And again, correlation does not equal causation. And again, Mr. Lopez is someone with neither CADAC/LADAC in his credentials, AND he discloses details about his clients AND where he works? Oh and btw, it seems he’s pumping his soapbox in more than one place…I would hardly deem him an expert.
The only “details” he reveals about his clients is that they are homeless, primarily African American men, and they are approximately a certain age range. And that cite was only to show that I am not using my own experiences with an addict to draw conclusions about crack addiction. And, the addition of another professional who is discussing the same thing lends credence to what Mr. Lopez is discussing.
So tell me have you ever really
Really really ever known a crackhead?
Sorry. I’ve been resisting posting that for three pages.
And with two hits of google I found out he works with Veterans, in Texas, and where…that’s too much info. And again, where are his creds? He’s a social worker. That’s it. No specialty degree mentioned.
Yes but the fact that he’s documented these “crack/sex” connections, over and over again, is true irrespective of his level of specific expertise in the field of addiction. He’s got training in the field (as evidenced by his education) and he has observed the patterns in crack cocaine addiction that show a intermingling of compulsive sexual behavior. And his observances are corroborated by others’. It’s one thing to observe the connection; it’s another thing to break it down and understand it, it’s origin and it’s complexity.
ETA: I’m confused why you think he’s revealed too much info about his clients. He’s merely identified the area in which he works and the segment of the population that he works with.
“Yes but the fact that he’s documented these “crack/sex” connections, over and over again, is true irrespective of his level of specific expertise in the field of addiction. He’s got training in the field (as evidenced by his education) and he has observed the patterns in crack cocaine addiction that show a intermingling of compulsive sexual behavior. And his observances are corroborated by others’. It’s one thing to observe the connection; it’s another thing to break it down and understand it, it’s origin and it’s complexity.”
And yet you discredited anyone and everyone with any area of “expertise” personal or professional, who posted here.
And he is not a CADAC nor a LADAC. So in the most formal sense of the term, he is not an expert.
And he is giving enough information (about a limited sample, by the way) to identify clients. I wonder how his clients feel about him exploiting his experience of them on the Internet?
I love that song!
Give me a break. Not true at all. If anyone here has worked specifically with crackheads in a professional role, I welcome their input. I believe the only such poster was Little Nemo and when he/she told me that they spent eleven years working in a drug detox treatment center, I ceded to his/her professional opinion. And I got no response back. And I asked if any had had personal experience that went beyond mere acquaintance level, as this is really the only way to understand what goes on.
Client with an average age of 40 years old, homeless, black, male and addicted to crack; living in the greater Dallas area. I’m not being snarky, I might be ignorant here; how is this revealing too much? How is it exploiting? He is providing demographic and racial/statistical information regarding his client base.
There is a documentary on H2 about cocaine. They interviewed “real crackheads” and even they say, “it affects everyone differently.” Check it out.
No. They are wrong. It affects everyone the same. Crack=sex orgy. The end.
I must have missed the orgy scene in The Fighter.
You spent some time arguing with belladonna that your google searches were more valid than her personal experience of 3 years living in a crackhouse.
That sounds like “personal experience that [goes] beyond mere acquaintance level” to me, and yet you continue to insist that you’re right and she’s wrong.
I’m sorry that your friend is suffering from this addiction, and I applaud you for trying to find out about it. But insisting that your (online, recent) research makes you an expert on crack use and abuse isn’t making you look particularly good, here. And your continued mentions of all the wild sex crack addicts have, and the sexual behaviour of crack addicts in general is a little… creepy. I’m sure you don’t mean it to be, but it’s coming across a bit weird.
I always suspected that crack was a “gateway drug.”
In all seriousness, when did you spend this three years in a crackhouse? And why? Were you a small child? An addict? A dealer?
I’m going to have to intercede here because the both you and Ambivalid are talking utter rubbish when it comes to “purity”. The discussion of the effects of crack with comparison to cocaine is a lot more complicated than a simple discussion of purity, so bear with me.
First of all, “purity” has a very simple and perfectly adequate defintion in this case- the chemical one: *“*the degree to which a substance is undiluted or unmixed with extraneous material, typically expressed as a percentage (%).”
The reason this is the only valid definition here is that what we are discussing is a chemical transformation. “Crack” is simply free-base cocaine i.e. methyl (1R,2R,3S,5S)-3- (benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylate. Cocaine, as street users would understand it- the white powder designed to be insufflated (snorted) etc. is methyl (1R,2R,3S,5S)-3- (benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylate as an ammonium salt. Generally, the hydrochloride. This is due to ease of storage and extraction. As such we’re dealing with two separate substances here- structurally related but different. Their respective purity simply means the proportion of the powder one buys from one’s friend on the street corner which is actually the advertised substance.
To move on to the following contention:
We must first consider two things- common adulterants in cocaine ((1R,2R,3S,5S)-3- (benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylate hydrochloride) and the act of cooking cocaine to create crack ((1R,2R,3S,5S)-3- (benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylate). Starting with the latter, the process of “cooking” crack is pretty simple- there have been allusions throughout this thread to baking powder but actually you’re far better using baking soda which we’ll call NaHCO3 because that’s what it is… The action of baking soda on cocaine is very simple and as follows:
DHCl + NaHCO3 –> D + H2O + NaCl + CO2 (I’ve abbreviated the rather clunky IUPAC name for cocaine to D for ease)
The CO2 bubbles off, adding to America’s very real and growing carbon emissions problem (or something…), the water is hardly noticed as the reaction is run in water and the NaCl? Well, it sits there. The reaction is worked up by the expedient method of boiling the fucker until all the water is gone, leaving a nice white solid composed of D and NaCl, as well as any residual NaHCO3, which is very little generally as it’s unstable at elevated temperature with respect to NaOH + CO2.
A momentary diversion here to differentiate “crack” from pure freebase cocaine. To acquire the purer freebase here a liquid-liquid extraction would remove the relatively non-polar cocaine to the organic phase, leaving NaCl, NaHCO3 and possibly some adulterants (we’ll get there in a sec…) in the aqueous. You’re average crack-cooking scumbag doesn’t fancy doing this and so the above situation persists.
So, the act of freebasing the cocaine does not yield a more pure solid, in fact it is generally less pure owing to the persistence of NaCl (table salt to those playing at home) in the resultant solid. Nevertheless, Ambivalid’s contention is that the common adulterants in cocaine are lost in cooking, so let’s analyse a few:
[ol]
[li]baking soda;[/li][li]lactose[/li][li]dextrose[/li][li]inositol[/li][li]mannitol[/li][li]lidocaine[/li][li]benzocaine[/li][/ol]
The loss of these substances during cooking could be essentially via two possibilities- chemical degradation or evaporation. Chemical degradation of 1-7 is unlikely in a weakly basic aqueous solution, even at 100°C with the exception of the aforementioned thermolysis of 1. The lowest boiling point of any of these compounds is well in excess of 100°C and thus evaporation is ruled out.
So at this point we’ve fairly extensively dealt with the contention that we need to do some research on the effects of “cooking” on the purity of crack- it’s rubbish.
But the joy of chemistry and pharmacology is that the story doesn’t end there! At this point we need to introduce a new concept, potency:
“potency is a measure of drug activity expressed in terms of the amount required to produce an effect of given intensity”. In this respect Ambivalid’s point has some validity (snerk…). Crack cocaine is more potent and the reason for this is threefold:
[ol]
[li]Crack, as a molecule is inherently more potent than cocaine when inhaled versus insufflation, and furthermore the pharmacological effects of the two drugs via these methods are different.[/li][li]Heating crack to inhale it volatilises it at around 94°C, a temperature too low to volatilise the majority of contaminants in crack, yielding more a higher concentration of crack reaching the user and the brown residue left after smoking whch is pyrolised contaminant.[/li][li]Finally, heating of crack partially yields the pyrolysis product methylecgonidine which has its own pharmacological profile.[/li][/ol]
In conclusion, crack is not necessarily more pure than cocaine, and in all likelihood is equally or less pure than the precursor cocaine used, mirroring belladonna’s empirical contention that crap powder yields crap rocks. Nevertheless these are two rather different compounds, being administered differently and hence have different pharmacological profiles- a statement which is not a surprise to anyone with a decent knowledge of medicinal chemistry. Nevertheless, gram for gram crack, or more to the point pure D is more potent and furthermore in the face of its method of administration even impure D is more potent than cocaine, insufflated. As such belladonna is correct, Ambivalid is sort of correct, but more by luck than design and Whynot has fallen into the trap of applying the principles of cooking to medicinal chemistry, which never yields a satisfactory result.
ETA Ambivalid, you seem rather happy to yield to authority when it favours your presupposed view. This is lovely for surety in our modern and rather confusing world but ultimately reductive, unscientific and finally unsatisfying. As a result I’d like to point two things out: if you’d done the research you suggested yourself instead of simply ruling our belladonna’s empirical observation you might actually learn something and, if you want my qualifications you can bugger off.
From my work in the legal field, I’ve met dozens of crack users. Read their probation and parole reports, heard their sob stories, investigated their prior convictions and new allegations of criminal activity.
A close relative of mine ran away from home as a teenager, and amongst other things, sold crack.
When I was younger I volunteered for a charity known as HIPS (Helping individual prostitutes survive). We did things like distribute condoms, put them in contact with homeless and battered women shelters, helped them get their kids on food assistance, stuff like that. So I’ve actually met several real life crack whores!
You are attempting to paint a sensationalist picture with an overly broad brush. People are fond of blaming the drug for the action of human beings. Generally speaking, people’s crack use was caused by their preexisting problems, then proceeded to exacerbate them. Most crack addicts I met, to put it simply and bluntly, were pretty crappy people. Many of them were not, however. And from my experience in the legal field, I got the pleasure of meeting people far more despicable than any crackhead who didn’t use any drugs whatsoever.
Perhaps I was a little harsh at first. Everyone is ignorant of something, and it’s not the end of the world that you are ignorant about this subject. However, your know it all attitude about a subject you are not particularly well versed in is extremely :rolleyes:.
I’ve tried it a handfull of times in my life. Short euphoric high, and yes sex was good on it. But I saw it for what it was a waste of time and money, letting myself get hooked on something that lasts like 15 minutes seemed pretty stupid. It was like taking acid the next day felt like shit, another hit probably would of gotten rid of that, but I had to work the following day most of the time and never went down that road of doing it two days in a row. That was 10 years ago, would I do it again ? No, getting too old. Not interested.
It wouldn’t.
I mean, probably. Think I read that somewhere. How would I know?
I was not a child.
Regardless, I mainly just popped back in to bask in sweet, sweet vindication.
And to say: I heart Chimpy, your post is a thing of beauty.