Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (drugs) a habitual user of cocaine; thus Cokie Joe, a personification of a regular cocaine user.

1915		Marion Star (OH) 3 Apr. 17/5: One of the prisoners, a confirmed ‘cokie,’ who could not live without his snowflakes.
1922		T.A. Dorgan in Zwilling TAD Lex. (1993) 28: Is that guy just gittin’ over a party — or is he a cokie or has he got chills or what?
1930		J. Lait Gangster Girl 166: The cokies an’ the dopies who pick up this stuff.
1931		(con. 1920s) C.W. Willemse Behind The Green Lights 333: You never know what a cokey will do.
1940		S. Longstreet Decade 82: Is he a snow-boid? Those cokies are cards when they get a load of nose-candy.
1942		R. Chandler High Window (1951) 60: Out of the apartment houses come [...] fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers.
1958		Murtagh & Harris Cast the First Stone 14: The girls never bother the alkies and cokies of the street.
1964		B. Jackson Get Your Ass in the Water (1974) 133: Now Hypo, he was a gentleman, and Cokie, he was a rat, / a smoker can respect himself, but a drunkard can’t do that.
1971		E.E. Landy Underground Dict. (1972).
1989		(con. 1920s) Courtwright & Des Jarlais Addicts Who Survived 68: See it was no disgrace to be a cokie – they used to call them ‘cokies’.

2. (drugs, also coke) a habitual user of heroin or opium.

1916		New Republic VI 22 Apr. 314–6: The purveyors who sell heroin [...] became terrified, and for a time illicit traffic in the drug almost ceased. This was particularly acute just before the law went into effect on March 1, 1915, a period which is referred to by the ‘cokies’ as ‘the panic’.
1918		N.Y. Times 18 Dec. n.p.: Germany would have fallen upon a world which cried for its German tooth paste and soothing syrup — a world of ‘cokeys’ and ‘hop fiends’ which would have been absolutely helpless when a German embargo shut off the supply of its pet poison.
1928		J. Callahan Man’s Grim Justice 192: The keepers laughed at us and called us ‘coakies’ and ‘hop heads.’.
1931		C. Martinez ‘Gats in the Hat’ in Gun Molls Sept. 🌐 ‘A snowbird did this job.’ [...] ‘If it’s a cokey, he was working for someone else.’.
1934		Charleston (WV) Daily Mail 31 July 6/8: A cokie is a ‘hophead’ who smokes ‘mud’ or ‘hop’ which is opium. And a gong is an opium pipe.
1940		S. McBarron ‘Coffin Custodian’ Ten Detective Aces Apr. 🌐 I saw his pudgy hand go out in a gesture to the cokey at the end of the bar.
1954		E. Hunter ‘. . . Or Leave It Alone’ in Jungle Kids (1967) 54: ‘All right, cokie, what’d you do with it? [...] The syringe and the package.’ [i.e. of heroin].
1959		W. Brown Teen-Age Mafia 52: You want to cool your heels while the coke who brought you here gets his feel of the spooky-woogy?

3. (US Und.) any form of drug addict.

1928		M.C. Sharpe Chicago May (1929) 144: The women cokeys illustrate their lack of professional etiquette in this way.
1952		C. Hamilton Men of the Und. 321: Cokey, [...] 2. A drug addict.
1960		E. De Roo Big Rumble 56: Theirs was 8-D, where Mike had evicted a ‘den of cokies’ as he called them.

4. (US gang) a boy, usu. derog., esp. when referring to a member of another gang.

1949

Hal Ellson Duke 50: I see one of their cokies standing in a doorway [...] I give him an evil look.