Promise Thrown Away

In 1986, the institute's surveys recorded a cocaine use rate among 12th-graders of 12.7 percent, she said. "That's extremely high . . . one in eight."

After his death, rates plunged. By 1992, the rate had dropped to 3.1 percent, she said. "Sometimes, you need a sentinel event like this one to alert everybody."

Alas, she said, public attention can be short-lived. "All of that generation of kids that were exposed to the death of Len Bias . . . were very much protected," she said. "But then a generation gap happens, and the next one was not."

The 12th-grade use rate started back up, and doubled to 6.2 percent in 1999, she said. It's currently about 5 percent.

"I think the reason we're still seeing the numbers that we're seeing today is that we have not gotten in and really fought the good fight," Lonise Bias said last night. "We've done this, and we've done that. We have a grant here and a program there. But what we have to do is work with our young people like it's in intensive care."

If Bias's death caused a drop in cocaine use, experts say, it had little impact on the great crack cocaine epidemic of later years, when the drug became available in a cheaper, much more addictive and more hazardous form.

Van Quarles, a supervisory special agent with the Washington field division of the DEA, said crack democratized cocaine use in the 1980s. Crack, which is smoked, was far less expensive than powdered cocaine, which is most often snorted.

"Back in the early '80s when you talked cocaine, it was more expensive," he said. An ounce of powdered cocaine could be a couple of thousand dollars, he said. "A certain level or group of people could afford it -- the party people, the pretty people. . . . Crack made it affordable for anyone. You could get a five-dollar rock, 10-dollar rock, whatever. It wasn't just limited to people who could spend a lot of money. It made it available to pretty much anyone."

Crack use exploded in the inner city, sparking gang wars, killings, the proliferation of crack houses -- where it was sold as if from popcorn stands -- and a generation of crack addicts.

Art Smith, 53, a drug counselor for the New York City school system, watched it claim scores of young people in the city, including a sister who became a crack addict and died in the 1980s.

It was "horrible, horrible, horrible," he said last night as he waited for the ceremony to begin.

Now, he said, the community has the legacy of grown-up children born to crack-addicted mothers, called crack babies.