Promise Thrown Away

"We have them in the schools now," he said. "First of all, they cannot focus. They're very fidgety. They're very violent a lot of the time. And it's hard to deal with them and hard to control them. And, also, what you have are a lot of grandmas trying to raise those kids because the mothers are all gone, and Grandma can't do it."

Although cocaine use has subsided somewhat, there were still 5.7 million people across the country who abused it in 2004, according to the most recent statistics from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The year before, about a million people reported having tried it for the first time.

Leah Young, a spokeswoman for the agency, said first-time cocaine use has been rebounding after rising to well over 1 million people in the mid-1980s and then falling to 634,000 in 1993. It reached 825,000 in 1996 and 917,000 in 1999.

It's not clear why. "Our data tell us what is happening; they don't tell us why," Young said. "You're still getting a million people a year starting to use this stuff. People never learn. People just don't get it."

Michael Houbrick, 46, a real estate agent from Spokane, Wash., knows the current statistics firsthand.

As he stood in the crowd in Arlington last night, he said his identical twin brother, Matthew, a television producer, died of a cocaine overdose Nov. 14 in a hotel room in Chicago.

Houbrick said he had no idea his brother used drugs.

"Not pot, not cocaine, nothing," Houbrick said. "That's why it was so hard to take. From the police I found out he ordered chicken fingers, french fries and a Diet Coke."

Houbrick shrugged. "And then he took cocaine," Houbrick said. "And for me, it's very difficult to believe that. But that's what happened. That's what the toxicology report and the autopsy showed: cocaine poisoning."