Santa Clara's underground coke scene

Editor's note: All students' names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Christine Swift tells Sean Caferty to change the song on iTunes -- she knows the perfect one to listen to. Sean switches the song on his dorm room computer from a slow hip-hop tune to one with a bass-heavy beat.

It's Friday night, and Sean and Christine are getting high. Not just the typical, smoke-a-few-blunts-and-get-stoned high -- it's the intense but short-lived high that comes from snorting an 8-ball of cocaine, 3.5 grams worth.

A minute later, Christine tells Sean to find a new song. This time it's a rap number. Another minute, another song. One more minute. One more song. This one, by The Format, gets Christine out of her chair and dancing. Sean sits beside her, watching her arms and hips sway to the beat.

Then she drops to the floor.

Her dancing continues, Sean recalls. At least he thinks she is dancing. But really, Christine is having a seizure, arms and legs convulsing to the beat as she loses consciousness. Sean still doesn't think anything is wrong until Christine starts foaming at the mouth. Sean leaps out of his chair, shaking her, trying to wake her, but her eyes just roll into the back of her head.

"I thought at one point about where we were gonna have to dump this body," Sean recalls. "I didn't care at the time because I was so messed up. If I wasn't, I would have been freaking out."

Before Sean can come up with any plans to ditch Christine's body, she comes to, 10 minutes after losing consciousness. She sits silently the rest of the night, still, mumbling occasionally.

Christine survived the night, despite snorting nearly 10 grams of cocaine that day. But the experience hasn't stopped her or Sean from using coke. In fact, they are at the center of a secretive, underground cocaine scene at Santa Clara, where students use coke as a way to get a quick high, be social and push limits that alcohol and pot can't reach. But unlike alcohol, and even marijuana, cocaine isn't out in the open. While getting drunk at a party is accepted at Santa Clara, using cocaine is not, and those who do stay hidden.

"It's popular, but underground," explains Sean, a junior at Santa Clara who has dealt on and off for two years. "As soon as one cokehead knows you do coke and you're cool, they let you in with their other friends who do coke. It's little cocoons of cokeheads around campus. But they don't want to reveal themselves. You have to get to know people first to get in with them."

It's difficult to determine the actual number of cocaine users, not only at Santa Clara but nationally. Different national surveys say anywhere from 4.9 to 15 percent of college-age students have used coke. One survey of Santa Clara students reported that 4.1 percent of students -- about 200 of 4,900, or one in every 25-person classroom -- have tried coke. And interviews with 10 coke users and five dealers reveal this is likely a conservative estimate, because many use the drug but won't admit it.

"It's not something I want people to know, that I take the drug, because they put it in a negative light," says sophomore Lindsay Merced, who uses cocaine recreationally.

Jeanne Rosenberger, vice provost for student life, says she is concerned if students are using cocaine, but it isn't high on her radar compared with alcohol and marijuana. That's because none of the 41 drug violations this year through winter quarter have involved cocaine, and only 6.8 percent have been cocaine related in the past two years.

Sean says a majority of his approximately 25 cocaine customers would use the drug occasionally, like Lindsay. But some, like Christine, would buy coke nearly every day, abusing the highly addictive stimulant. Cocaine provides an intense high that can quickly turn recreational use into dependence, according to Ike Grozier, executive director of Recovery Connection Treatment Services in Santa Clara. Cocaine artificially creates dopamine, the body's pleasure-producing chemical, causing the body to stop producing it naturally. When a regular user stops taking the drug, the body has no way to get dopamine. This results in irritability, depression and, ultimately, a dependence to recreate the missing pleasure. Dependence leads to addiction.

"The problem is, with young adults, tolerance seems to be like a good thing. It's like a badge. The problem is, it's not a good thing at all," Grozier says. "All the way around, it's damaging. You're flirting with something and have no concept of what you're about to create. You may not have problems now (when you start using), but if you flirt with it too long, it can create dependence."

Fulfilling the dependence isn't cheap: A gram of coke, which one person can use in a night, costs around $50. At Santa Clara, there are plenty of students with money -- money some use on the expensive drug -- no matter what the cost.

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Lindsay Merced sits at the table in a brown towel and bathing suit, her black bikini top exposed. She takes an Access card and starts chopping up the cocaine on the sunburst-colored tabletop in her friend's apartment, where a handful of people are gathered. She cuts off a line from the small mound of white powder sitting beside two black and white iPods, an empty Red Bull can and a box of Parliament cigarettes. Lindsay puts down the Access card and grabs a dollar bill, rolling it into a tight cylinder. She sticks it up to her nose, bends down and snorts the three-inch line. She throws her head back, inhales and picks up the remaining powder on her finger before rubbing it on her gums.

It's Thursday night and Sean is hosting a 21st birthday party for his roommate. There are nine people in the small living room, eating desserts from Bon Appetit and taking shots of Jagermeister. Poker pros are battling in a high-stakes game on TV, while two-thirds of the room takes turns snorting the gram of coke on the table. Lindsay gets up from the seat closest to the kitchen and Courtney Lions takes her place, grabbing the Access card and unrolling the dollar bill. She's also in a two-piece bathing suit, blue straps stemming up from her white towel, partially hidden by her shoulder-length brown hair. Courtney re-rolls the bill, breaks off a line from the pile of cocaine, and, without hesitating, snorts it.