Darkness Rising
As a deadly new drug hits the streets, police and citizens silently fear a return of chaos a quarter century old
Most New Yorkers did not know Kenneth Tsang. The son of Chinese immigrants who passed away before he graduated high school, Tsang received his MBA from Wharton and spent most of his twenties raking in the dough while working at two prestigious investment firms. Most New Yorkers did not know that, despite his income, Tsang owed nearly half a million dollars in taxes and mortgage payments, and that he burned through his money nearly as fast as it came in.
Most NewYorkers know thatTsang was found dead this week, his body pulverized and found floating in the East River. What they do not know is that a balloon marker was tied to the buoy that Tsang’s body was tethered to. They do not know that inside that balloon were half a dozen small, black rocks, left by Tsang’s killer. These rocks were no bigger than a piece of gravel, but each contain enough destructive power to clinch a plastic bag around the head of a city already gasping for air.
Now, come with me for a moment. I have a brief history lesson to impart upon you.
For those of us who lived through New York in the
1980s, much of the information within this article will ring horrifyingly familiar. Let’s backtrack for a minute, about twenty-five years ago to 1984. George Orwell would have been proud. Or terrified.
New York as we know it today did not exist. Following the oil shortage of the 1970s, the Son of Sam murders, and an economy on the verge of chaos, the plumbing system that was New York was about to get hit with a cherry bomb that nearly destroyed it totally.
That cherry bomb was a new drug known to scientists as methylbenzoylecgonine. Or as it is more commonly known, crack.
Crack first appeared on our shores in 1984. Before that, the drug of choice was cocaine. But as cocaine became more plentiful, prices dropped and dealers began to lose much of their profit margin.
Poor them.
So to get back the money they were losing on coke, they came up with a new way to profit. In a nutshell, they used baking soda or other bases to cut the cocaine.
This increased the volume of their product while retaining the same toxicity of the drug. It was the equivalent of taking a dollar bill, mixing it with a few pennies, and turning it into two dollars.
By 1986, just two years after crack hit the streets, over fifty-five thousand people were admitted to emergency rooms around the country with crackrelated injuries (most often this was either from overdosing, or violence which was a result of the drug trade).
For those of you who lived in New York during that time, as I did, the effects of the crack epidemic were as visible as a streetlamp. Crime in this city hit highs never before seen. Murder and rape rates rose dramatically. Cases of aggravated assault skyrocketed from just over 60,000 in 1980 to over 91,000 by the end of the decade. Burglaries. Larceny. Vehicle theft.
New York began to resemble less of a modern, cosmopolitan city than an outpost of Beirut.
Thankfully, this trend reversed itself in the 1990s, and through the new millennium New York has enjoyed its lowest crime rates per capita since the
1960s. New York was known as one of the safest big cities in the country, and if you live here or came to visit, you could walk down the street feeling safe.
After the atrocities of 9/11, New Yorkers banded together to create a safer city. One that reclaimed its place among the grandest in the world. The virus that infected us twenty-five years ago had long been forgotten.
To my horror, though, recent developments have proven that this virus was not extinguished, but had rather been lying dormant, in remission, waiting for a catalyst to revitalize its poisons.
That catalyst has finally found us. And it is not a terrorist, or a crooked financial institution. It exists in the tiniest form possible: a small black rock.
Though the human eye might not register this tiny specimen as anything more than a pebble, a piece of gravel, something that might even pave a driveway, the properties that exist within it threaten the very sanctity of the city we have fought so bravely to protect.
The culprit? A simple black rock that dissolves on your tongue as fast as a breath strip.
Nobody is quite sure where the Darkness came from, who manufactures it, or whether this drug has spread to other states. Crack began in primarily metropolitan cities. New York. Los Angeles. Washington,
D.C. Cities with large urban populations. Cities where there was enough poverty to turn the need of a cheap hit into gold for the men and women whose lack of humanity drove them to produce it.
As of press time, the police had no leads on who deals the drug. A high-ranking member inside the
NYPD did comment, off the record, stating,“We are fully preparing for another epidemic similar to the rise of crack cocaine we saw in the 1980s. Though privately, we’re worried that this one will be much, much worse and have a potentially more devastating impact considering that our infrastructure is already damaged.”
So what’s the harm in a little black rock, you might ask? Why should I care about some idiots getting high?
Because increases in drug production and consumption lead to increases in crime. But here’s where this drug differs: a normal crack user will find successive hits of the drug granting decreasing effects. The hits, as they are, are not as potent.
With the Darkness, however, some insane chemical genius has figured out a way around this.
The human brain produces a certain amount of dopamine, a neurotransmitter often associated with pleasure. Dopamine is released through many pleasurable experiences, including food, exercise, sex and, of course, drugs. Simple crack cocaine releases a larger amount of dopamine than the brain is accustomed to, so when the user takes a second hit before the brain can replenish dopamine, a lesser amount is released.
Yet the Darkness circumvents this by causing the brain to produce more dopamine. This means that each successive hit will have the exact same impact as the one preceding it, making it more addictive than nearly every drug on the market.
It’s no wonder the cops are nervous. They’re facing streets about to be teeming with a drug that’s cheaper, more plentiful, and delivers, pardon the expression, the best hit money can buy.
God help us all.