Crack

Cocaine cooked with baking soda into smokable "rocks".

Cooking with a baking soda converts the cocaine to a smokable freebase, and once the water is boiled off, the mixture can be broken into "rocks" of crack.

Crack first appeared in the US in the early 1980s, but was preceded in central and South America by the similarly devastating "basuco", a paste rich in freebase cocaine produced as an intermediate in the purification of powder cocaine (cocaine hydrochloride) from coca leaves.

Documents:

• Preparation of Freebase Cocaine and "Crack"
• Medical Consequences of Crack and Freebase Cocaine
  A collection of references and abstracts.
• Crack Babies Excerpt from "Smoke and Mirrors"
  By Dan Baum, 1996.

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Contacts and URLs:

• Hedonistic Imperative (homepage, more info)
  Entry point for an eclectic group of sites with information and opinions on many things, including drugs.
  • Photo of crack rock, crack pipes, and some brief information on pharmacology (related items...)
  • What is crack cocaine? (related items...)
• Virtual Crack Rock (homepage, more info)
  Send someone virtual crack.
• Wackycrackheads (homepage, more info)
  Web comic with crackcentric humor

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Images:

• Crack cocaine

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