day they light up the phone bank on the second floor of Fair Oaks Hospital with toll-free nameless renditions of the cocaine blues. Half are actual coke abusers looking for medical advice, hospital referrals or a nonjudgmental ear; the rest are stumped healthcare professionals or traumatized family members like the 10-year-old who recently called the Summit, N.J., hot line to say his tooted-up father would not stop beating his mother. Most callers start haltingly.
Yeah . . . uhm . . . I'm into freebasing and I want to stop. I've been hitting the pipe for two months. I've been trying to stop on my own, but it's not working.
Last May Dr. Mark Gold, chief of research at Fair Oaks (a psychiatric and drug-dependency hospital), set up the hot line to provide public information on cocaine abuse and treatment. A room was set aside, a phone plugged in and a small computer programmed with the names and numbers of 700 doctors and drug-treatment centers across the country. "At first," says drug counselor and phone-bank supervisor Jeffrey Shore, "we figured we'd just have someone near the phone in case it rang."
It did. Originally, the hot-line staff thought they would receive 10,000 calls a year. Soon after the first line was operational, however, 1,000 calls a day began streaming into the tiny room. "We never slept," says Shore of the old times when only he and a skeleton staff were on board. "We just kept answering the phone. Now, with a better sense of how badly they are needed (and a concurrent rise in grants and donations), the not-forprofit phone bank has expanded a bit. Still squeezed into the three-desk, two-ashtray office, the hot line now boasts a mostly volunteer pool of 25, three to five of whom man phones during the day. During the after-midnight hours, when the hard-core abusers traditionally call in, one counselor is on call. Many on the hot-line staff are former abusers.
Whattaya, snorting? Smoking? How much? You got health insurance? They had to lock me up five times before I got straight.
Unsurprisingly, the hot line logs more calls from New York and Los Angeles than anywhere else. Still, callers frequently dial from the Midwest and small towns. Recent surveys show that 85 percent of the callers are white, one in seven makes over $50,000 a year, 63 percent consider themselves addicted and four of five suffer from severe depression. But to those who answer the phones it's the voices, not the numbers, that haunt.
"There was this state trooper despondent on cocaine," remembers Richard Jensen, hospital coordinator for the phone bank. "He said, 'I've got my revolver in one hand and the phone in the other. It's up to you to make me decide which to use.' We kept him on for awhile, but he never told us who or where he was." Although those handling the phones are trained in crisis intervention, Jensen says 800-COCAINE's main function is education, not suicide prevention. "Only one of eight of the abusers who calls here," he remarks, "is looking for treatment. Some want to talk about how the drug is affecting them; others want to confess; they feel better after they talk about it."
One of Jensen's most disturbing calls came from a 23-year-old woman who said she had just sold her baby for $5,000 worth of cocaine. "I could hear her mother in the background saying, 'Don't tell them, it's none of their business'," details Jensen. Pausing, he muses over the 350,000 calls the hot line has received in the year it has been in operation. "We want people to know," he finishes, "that they can talk to us, and we can get them help." The message is out: on the second floor, the buttons glow.
Yeah, listen, how long after you take cocaine does it stop showing up in your urine? Ya see, they're going to be testing us at work in 35 days and I only did it twice and . . . Ya sure?