A hundred degrees of difference turned cocaine into a smokable crisis
Powdered cocaine is a salt that burns uselessly in a flame, but its freebase form, crack, vaporises near 90 °C. That chemical quirk delivers effects within seconds, a high lasting only minutes, and an addiction that can take hold in four to six weeks, far faster than with powder.
The name comes from the crackling noise the material makes when heated, and the street nickname rock from its hard, off-white lumps. Chemically, crack is cocaine with its hydrochloride stripped away using a weak base such as baking soda. The salt form dissolves in water and melts at around 190 °C; the base barely dissolves in water and turns to vapour at a far lower temperature. Strictly speaking, users vaporise rather than burn it, since combustion degrades the drug.
Crack spread through poor neighbourhoods of cities such as New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Miami in late 1984 and 1985, a surge labelled the crack epidemic that eased in the 1990s. In the United States both crack and powder cocaine are Schedule II drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. A manual on adolescent substance treatment describes crack as the most addictive form of cocaine.
Speed is the problem. Inhaled cocaine reaches the brain within seconds and floods it with dopamine; a Brookhaven study of 32 people put the average peak at about 1.4 minutes. The euphoria fades within ten minutes or so, and plunging dopamine leaves a crash and craving. Short-term effects include raised blood pressure, dilated pupils, overheating and tremors, while repeated use is linked to seizures, heart muscle disease, paranoia and psychosis. Heating also produces methylecgonidine, which some research suggests makes smoking harder on the heart, lungs and liver than other routes.
Street supply adds hazards. Batches are bulked with substances ranging from sugars and caffeine to the worming drug levamisole, and purity swings can trigger overdose. Short, fragile glass pipes burn lips, and shared pipes pass on germs. A mixed-methods study in Connecticut found xylazine in 19.2 percent of fentanyl-related overdose deaths, and interviewees described turning to more crack in response to xylazine in their fentanyl, though the survey differences were not statistically significant.
Source: Crack cocaine
