In my fairly prude excuse for a life, the majority of what I know about illegal drugs came from watching “Pulp Fiction.” Movies don’t tell the whole story though and I have some questions.
What the heck is crack cocaine? How is it different than just cocaine?
Is crack similar to crank, or totally different?
What’s free basing?
How is it that heroine is a powder before you heat it then it becomse a liquid and stays that way?
“I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass.” Denis Leary
Crack is cocaine that has been converted to a form that makes it easy to smoke, that won’t dissolve in your hand. This can be done by mixing cocaine with baking soda, dissolving it in a bit of water, and then evaporating the water. Smoking crack is no different than smoking pure cocaine, but cocaine can be tricky to smoke since it melts so fast - you generally need a special type of pipe, while you can smoke crack with a coke can and some cigarette ashes.
Crack is different from crank. Crank is a methamphetemine that can be snorted, smoked, taken orally, or injected. No matter how you do crank, you get the same general affect - you will be high for hours (unless you have a tolerance). Smoking crack (or just plain cocaine) gives you a more intense rush than snorting it (though not nearly as strong as injecting it) that lasts about 10 minutes.
Free basing is smoking drugs like cocaine or crank.
I don’t know how to answer your question about heroin, as I have never done it (well, I swallowed a cap of it when I was 15, but I never did it RIGHT). I don’t think it would stay liquid, though - I think the way most people inject heroin is they dissolve it in a small amount of water in a spoon, and then suck it up into a syringe.
See my thread “Who Invented Crack?”
Not to step on Badtz Maru’s shoes here, but I wanted to clarify a point.
Free basing is taking Cocaine or Heroin in a spoon, with a little water and heating it up. Once it is heated up, it is put into a syringe and injected.
Simple chemistry for this one actually. Think of water, although that’s really overly simplifying it since not everything works like water. Heat + ice = water. Heat + water = gas. Heating something changes the chemical structure of anything, breaking bonds and sometimes makeing new ones. Heat heroin and you break the bonds that keep it as a solid and turn it into a liquid form. Unlike water, you can’t freeze heroin to get a powder again. The powder forms from combining other chemicals in the right proportions to form the specific heroin structure. Woohoo! look at that i did learn something from my chem and ochem classes!
No personal experience, but I thought the H was heated with water to improve the solubility. If this was a phase change (melting), it would probably be reversible, except solidify as a big rock, instead of a powder. If there is a chemical change, then why does snorting or ingesting powdered H get a person off in the same way (just not as quickly or as intensely) as going straight to the vein with this “chemically changed” material.
So many people are saying so many wrong things in this thread that I don’t know where to start.
Powder cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride, a compound of cocaine, which is a base, and hydrochloric acid. Cocaine hydrochloride is soluble in water, so you can inject it or snort it, but cocaine hydrochloride isn’t very smokable because of the acid. Freebasing is the process of removing the hydrochloric acid from cocaine hydrochloride (which does sometimes involve baking soda), thereby producing “free base,” which is cocaine base that’s free from hydrochloric acid. Freebase is pretty much the same thing as crack. You can smoke it, but it isn’t very water soluble and usually comes in chunks instead of powder, so it’s not very snortable.
When people put drugs in a spoon with water and heat it, all that happens is the drugs dissolve in the water. I’ve heard this called cooking something down, but it is not at all the same thing as freebasing.
Bob Scene’s description of free basing is very correct. And the difference between freebase and crack is largely just a name thing.
In the 80s smoking cocaine was called freebasing and you had to start with a fairly large amount of powder coke to make it. Hence, the only people who really did it were drug dealers (and Richard Pryor).
By the 90s people discovered how much more intense a high you got from smoking it rather than snorting it. So it began to become more than just a dealer perk, but a true ‘consumer item’. Since you didn’t cook it to separate the ‘free base’ yourself it wasn’t called that anymore. You just bought little pieces of pre-made ‘cracked’ rock.
Any questions class?
I note the presence of Crack Aficionados.
Here’s a bad drug joke for you:
Q: Who’s on first base?
A: Me, or I’ll kill you.
**
Ummm your right actually. Heroin isn’t my drug of choice, i didn’t even know they used water when heating it. Strictly from my chemistry knowledge it would be one big chunk instead of powder. Usually there is no chemical change tho, just a structural one.
I was thinking as in mixing the correct chemical compounds to make heroin can’t always be reversed. Breaking down heroin to the origional compounds. So sorry.
Last thing, People may still get off with snorting or ingestion, but it takes a longer since your body to dissolve it,and then for it go to into your blood stream back to your brain. Straight injection puts it right to the blood more or less. That’s why headache medicine takes so long to work. The doses have to be higher too, b/c most drugs in powder/pill form get broken down and used up for other purposes before they reach your nervous system.
Am i hijacking? Eep! Thanx for all the great info everyone.
I do know that heroin users will use something like margerine in low quality heroin to help it run better when they chase the dragon.
You don’t generally get high grade heroin in prisons.