Actually, the study seems to indicate that it is NOT the form of the cocaine that results in greater dependency and it then comes up with an ad hoc rationale for believing that crack is worse, anyway. (And it still comes down on the side of getting rid of the ridiculous discrepancy between the sentencing rules.)
John P. Morgan and Lynn Zimmer performed the same sort of meta-analyses (scroll to Comparing the Addictiveness of Crack and Cocaine) in about the same time frame as the Hatsukami and Fischman paper and noted from several cross-studies that the rates of actual addiction were not greatly different and that an explanation use based on marketing and cost were quite as likely to be responsible for the difference–a point acknowledged if downplayed by Hatsukami and Fischman.
Shodan, not one of your citations makes a medical claim that crack is more addicting. The comments even in your links indicate that whether crack is “worse” or worthy of harsher punishment tends to be based on the political position of the author.
Just as soon as you provide any evidence that the phrase “institutional racism” is “a method of making white people feel defensive.”
Crack is cheap enough that anyone holding down a job at slightly above minimum wage can afford it.
On the other hand, if we reduced the amount of effort and money we waste trying to stop it, its price would come down even further.
And if we’re going to talk cost to society from that perspective, we still need to address the issue of wasting money to build more prisons to hold more people while giving them felony records that inhibit to future employment, often for being users, not dealers (since the bar had been set so low to be named a dealer).
I am weighing the same evidence as you and coming to a different conclusion. That is how these discussions go. Making an accusation of ignoring evidence is silly when one has also ignored evidence (or misread it).
Crack cocaine is not a devilish substance that creates dependence by some magical virtue of its form. But its raison d’etre is to modulate the above-cited “crucial variables”. If someone were to chew miniscule amounts of freebase cocaine in a pill form, I daresay the effects would be less toxic than caffeine. But crack cocaine is not used that way, so the ‘form’ of the drug, per se, in this case can’t be decoupled from its predominant method of use and the contingencies it introduces viz. the immediacy, duration and intensity of effect.
Re: the Morgan/Zimmer analyses, they use the same survey but an earlier dataset as Anthony 2004 (which I cited above). In contrast to Anthony, their analysis is crude, apparently based on a comparison of continuation rates between crack and powder within the 1990 dataset. Anthony et al., OTOH, do a controlled statistical analysis on 3 years of data (95-98), also factoring in the responses to questions modeled on the DSM diagnostic criteria. M/Z seem to be debunking the instant/inevitable addiction perception of crack, and I agree with them there, but their crude analysis on comparative dependence liability is superseded by the rigorous analysis by Anthony et al.
tomndebb, I’d still like to know of the studies you refer to in this quote
I am not sure that I will be able to find them on-line. They were published in 1987 and I have not kept track of the authors in the ensuing decades.
I’ll keep looking.
