ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 11, 1997 TAG: 9701130053
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: crime and punishment
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE
Staff writer Jan Vertefeuille visited a Roanoke crack house to see how life was lived inside. This is what she found:
Cars pull up to the shabby, wood-frame house nonstop on a rainy fall night, their passengers dashing in to buy a rock or two of crack cocaine, sometimes staying to smoke it there. This isn't the sort of place that usually comes to mind when you hear the term "crack house," with images of an abandoned building taken over by addicts. It's a family's home. Mom sells crack - and lets others sell there, too - to support her habit.
Kids run in and out of the Northwest Roanoke house, sidestepping customers and ignoring the lookout mumbling into a cellular phone on the front porch.
In the bathroom, two dealers are cooking powder cocaine into crack over a butane flame. No aspirin or toothpaste clutters this medicine cabinet; it's filled with test tubes, a set of scales and the razor blades used to carve the hardened cocaine base into pebble-size rocks for retail sale.
The master bedroom doubles as a smoking lounge, where addicts light up on a ratty couch and zone out in front of music videos blaring from the TV. Class pictures, a Dr. Seuss book and school papers litter one side of the room, the only evidence of family life apparent here.
A toddler comes into the bedroom and dances around on two dilapidated mattresses on the floor. The adults ignore her. She then announces that she has to go to the bathroom. The men stop weighing crack just long enough to let her use the toilet.
It's a house where children - or maybe adults - scrawl graffiti on the flaking walls with markers, and no one cares. The phone has been disconnected again because the owner couldn't divert enough money from buying crack the previous month to pay the phone bill.
Crack runs the household, but it's obvious it isn't being sold to make money. It's being sold to support the owner's habit.
Her dealer might front her an ounce of powder cocaine to cook into crack and tell her to bring him back $500 or more. The profit margin on crack is substantial; she can get more than $2,500 worth of $20 rocks out of the ounce.
On a busy night, it takes no time to sell $500 worth, pay off her dealer, and have plenty of crack left over to smoke herself. But a slow night can be a problem - she and her boyfriend might smoke it all before they sell enough to pay the dealer.
The crack trade in Roanoke has mostly moved inside, to houses like this one.
A few open-air crack markets remain here and there, where anyone driving down the street can buy a rock from a kid on the corner. But the days of street dealers boisterously hawking crack like boys peddling newspapers are largely over, thanks to a couple of highly publicized federal crackdowns a few years ago and regular sweeps by city police.
But as long as there are huge profits in crack and users who need to support their insatiable habits, crack houses will thrive.
LENGTH: Medium: 59 linesby CNB