From the Oregonian, September 12, 1989

At first, Mary thought she saw a small child standing next to the man in the doorway of her North Portland apartment where she sold crack cocaine.

That got her attention. Customers showed up at all hours to buy crack, but they seldom appeared at 3 a.m. with a kid.

Then she realized it wasn’t a child. It was a man lying on the ground, aiming a sawed-off shotgun at her.

“Give me all your dope and all your money,” the gunman barked at her.

Mary, who started as a crack dealer the previous month, had known she might be robbed. She had prepared for it by carrying only a small amount of drugs and money and hiding the rest in the apartment.

Now her planning came in handy. She handed over a wad of bills that totaled only $25 and threw five rocks of crack on the floor.

The thieves hurriedly grabbed the cash, scooped up three rocks of crack and raced off into the August night. They left behind nearly $2,000 worth of hidden crack that Mary’s supplier had delivered only a short time earlier.

Mary was unharmed and went back to what she was doing when the robbers knocked on her door: She smoked more crack.

Three years after that 1986 robbery, Mary is still smoking crack. So are thousands of others. Crack use has exploded to become the Portland area’s most visible drug problem. Some police and drug treatment officials believe crack is used even more widely than powdered cocaine, which is snorted through the nose or mixed with water and injected.

The main marketplace for crack is an estimated 150 drug houses and apartments in North and Northeast Portland.

Police estimate there are at least 750 drug houses in Portland and that three of every four sell cocaine in one form or another. But none attracts the large volume of round-the-clock customers who stream into the crack houses of North and Northeast Portland.

Mary, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be published, said she doesn’t sell crack anymore. But in her inner-North Portland neighborhood, she is surrounded by people who do.

“Probably the farthest you have to go is three blocks to find a rock house,” said Mary, 31.

In her corner of Albina, Mary counts 20 houses and apartments where dealers sell crack in pea-size pieces called rocks. Brash hawkers offer her the drug as she walks down the street at midday.

Cheap and ready to use, crack is the fast food of drugs. Every rock yields several breaths of smoke, which brings a surge of pleasure. The drug is highly addictive, so people use a lot of it in a short time.

This year, the price of the cheapest rocks has fallen from $10 to just $5 each in Portland. Police say that is a sign of the growing competition among crack dealers in a saturated market.

At the same time, the number of cocaine overdoses in Oregon is skyrocketing. More than 50 people have died from the drug since January 1988, compared with fewer than 20 cocaine deaths in the previous two years.

Dr. Larry V. Lewman, state medical examiner, attributes the surge to the spread of crack. Deaths from drug overdoses are occurring at a record pace this year, and most of them are in the Portland area.

For Mary, crack is the latest stop on a long road of drug abuse. She is a thin but healthy-looking woman with bright eyes and smooth skin. There is a weariness in her sigh, but she speaks politely, apologizing before using an obscenity.

Mary has worked as a dishwasher, security guard and gas station attendant, but now she’s unemployed. Her husband is long gone, in a prison somewhere. She is unable to care properly for her young son, so he lives with her mother. She is, in her own words, a loner.

“When you do drugs, you have no friends,” she said.

Like many others, Mary’s life of drug abuse started with alcohol. The first time she got drunk was as a teen-ager in May 1976, when she drank from beer kegs at Neil Goldschmidt‘s victory party after he was re-elected Portland’s mayor.

She graduated from Lincoln High School a few weeks later and eventually took some Portland Community College courses. But she soon quit. By 1978, she was injecting herself daily with methylphenidate — a stimulant commonly known by the brand name Ritalin and often used to treat attention disorders in children. For three years, she worked as a prostitute to support her habit. She quit using the drug on her own in 1982.

But she used other drugs — marijuana, barbiturates, LSD, heroin and PCP, not to mention alcohol.

“I was always the inquisitive type,” Mary said. “I always tried something once. Then, if it gets out of hand, it’s time to give it up. But of all the things I’ve done, rock cocaine is about the worst.”

Mary first smoked cocaine in the late 1970s, but she smoked it only occasionally until she moved back into her old neighborhood in mid-1986. There, crack was all around her, and she began using it frequently. For a short time, she helped a man run a crack house. Then she started working for a drug supplier, supporting her crack use by selling large $25 rocks out of the apartment where she was robbed.

The crack was delivered to her apartment in a sandwich bag filled with $2,000 worth of rocks, each packaged inside its own plastic bag. Customers bought anywhere from $25 to $500 worth of crack at a time, and she sold as much as $4,000 worth a day.

Mary worked 12 hours a day selling crack, and the supplier hired someone else to work the other 12 hours. She earned $200 a day, but spent most of it on her own crack.

In a twinge of conscience, Mary stopped her crack sales for half an hour each afternoon because she said she was worried about the impact on children who passed by her apartment on their way home from school. That lasted two weeks, until her supplier found out and ordered an end to the sales breaks.

In late 1986, police raided her apartment, ending her crack-selling career.

Though she said she doesn’t sell the drug anymore, she is still a customer at many crack houses. Some houses sell crack and allow the customers to smoke the drug inside, she said, while others require the buyers to leave as soon as they make their purchase.

Most “smokehouses” where crack is used are a mess, Mary said. Dishes and jar lids are used as ashtrays. Matches, cigarette butts, wine bottles and beer cans are strewn about. The windows are covered by curtains, blankets or anything else that will keep the rest of the world out.

Pop cans, beer bottles and miniature liquor bottles are fashioned into pipes for smoking the drug.

“They use antennas when they get desperate,” Mary said, explaining that smokers who don’t have pipes with them sometimes break radio antennas off cars and draw the crack smoke through the hollow middle.

Regardless of the way it is smoked, crack often leaves its users paranoid, or “tweaking.” Some people hide in closets, afraid of being seen or caught or attacked. Some inspect rooms and doorways to make sure no one is lurking there.

And the drug often makes its users combative and unpredictable.

“Some people, mainly men, think they’re God,” Mary said. “They get really rowdy, loud. They know it all. And some people get violent.”

Crack users who need emergency medical help are “abusive as hell in the emergency room,” said Dr. Donald D. Trunkey, who heads Oregon Health Sciences University’s surgery department. “Their behavior is impulsive and very violent. I have the greatest respect for a crack addict in the emergency room because I don’t trust them as far as I can spit. They would kill you in a second and have absolutely no guilt.”

In any house or apartment where crack is sold, guns are common. The entrance often is flanked by youths paid to watch for police.

In preparation for a police raid, some crack sellers leave a pan of grease cooking on the stove, Mary said. If police suddenly burst into the house, the rocks of cocaine can be pitched into the grease and melted.

Mary said crack house customers range in age from teen-agers to gray-haired adults in their 60s. Most are black, but many are white.

Some go straight from work to the crack houses, wearing suits and ties. Mary has seen musicians, beauticians, bus drivers, telephone workers, even pregnant women, all buying crack.

While Mary worked as a security guard, she wore her uniform when she bought crack at the Kerby Square Apartments after work. City officials shut down the North Portland apartment complex in 1987 after repeated complaints of gang and drug activity.

The drug houses have spawned a new kind of economy. Cash is common, but Mary said some buyers use food stamps, paying $2 in food stamps for every dollar’s worth of drug. In that exchange, a “dime rock” that sells for $10 in cash can be purchased with $20 worth of food stamps.

The crack business is particularly brisk at the first of each month when paychecks, welfare checks and food stamps are distributed, Mary said.

Sometimes the customers trade televisions, videocassette recorders, stereo equipment, clothes, guns or stolen credit cards for crack.

Mary also said it was common for women in crack houses to offer sex in exchange for crack or for money that they then use for buying crack.

“People will do anything to get rocks,” she said.

Gunfire in the streets is common late at night, as are smokers roaming loudly from drug house to drug house. Addicts often turn to robbery and burglary to pay for the drug.

“There’s a rise in violence, there’s a rise in assaults, there’s a rise in thefts and there’s a rise in burglaries in an area where a crack house opens up,” said Officer Derrick Foxworth of the Portland Police Bureau’s Gang Enforcement Team.

Foxworth says the area hardest hit by crack houses lies between Interstate 5 and Northeast 15th Avenue, and between Killingsworth Street and Broadway. That is the area where Mary was born and raised.

The crack-selling operations, most of them located in rental houses or apartments, move as often as every three weeks to avoid police detection. But the relief for the neighborhood is limited: They often move only a few blocks away.

The city’s crack explosion began in late 1985 when two violent Los Angeles-based gangs, the Bloods and Crips, moved to Portland to sell the drug.

After five people died in Portland gang shootings last year, law enforcement officials had feared this summer would bring even more violence. Instead, there have been no fatal gang shootings here so far this year.

Police estimate there are now 1,100 Bloods and Crips in the city — most of them from Portland instead of Los Angeles. Foxworth said most of the Southern California gang members who once controlled many of the city’s crack operations left Portland or were imprisoned.

“I’m reluctant to say they’re eradicated,” said Michael J. Brown, a special assistant U.S. attorney who prosecutes gang cases. “But by all accounts, the Los Angeles gang presence, if not eliminated, has been diminished to where we don’t have the major players out here right now.”

Foxworth estimates that gang members and their friends run half of the crack houses in North and Northeast Portland.

“What you have now is a bunch of little operators running the houses, but they’re gang-affiliated,” Foxworth said.

A variety of local drug dealers run the other crack houses, and it’s common for them to run two or three at the same time, Foxworth said. He said the total number of crack houses has remained fairly steady in the past year.

Foxworth also said that women are becoming more involved in selling and delivering crack, just as Mary did in 1986.

And, like Mary, more women crack users are having trouble caring for their children, he said.

“We have a lot more children being taken care of by relatives because they realize what’s happening and they don’t want the kids around it,” he said. “Or the kids are not being taken care of at all and they end up on the streets and joining gangs.”

Mary says she is trying to cut down on her use of crack. She used to go days without a meal, a bath or a change of her clothes. She smoked crack instead.

Now, she eats regularly while maintaining her crack habit, a condition that she describes as “halfway together.”

She estimated that she only smokes crack once or twice a week, although a recent binge took her to five crack houses in 15 hours.

Mary is determined to quit on her own, though treatment specialists say it is extremely difficult to stop drug abuse without the help of friends, relatives or other supporters. Mary tried drug treatment programs before without success, she said.

In mid-1987, she went through an outpatient drug treatment program. She lived in a Burnside Projects hotel that supposedly was drug-free, but she continued to smoke crack. She left the hotel last year after she found the body of a man who died in his room of a tar heroin overdose.

Mary still rejects any suggestion that she is a drug addict.

This summer, she moved out of her old neighborhood into another section of North Portland in an effort to get away from crack.

She talks of moving away to another city with her son, believing that she could quit crack if she could go someplace where she didn’t know anyone and she didn’t know how to find crack.

But that dream is far off. She has no job, no money. She is still smoking crack. And her son is still living with her mother. She prefers it that way, she said, since her life has “kind of gone to hell with drugs.”

“Cocaine has done its job on me.”

From the Oregonian, September 10, 1989

Overdose: cocaine and crime in Portland – the first of twelve parts
READ – all parts of Overdose: cocaine and crime in Portland

Sgt. John Bunnell, an undercover narcotics officer with the Multnomah County sheriff’s department, made big news back in 1979 when he seized 5 ounces of cocaine.

Overdose: cocaine and crime in Portland

It was the department’s first major cocaine bust, and the officials deemed the event worthy of a news conference. On display that day was “nose candy,” that exotic white powder that conjured up images of places such as Miami or South America, but certainly not Portland.

How things change.

When Bunnell and the crew he leads seized more than 5 pounds of cocaine this past summer, there were no news conferences. Discoveries of large amounts of the drug in Portland were no longer considered all that newsworthy.

“The number of people using and dealing cocaine in the metropolitan area is amazing,” Bunnell said. “In the past decade, the area has become flooded with the stuff.”

In the past several years, Portland has come of age in the drug trade. The flow of cocaine has increased dramatically, partly because the drug-smuggling routes shifted from the East Coast to the West. And the city has matured from its Pollyanna attitude to a realization that it is no longer a safe haven from crime and drugs.

Portland-area law enforcement authorities seized more than 500 pounds of cocaine last year. They believe that represents only a small percentage of the cocaine available in Portland.

“At first I couldn’t understand where it was all going,” said Chuck Karl, a Portland Police Bureau captain who now runs the Regional Organized Crime Narcotics Task Force. “But then I talked with treatment centers, employers and people on the street, and I realized there is an insatiable demand for cocaine.

“If we wanted, my guys could forget about heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines and just spend all their time investigating nothing but cocaine,” he said. “There’s that much out there.”

What’s happened in Portland is not unique. These days, every major U.S. city has a cocaine problem.

Michael Schrunk, the Multnomah County district attorney, believes that the city’s drug problem has worsened in the past five years. “My overall sense is that Portland has a tremendous problem with drugs,” he said. “Is it worse than other cities? I don’t think so.”

But some authorities believe circumstances peculiar to Portland have contributed to the problem:

• Los Angeles has became a hub city for cocaine distribution, putting large amounts of pure and relatively cheap cocaine right at Portland’s doorstep.
• Los Angeles gang members moved to the city in 1986 and opened crack cocaine houses in many North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods. Today, some treatment experts believe crack is the dominant form of cocaine used in Portland.
• Former Police Chief Penny E. Harrington reassigned her drug police to other details in 1985, leaving Portland without any drug investigators for about a year. During that time, tar heroin smugglers made substantial inroads in the city. Later, those same people began bringing cocaine here.

Cocaine’s increased prevalence in Portland over the past five years occurred partly because the smugglers’ routes moved from the East Coast to the West, said Gary Liming, special agent in charge of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s regional office in Seattle.

When authorities put pressure on routes to Florida, drug organizations began moving cocaine into the United States through Mexico, along routes established by marijuana and Mexican tar heroin smugglers.

The majority of cocaine now sold in Portland is brought into the country by smugglers who cross the border in San Diego and Brownsville, Texas. Couriers then drive the drug to Los Angeles, where it’s stored before it’s sent to other parts of the country. Federal authorities say about 40 percent of the cocaine coming into the country now goes through Los Angeles.

A multi-kilo dealer based in Portland is almost always working with someone based in Los Angeles. Ten years ago, Portland dealers worked through connections that ultimately led back to Miami, Bunnell said.

“In the 1970s we rarely saw cocaine in the metropolitan area,” he said. “It was like a jet-set drug, very rare and in downtown bars. Then, and it seemed like almost overnight, we ran into people who could deal half-ounces. Then it was people who could do ounces and finally, in about 1983, kilos.”

In 1985, Harrington, who had just been appointed chief, closed down the bureau’s narcotics and intelligence units to start a Juvenile Enforcement Unit to concentrate on crimes, particularly burglaries, committed by youths. No major drug investigations were conducted for more than a year.

Law enforcement authorities believe her reorganization was not the only reason for the increase in drugs, specifically Mexican tar heroin and cocaine, but they feel it made a bad situation worse.

“Drug investigations are unique,” Liming said. “It’s not something you can work part time at and be successful. The bureau’s decision came at a very bad time.”

By 1986, heroin was sold openly in several areas of downtown Portland. The city became known as the heroin capital of the Northwest, primarily because in 1985 more addicts overdosed in Multnomah County than in San Francisco and Seattle combined.

Groups based in Portland soon had links with dealers elsewhere in Oregon, and in Washington, California and Arizona. Before long, many of those groups also started smuggling cocaine.

The Drug and Vice Division was finally resurrected in September 1986, but the damage had already been done.

“For some time the only dope unit still operating in the entire metropolitan area was mine,” said Bunnell of the sheriff’s office. “And we had only five guys.

“They were the largest law enforcement agency in the area and historically had as many as 20 people working narcotics,” he said of the Police Bureau. “To eliminate the unit overnight was ridiculous. We had a major city with no drug enforcement.”

Just as the Police Bureau was getting its drug cops back on the job, the Bloods and Crips, seeking a new market for crack, moved to Portland from Los Angeles. Here, they set up drug houses, and crack sales began to flourish.

There was little crack use in Portland until five years ago, according to Dr. Jerry Larsen, medical director for Comprehensive Options for Drug Abusers — the largest drug treatment program in the state. Larsen believes the predominant use of cocaine is now in the form of crack.

Gary Perlstein, a professor of criminal justice at Portland State University, said the city’s drug problem is a byproduct of Portland’s growth from a small to a large city.

Perlstein, born and raised in New York City, moved to Portland in 1971 and found that Portlanders, until recently, didn’t want to confront crime and drug problems.

“There has been a tendency to deny there are problems,” he said. “People only want to talk about the beauty and wonder of the area. In the meantime, the problems multiplied because people had the attitude that it couldn’t happen here.

“Five years ago, for example, some people in law enforcement warned that Portland was going to have a problem with gangs from the Los Angeles area,” he said. “No one believed them, or wanted to do anything about it. You can see what happened.”

From the Oregonian, September 10, 1989

Overdose: cocaine and crime in Portland – the first of twelve parts
READ – all parts of Overdose: cocaine and crime in Portland

Judy Charlton sat on the front porch of her Northeast Portland home one evening a few weeks ago to watch the people who make up the fabric of her neighborhood: the kids, the parents and the drug addicts.

Overdose: cocaine and crime in Portland

While children played catch, roller-skated or chased each other up and down the street, the addicts quietly walked among them.

These addicts — men and women, black and white, young and old — had come to the 4000 block of Northeast 13th Avenue to buy small amounts of cocaine. They arrived in cars and on foot. One pedaled a bicycle. Another used a skateboard. But whatever it took, they got there.

And with each transaction they chipped away at the foundation of a proud neighborhood that not too many years ago was something more than a festering sore in a city that likes to boast about livability.

None was embarrassed, ashamed or afraid. On some days, as many as 200 people make their way to the nondescript drug house in the middle of the block. Some even nodded, in a friendly sort of way, to a stony-faced Charlton.

The Charltons bought their home four years ago for $25,000. Since then, they’ve spent money and sweat remodeling the place to make it comfortable for their two children, ages 8 and 4.

Their racially diverse neighborhood, as 32-year-old Rick Charlton points out, was never the fanciest in the city. No one’s rich there. It’s strictly low and moderate income. But appearances aside, Charlton said, the biggest problems until two years ago were domestic fights and an occasional burglary.

Then everything changed.

The drug and gang problem, which had been largely confined to areas west of Northeast Eighth Avenue, moved east, swallowing up chunks of land as far away as Northeast 15th Avenue.

Crime, particularly burglary, has increased. And now the sound of gunfire is common. Needles and other drug paraphernalia litter the street.

Prostitutes, who used to be infrequent visitors to the neighborhood, are more blatant. But they’re not just selling sex. They’re serving as lookouts, keeping an eye out for police and directing customers to drug houses.

Longtime residents panicked and moved away. They took with them their decency, stability and commitment, the bedrock of any neighborhood. The legacy: three vacant homes and at least two known drug houses on just two blocks.

Last fall the Charltons decided they, too, would throw in the towel and put their house on the market for $25,000. They forgot about the time and money they had spent improving their home. They just wanted out.

Prospective buyers backed off, however, whenever real estate agents gave them the address. In nine months not one person even bothered to look at the house.

“If I could get out, and even lose a couple of thousand dollars, I’d sign the papers tonight,” said Rick Charlton, a salesman for a sawmill company. “But the only way to get out is to walk away and let the bank take the house.”

The Charltons thought they escaped drugs and gangs four years ago when they moved to Portland from Los Angeles, the city where this country’s recent gang problems originated.

“Our neighborhood there changed just the way this one has,” said 30-year-old Judy Charlton. “There were gangs and drugs and violence. We moved up here because LA was no longer a place to raise kids.

“But the other night I was lying in bed, and I told my husband that the only difference now between Portland and LA is that LA police use helicopters to look for gangs, and the searchlights shine in your bedroom,” she said. “They don’t use helicopters in Portland.”

The Charltons don’t know who to blame for what has happened to their neighborhood.

“It goes beyond what any one politician or leader did or didn’t do,” Rick Charlton said. “The politicians tell us to hang in there, they say things will change in a couple of years. But we can’t wait that long.”

For now, the Charltons, and their neighbors, are working the system. They filed more than 45 police complaints about the two drug houses.

And a few months ago residents teamed up with police and the neighborhood association to close a third drug house. They put pressure on the owner of the rental, and he agreed to evict the drug-selling tenants.

“People in Portland better wake up,” Rick Charlton said. “If they don’t, they’re going to find themselves with a drug house in their neighborhood. This isn’t just a problem that’s in Northeast Portland. It’s everywhere.”

Charlton is not exaggerating. Portland is awash in drugs, particularly cocaine, which, just behind alcohol and marijuana, is one of the most widely used harmful drugs in the Portland area.

Once called the champagne of drugs because of its high price and jet-set image, the cocaine derivative crack is cheaper than the price of a movie ticket.

An estimated one in 10 Portland area residents has used some form of cocaine more than once, according to Dr. Jerry Larsen, medical director for Portland’s Comprehensive Options for Drug Abusers, the largest drug-treatment program in the state.

Studies show that most cocaine users range in age from their late teens to late 30s. In that group, as many as one in five people in the Portland area uses cocaine once a month or more, said Logan C. Baldwin of St. Vincent Hospital *and Medical Center.

Five years ago, little crack was found in Portland. Now, it’s the favorite drug in many neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland.

Some treatment specialists believe crack, smoked in small “rocks” that sell for as little as $5 each, has become the most widely used form of cocaine in the Portland area. Others say powdered cocaine that is snorted or mixed with water and injected is more popular than crack.

Much of the crack is sold by gun-toting gang members who have set up high-volume drug houses in peaceful neighborhoods. The violent dealers and unpredictable users take over neighborhoods from residents whose property values sink and whose family safety is jeopardized.

Intensely addictive, crack hooks users quickly and completely. It hits the brain in just seconds, producing an intense high that is over in five minutes. An unpleasant crash follows, marked by depression and a hunger for more cocaine.

Despite earlier claims that crack addicts couldn’t be treated, researchers are finding that usual treatment methods can be effective. They say the crack user’s environment — usually in poor inner cities lacking education, job opportunities and supportive friends and relatives — may be as important in treatment difficulties as the drug’s physiological effects.

About 150 drug houses in North and Northeast Portland are the prime crack outlets. But drug houses are not the only marketplace for cocaine. Street dealers openly peddle cocaine and other drugs in city parks on both sides of the river, including one that Police Chief Richard D. Walker can see from his 15th floor office in the Portland Police Bureau headquarters just a block away.

Cocaine can be purchased from patrons in virtually every large bar, nightclub or restaurant in the metropolitan area. In some establishments, it’s almost as easy as ordering a drink.

Other drugs also are easy to get in Portland. Mexican tar heroin is readily available from street-corner dealers in Old Town. The city has earned itself a national reputation as a major supplier of methamphetamines, which are produced in clandestine labs throughout the metropolitan area. And Oregon is known for growing some of the world’s best marijuana.

Heroin and meth addicts typically come from well-defined, relatively small and isolated segments of the community: street people, prostitutes and criminals. But cocaine users come from all walks of life.

They live in Albina and Alameda, in Portland Heights and in Errol Heights. They are employed as cops, clerks, doctors, lawyers and journalists. They are kids not old enough to get a driver’s license and adults who worry about the mortgage.

They all share one thing: They can’t stay away from cocaine.

Fourteen years ago, a task force led by then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller said that cocaine was not physically addictive. But recent research has shown that crack is one of the most addictive drugs known, so addictive that it cannot be used as a recreational drug.

Portland’s addicts know that.

Three years ago there were just five Cocaine Anonymous groups meeting weekly in the Portland area. Now, there are 24 such groups, at least one meeting daily.

Drugs like cocaine have changed the way all Portland residents, not just addicts, live their lives.

Portland’s crime rate is among the fifth-highest in the country, and police and prosecutors estimate that three-fourths of crime is related to or motivated by drugs. But the issue goes beyond statistics. During the 1980s, Portlanders’ perception of their city changed, much of it because of drugs and crime.

Neighborhood activists say residents fear that they and police are losing control over areas where families live under virtual siege because of what drugs are doing to their neighborhoods.

Residents worry that Portland is no longer the small, safe, livable city it once was. They wonder if their children’s schools are safe, or if they’ll be mugged if they go downtown to a theater.

And there’s a growing fear that the people with the power to effect change are not able to cope with the problem.

As the crime problem became more acute, many of the city’s leaders were distracted, fighting internal battles that hampered their ability to provide leadership when it was needed most.

Mayor Bud Clark didn’t use the power of his office to address the problems in the neighborhoods hardest hit by drug violence. Leaders in North and Northeast Portland and even the mayor’s friends tried for more than a year to convince his office that the city had a serious gang and drug problem. The first public response from City Hall did not come until last year.

“Until the day I die, I will believe that had this happened in the richer part of town, that would not have been the response,” said Ron Herndon, who has emerged as a leading voice on crime issues in the North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods.

Internal strife spawned a tug-of-war between the mayor’s office and the Police Bureau. The disputes became so bad that state and federal law enforcement agencies began to look past those two institutions to solve the city’s problems.

Since 1980, there have been five police chiefs, two interim chiefs and several deputy chiefs running the Police Bureau. The frequent management changes have left a bureau that no longer appears to know what is expected of it.

No one in the bureau has a plan to effectively deal with crime and drugs during the next few years, let alone the next 12 months.

Five months ago, The Oregonian assembled a team of 10 staff members to examine Portland’s cocaine problem and the toll it has taken on the city and its citizens. The team found:

*Total property crime losses last year amounted to $142 for each resident.

*Last year’s dollar loss — based on worker productivity, crime and decreases in property values attributed to gangs and drugs — reached $200 million in Multnomah County.

*The values on more than 700 square blocks in inner-city neighborhoods fell by as much as 17 percent last year. Realtors and residents blamed drug-related activity.

*The age at which youngsters in Portland and the rest of the state first try drugs and alcohol continues to decline.

*Students can make contacts to buy drugs in every Portland-area public middle school and high school.

*Drug addicts without money or health insurance may have to wait weeks or months to get drug treatment.

*The percentage of Oregonians failing pre-employment drug tests exceeds the national average.

*Most drug users are not hard-core addicts, but are employed and managing to carry on their lives.

Chuck Karl, a Portland Police Bureau captain who runs the Regional Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force, is not known for hyperbole. Yet he admits that he is worried about Portland’s future.

“Our community has to mobilize to kill the demand for drugs,” he said. “Law enforcement has been depended on too much to deal with drugs. The community, and by that I mean the churches, the businesses, the schools and the neighborhoods, have to do their part.

“In cities like New York, where they’ve been dealing with this problem for a lot longer, there’s a tendency for the citizens to give up,” he said. “I’m worried that’s what’s happening in Portland.

“My fear is that Portland has reached a crossroads,” he said. “The time to do something, as a community, as a city, is now. If we don’t, we can count on it only getting worse each day.”

The easiest way to understand what’s happened to Portland is to imagine that a large map of the western United States is spread out across a kitchen table.

Placed at the southern end of California, and representing cocaine, is a full glass of milk. Knock that glass over and the milk washes over all of Los Angeles. And rivulets run to Portland.

Portland’s cocaine problems are acute because in the early 1980s, drug rings began smuggling cocaine through California as well as through Florida, a longtime port of entry.

Now Los Angeles, like Miami, has become one of the nation’s largest hubs for cocaine. An estimated 40 percent of this country’s cocaine travels through Los Angeles before being shipped to dealers scattered in nearly every state, according to federal narcotics officials.

Authorities believe they only stopped 10 percent of all the cocaine smuggled into Los Angeles last year. Yet they still seized 20 tons, enough to put a 3.3-pound bag on every seat in Portland’s Memorial Coliseum. And each bag will provide between 4,000 and 7,500 hits of cocaine.

Cocaine flows north to Portland along Interstate 5 each day. Since January, Oregon State Police patrolling the highways have seized more than 170 pounds of cocaine worth more than $1.5 million — most of it on I-5.

“I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said state police Capt. Jim Stevenson of the Patrol Division.

Larry McKinney, the special agent in charge of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s Portland office, agrees.

“These days, the physical distance that separates us from the border doesn’t do much to stop the drugs,” he said. “Once across the border, they come to Portland almost as easily as they come to Los Angeles. Portland has no special insulation from these guys anymore.”

Another contributing factor to the city’s cocaine problem has been the growth of the Crips and Bloods, street gangs that formed in Los Angeles and entered the crack business.

About four years ago, gang members began moving to Portland to find new markets. Authorities believe that most of the top Los Angeles gang members have been driven from the city, but local members now control most of Portland’s crack trade. The gang members have been involved in murders and drive-by shootings.

Primarily because of those two events — Los Angeles becoming a hub city, and the growth of gangs involved in the crack business — Portland’s cocaine market is booming.

As law enforcement agencies put greater emphasis on drug cases, Portland-area jails burst. In Portland last year, almost two of three persons arrested on drug charges were merely given citations to appear in court at a later date.

Neither state prisons, jail nor probation programs offer enough drug treatment. The chances of getting drug treatment, counseling or drug education in the prison system are less than one in 10. Most jails offer no treatment.

On many fronts, the war on drugs is being lost.

Norma Jaeger, alcohol and drug coordinator for the Multnomah County Department of Human Services, doesn’t even like the war metaphor.

“The last war this country was in was the Vietnam War, and if people will remember, we didn’t win. We gave up,” she said. “And how do you declare war on something that’s so insidious, so interwoven? War works when there is a clear enemy.

“But what do you do when the drug dealer is a Gresham High School student? Is that who you want to declare war on? It’s a flashy metaphor, but other than shooting down drug smugglers’ airplanes, it really isn’t helpful.”

The story of cocaine is a story about victims. People such as:

Robert D. Clary, an 18-year veteran with the Portland Police Bureau. While working as an undercover drug officer in 1976, Clary first snorted cocaine to keep his cover while investigating a California outlaw biker. Clary became hooked, and didn’t stop until late 1987.

The toll: Clary, who had attained the rank of sergeant and had earned seven commendations during his career, was fired.

Tom, a 14-year-old boy who fell in love with cocaine when he turned 13. He injected cocaine and soon was hooked. To support himself he began selling drugs to other kids.

The toll: Tom dropped out of school to enter drug treatment. In May, he checked himself into a long-term residential treatment center for adolescents near San Diego. He will live there for eight months.

David Lawrence “Larry” Olstad, a former Portland attorney who was arrested by federal drug agents last year in his downtown office. The charge: distributing and conspiring to deliver cocaine.

Olstad had been a recreational cocaine user for several years, but lost control of his life in 1987 when he started smoking cocaine.

The toll: suspension of his license as a lawyer, separation from his wife and two teen-age daughters, forfeiture of his Irvington home to the bank, and a prison sentence.

Frank, a family man and city of Portland utility worker who became addicted to crack. On payday, he would leave work and stop at home only long enough to shower. Then he would head to a Northeast Portland drug house to buy his fix.

The toll: Frank spent as much as $300 a night on crack before he finally went into drug treatment.

Kamira, a baby who tested positive for cocaine one day after she was born.

State officials say that during the first five months of this year, the births of drug-affected babies were running about 20 percent higher than last year.

The toll: Long-range consequences that could include mental retardation and stunted coordination.

Neither Judy nor Rick Charlton has ever used cocaine. Yet cocaine has infected their lives.

In mid-August, after working with the neighborhood association and authorities, police arrested the man suspected of running the drug house in the middle of their block.

Two weeks later, when it became clear the drug house would not reopen, the Charltons organized a neighborhood party to celebrate. About 25 neighbors gathered in the Charltons’ back yard to eat cake and congratulate each other.

Mike Linhares, a Portland Police Bureau lieutenant who had worked closely with the neighborhood, said he believed the men who ran the drug house had opened another one two blocks away. He urged continued vigilance.

“One victory on one block in the city doesn’t mean a lot by itself,” he said. “But down the road they get rid of another drug house and it becomes a two-block victory. Then four blocks, and pretty soon you have a neighborhood.”

After the cake had been cut, helium-filled balloons were handed out, and Rick Charlton climbed on his deck to make a speech.

“We know that in the scheme of things not a whole lot has been accomplished,” he said. “There are still drug houses and problems. But let’s make a toast to ourselves.

“Maybe some other neighborhood will notice what we did here and try something,” he said. “So, anyway, here’s to us.”

On the count of three, the crowd let go of the balloons. And then they clapped and smiled and cheered.