Story by Ryan Loew | Photos by Melissa Gaug

Mary sifts through a pile of white powder with a Borders gift card, rolls up a $5 bill and sends an inch-long line of heroin straight up her nose. She wipes the remaining dust from the desk.

It’s a Sunday night in September in one of the residence halls, and Mary is with three friends, eating pizza and studying.

They’ve already smoked crack.

The friends passed a glass pipe packed with a Chore Boy, a metal scrubbing material. Mary put a piece of crack into the pipe and heated the metal until it was white hot. She inhaled, all that was left — an odorless vapor.
There is the assumption that once you smoke crack, you turn into a homeless person, one of Mary’s friends says. The social stigma isn’t enough to stop her, though. This is her first time trying the drug — but it’s neither her nor Mary’s first time doing hard drugs in the dorms.

Mary’s been using hard drugs since she was 15. Now, the 19-year-old sophomore education major is doing more drugs than ever. She asked that her real name not be used for this story.

For Sunday night, Mary brought the heroin from home. The crack had to be bought off campus. She didn’t know where the place was, but she went with a friend to an apartment to get the drug that Sunday night. As usual, it was a friend of a friend, she says.

While there, she waited in the living room of the stranger’s home. “He had like canned food all over the floor,” she says. “You could tell this guy was a crackhead.” A 350-pound stranger came through the door, she says. After a few minutes, he left. “Buying crack is always scary,” Mary says. “It’s always sleazy people.”

After what seemed like an eternity, they paid $50 for a “shady” bag of crack and left. Mary didn’t even want the crack — that was for her friends. She was happy with the heroin they had for that night. But she also bought meth and, by the next day, it was all gone. “We’ve already smoked crack, done meth, smoked weed, been drunk and done heroin, and it’s only Monday,” she says.

“What else is there?”