"At First I Was Scared"

Caroline Coleman grew up in the privileged world of trust funds, Virginia boarding schools and Swiss finishing schools. It is a world, she claims, where using drugs is as common as clipping coupons. "Most of the people I knew snorted coke and took pills. You just couldn't make a move without ammunition." Coleman, now 28, says she began sampling marijuana, hash, amphetamines and barbiturates when she was a freshman at an exclusive girls' school in Virginia horse country. The status drug among the teen-age girls, however, was clearly cocaine. "If you had a little thing of coke you felt cool," Coleman recalls.

She snorted coke occasionally but preferred the more mellow high of heroin, which a classmate gave her during her senior year. Soon she was hooked. After two years of college in New York and two more years abroad, Coleman settled in Manhattan. She tried to kick her heroin habit, enrolling in a methadone program. But soon she discovered an irresistible thrill: speedballs, injections of coke and heroin mixed together. She thus acquired a craving for the drug she had once dismissed. "The intense flash from the cocaine was so wonderful that if I only had $20 I'd buy coke."

She initially bought her drugs from friends, but as her speedballing grew to a $300a-day habit, she had to buy on the street. "At first I was scared," she says. "But then it became a part of it that I really liked, going into a really bad neighborhood."

Although her income from a trust fund supported her comfortably, Coleman kept busy with odd jobs as a substitute teacher or an extra on a TV soap opera. But her interest waned as she became more obsessed with coke. "There was no room to think about anything else. When I was working, I'd be thinking, 'I'll cop [buy] in four hours,' 'I'll cop in three hours.' Sometimes I'd just leave early and go cop." Before long, the interest she received on her trust fund was not enough to pay her drug bills. "The coke made me absolutely insane. I'd steal silver and gold jewelry from my family and friends. That would be my motivation for going to people's houses." She also began to dip into her capital.

Bank officials, alarmed at her shrinking account, contacted her parents in Greenwich, Conn. Her mother hired a detective to follow Caroline. The detective tapped her phone and secretly photographed her buying drugs.

When he presented the evidence to her parents, they persuaded her to go to Phoenix House, a drug rehabilitation center in New York. Coleman finally stopped taking drugs.

Now a counselor at Phoenix House working with teenagers, she considers cocaine far more addictive than heroin. She-sums up: "I was like a vampire needing blood." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.