About crack: The public discourse was racist, the CIA had a lot to do with creating the problem, and in general it's no worse than the cocaine my fellow white people seem to think is so much cooler.
It is common to smoked drugs in general. For what I know, smoking is the fastest route of administration. That instant gratification makes it more addictive than slower routes of administration, like snorting in this case.
It doesn't mean the laws weren't racist, but crack cocaine is more addictive.
In reflecting on why it's so addictive, I've come to believe there's a sort of feeling of adventure in random outcomes --that people like the entropy as well as the wins.
That said, going back to what I said before, my issue with the title of the article is with invoking crack specifically as some especially scary super-addictive thing, which is an idea that was over-hyped at one time. They could have just said cocaine, or better yet, made a comparison to opiates, but they're playing to an old and incorrect bias.
People get hung up on physical addiction, but the mental obsession is the real destroyer. Most folks aren’t wired for that kind of obsession. They can get physically addicted to opiates, quit, and never go back. I’ve seen exactly that. I’ve also seen folks become so obsessed with pot, that it makes your worst Central Casting street junkie look tame, by comparison.
True addicts don’t need physical addiction. It’s a mental disorder that doesn’t make sense to most people, but it’s definitely there.
But my criticism of the 'crack is scary' meme isn't coming from personal experience, really. From what I've read and from what I understand of the chemistry, and having lived through the era where crack was all over the news, and where possession of the drug got the harshest sentences... I do believe it was relatively over-hyped, and that a big part of what made crack scary is that it was something poor black people in cities did.
It was always a fairly gritty, blue-collar town, but crack moved in around ‘83, and that’s when it became The Wire. Before, I could walk through some of the toughest neighborhoods in town, and it would be OK (I was fairly scruffy, back then, but no Billy Badass). Nowadays, even the nice areas are a bit scary.
Crack was focused on, a lot, and there was definitely a racial aspect to law enforcement and hysteria, but the drug is still quite nasty. It’s more like the focus on cocaine was muted, as opposed to the focus on crack being overwrought.
That said, gambling can have extremely similar outcomes. You don’t want to stray too far from The Strip, in Vegas or Atlantic City.
Desperate people can get fairly rapacious; regardless of the source of their desperation.
If it didn't make a meaningful difference in the experience but only increased the legal penalties, there would be no good reason for dealers to prepare crack, yet they did.
Nothing about a the race of a cocaine addict compels that addict to prefer one form or the other.
The comparison is made as a metaphor for strong addiction exactly because of the old political connotation. Those don't just go away. There are almost certainly more addictive substances out there; that is completely irrelevant to how humans use language. I would argue, even the phrase "crack cocaine" has more sticking power because of the phonetics.
Fact is, it's smoked cocaine, and the level of scaremongering about it was pretty absurd compared to powder cocaine, amphetamine, or opiates, all arguably just as bad.