every single addiction takes effort and time to develope, even heroin. anyway, google 'heroin + medical use' and be very suprised.
In terms of addictive potential for any given drug:
smoking > injecting > snorting > eating > topical
If you were to actually compare drinking crack with drinking coffee, the addictiveness of both would be identical.
Both in your nose and in your mouth the drug is absorbed into the bloodstream via a mucous membrane. The reason you don't see a lot of people putting large doses of cocaine on their gums is largely practical... same thing for mdma for example, just the other way around.
/edit The coke-numbs-your-gums part is supposed to be a test for the quality of the product, easily faked though.
>Both in your nose and in your mouth the drug is absorbed into the bloodstream via a mucous membrane. The reason you don't see a lot of people putting large doses of cocaine on their gums is largely practical... same thing for mdma for example, just the other way around.
It's more practical to put it in your gums though - you don't need to lay it out, crush it up, line it up into lines, find/roll a tube etc. You just stick your finger into the packet and rub it on your gums. Do a little research - snorting affects you in a more intense way.
> /edit The coke-numbs-your-gums part is supposed to be a test for the quality of the product, easily faked though.
Cocaine was used by dentists to numb gums. It acts as an anaesthetic. Drug dealers play on this and add numbing agents to other drugs and pass it off as coke.