It’s Snowing in Morgantown
by Ireland Butler and Mackenzie Myers
Merwis Haidar was a junior at Morgantown High School when he first used cocaine.
Haidar was at a college party at what is now the Campus Evolution Villages when he went into a bedroom to get to the bathroom. As he entered the room, he saw multiple people smoking pot and burning pills off of foil. He was interested in getting some marijuana but no one would give him any of what they had, they simply kept referring him to go to the bathroom.
Once in the bathroom, he was introduced to cocaine by a dealer.
“Jumping out of a plane was almost as thrilling as doing cocaine for the first time,” he said.
By the time Haidar was a student at West Virginia University, his substance abuse had spiraled. He dropped out during his second semester.
Snow can be found in Morgantown regardless of the season. Not winter precipitation of course, but the party drug cocaine. Many dealers use the slang “snow” or simply the snow emoji to refer to the drug. People can be found selling it on social media like Snapchat and Instagram.
Cocaine Culture in Morgantown
Josh, whose name has been changed for privacy, is a student at West Virginia University who recently got into selling cocaine. According to him, cocaine can be found in just about any bathroom at a club or Greek house party.
“You can probably find someone out there giving it away honestly,” he said.
He posts advertisements for cocaine on Snapchat whenever he is selling it. But why have so many students turned to cocaine?
Cocaine is a stimulant, so many college kids use it to sober up when they’ve been drinking, according to an Assistant Professor Frankie Tack, the addiction studies minor coordinator at WVU. Cocaine is a stimulant while alcohol is a depressant. When a person uses both cocaine and alcohol, they act against each other. Cocaine can bring more energy to someone who has had a lot of alcohol and alcohol can be used to bring someone down from a cocaine high.
According to one study, while cocaine use has overall been on the decline, there has been a sharp upward trend in cocaine use among college campuses and people in their 20's. As Morgantown is a college town, it is no surprise that there does seem to be a cocaine culture intertwined with the party atmosphere.
The journalists who reported this story administered a survey regarding cocaine use at WVU to 46 students. Of that group, 39 students knew someone who had tried cocaine, 14 had tried it and 27 knew where they could get it if they wanted it.
Why did they do it? The answers ranged from the “thrill of being rebellious,” to “For fun, because friends do it,” and “Because women love blow.”
Two students who used cocaine were both introduced to it at parties. Trixie, whose name has been changed for privacy, was first introduced to cocaine her freshman year while she was getting ready to go clubbing. She was at Seneca Hall where her friend lived when a dealer who was dating her friend visited the dorm. He offered her free lines and had at least a full gram of cocaine available to Trixie and the others there.
The dealer let Haidar try cocaine by giving him roughly three lines of cocaine and told him to snort them all. Haidar eventually became addicted to both cocaine and alcohol.
“One of the things that really stuck out to me is how often people would push cocaine and ecstasy and MDMA for free… especially guys at parties trying to get girls to consume it…,” said Haidar.
Greek Life and Cocaine
Five of the sources who were interviewed for this story agreed on one thing: that a significant portion of all the cocaine in Morgantown was involved with the social Greek life at the university.
A Greek house party was where Trixie had her second encounter with cocaine. She could not get anyone to give her any free lines so she and a friend would go into the bathroom after the cocaine users had left and sweep up leftover cocaine from the counter and made up half a line that way.
Haidar was friends with someone in one of the Greek fraternities and saw first hand all of the drugs that they had access to back in 2012. According to him, some of the brothers had large tackle boxes full of drugs for them to sell.
Josh said that you could almost always find cocaine at the Greek houses.
Carmen, a Greek life member whose name has been changed for privacy, said a so-called “frat rat,” a girl who is known to hang around fraternities, helped members get all the drugs out of a fraternity house last fall when there was a concern that the fraternity would be raided. The “frat rat” took them back to Dadisman Hall to keep the drugs safe until things blew over. Carmen learned of this incident because the ‘frat rat’ showed her all the drugs she had in her room.
“Nobody wants to be a snitch,” she said, explaining why people help keep their friends out of jail.
Carmen said she has never done cocaine.
“It kinda seems stupid to me but … I also don’t want to spend the money on it,” Carmen explains.
Her first encounter with cocaine was during her freshman year of college. She and her friend Hannah had been smoking when their friend Todd offered them cocaine. Both of their names have been changed for privacy. Carmen wasn’t interested but Hannah wanted to give it a try. Since this was Hannah’s first time she was unaware like many the effects of cocaine.
“We were very high … and then she just got sobered up,” Carmen said.
Her second time coming into contact with cocaine was at a fraternity party. Carmen was in a room with other people smoking weed and after a while realized that everyone else in the room besides she and her friend were doing lines of cocaine off the desk.
“Oh my gosh, so many people do meth accidentally here,” she said.
She knows two girls from freshman year who accidentally did meth and a group of people who bought drugs for Fall Fest that ended up being meth. Situations like that is why Josh has personally decided that cocaine is one of the last things he wants to try and sell. According to an Addiction Center article in 2018, there was a 112 percent increase of cocaine laced with fentanyl. Carmen has a golden rule when it comes to buying drugs.
“If I saw my drug dealer doing it I would know it’s okay,” she said.
Some people don’t have to look farther for cocaine than just asking a fraternity brother. Carmen’s drug dealer, for example, sells to his fellow brothers.
Dean Gill, the president of the fraternity Phi Beta Theta at WVU, explained why he thinks drugs have become so normalized within a fraternity.
“You could have 50 to 60 members that just aren’t into that kind of thing and then all of a sudden you have one class that comes in and there’s 5 to 10 people who are into it … that can change the whole dynamic of the chapter,” Gill said.
He believes most people start doing it because that’s what everyone else is doing so it’s okay.
“They think doing cocaine is not much different than grabbing a beer.”
One of the reasons Gill became a president is to get his chapter away from the stereotypes and set an example for what they should be representing. Especially after several chapters have been disassociated from West Virginia University. Gill has seen what cocaine has done to friends and celebrities such as Mac Miller.
“Doing something like that it’s not worth my life.”
The War on Weed
Both the University Police Department and the Director of the Office of Fraternity & Sorority Life Matthew Richardson had similar sentiments in regards to cocaine in Morgantown.
“Most of those drug arrests are for marijuana and not cocaine,” Richardson wrote in an email.
Richardson also wrote that all the social Greek life groups have to have at least 70 percent of their members attend drug and alcohol education programs.
Lieutenant Chad Barker of the UPD said that the department deals with cocaine only a few times a year according to their statistics. Marijuana has a smell so it’s easier to find and more likely to be reported, so in most cases they’ve found cocaine after receiving a call about marijuana.
Tack, the addiction studies professor, says that while she knew about the drinking and smoking cultures of Morgantown, she missed the fact that there was an influx of cocaine. She says that drugs move in cycles, and her reasoning as to why cocaine is so popular again was due to the fact that most college-aged students now do not remember the negative effects of the cocaine boom of the ‘70s and the ‘80s.
What worries her most is that students may get addicted to cocaine and build up a tolerance to it, causing them to move from cocaine to something harder, like crack cocaine.
What happens when a student has progressed in their use to the point of addiction? For Trixie, she never got to the point of addiction with cocaine simply because she couldn’t afford it. She switched to the much cheaper and more readily available Adderall that her teaching assistant for one of her classes was selling. Haidar had a sort of intervention with multiple friends and family members that awakened his need to get clean and now works for the Serenity Place helping others with their substance abuse issues.
What more can be done for the people at WVU that are addicted to cocaine though? The university does have Collegiate Recovery Programs as an asset to the students, although most people are not aware that they are a program that is offered. Very few of the programs there though are tailored to specific recovery paths and instead it is a place for people to be surrounded by other sober people and have fun events that are drug-free.
Haidar works with collegiate recovery as an undergraduate assistant and encourages anyone who is wanting to live a clean life to come and see what the program has to offer.
“As long as I make one person feel good about their interaction they had with me, or better about themselves or feel just good at all,” he said, “that’s the goal right there.”
