New York's elite club of upper-class coke users are paranoid and jittery, and not just because they've been up all night. It turns out that getting high has become a headache since authorities busted a cadre of drug dealers operating out of the Lower East Side, as well as nabbing 18 alleged customers including Chipotle executive Mark Crumpacker, Fox Business producer Katie Welnhofer, and Merrill Lynch associate Christopher Dodson. The bust has some users so shaken that they told the New York Post that while they won't be cutting back, they are being super careful about getting the coke.
"This is actually terrifying. Everybody is scared,” a Manhattan publicist who said she does coke on the weekends told the Post. The woman, who the tabloid left anonymous for obvious reasons, admitted that the widely-reported arrest is encouraging her to cut back. "Your face is all of a sudden all over the world," she said. "Your career is over."
The arrested buyers were each charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance and in the seventh degree, a Class A misdemeanor in the state of New York, and many of them were refused bail by a judge at their arraignments. Crumpacker has been placed on administrative leave by Chipotle.
Charges for the four cocaine dealers arrested in the operation include criminal sale of a controlled substance, conspiracy, and, in the case of alleged kingpin Kenny 'Jay' Hernandez, operating as a major trafficker. The dealers allegedly operated primarily out of nightclubs, bars, and Duane Reades, using livery services for transportation.
Another anonymous source told the Post he has no plans to quit his 3.5 grams-per-week habit. The 45-year-old restauranteur described the horrors of having to actually wait for his dealer. "[L]ast week, I was with a client at a bar in the Meatpacking [District] and we wanted some stuff...My [dealer[ was stuck in Queens and the bartender told us about a guy we could talk to [in a corner of the bar]. Before the bust was in the news, we would have taken a shot. But now I’m more cautious. We thought he looked too clean-cut. We didn’t get involved.”
The Post also got a hold of one of those millennials, who was predictably so entitled and probably posting selfies as they called arresting people for cocaine use in New York "crazy."
"It's like busting people for drinking coffee," the anonymous millennial said. "[Cocaine] makes you energetic and social...[But] “I’ll be 100 percent more cautious. I won’t go out and get [cocaine]. I’ll have somebody get it for me.”
Finally, a 37-year-old described as a "web entrepreneur" admitted to using cocaine on a monthly basis, and offered a highly disruptive take: that like brunching at Prana and bankrupting Gawker Media, cocaine can be a status symbol of the 21st Century digital economy. "In a weird way, it advertises and elevates cocaine," the developer said. "You see successful, well-off people using it and wonder why you shouldn’t.”
