ADA Facts
Crack                                                   Printer Friendly PDF

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Crack is the street name for a "freebase" form of cocaine, a very powerful central nervous system stimulant. The freebasing process involves heating cocaine hydrochloride with other substances, resulting in a powder that is pressed into chunks or "rocks" and smoked in a pipe. Crack is extremely addictive, and its effects are felt within 10 seconds.

Crack is an odorless crystalline substance that often includes cornstarch, baby laxative's sugars, and/or local anesthetics, and other stimulants.

Short-Term Effects

Because it is smoked, crack is absorbed immediately into the bloodstream and can reach the brain within six seconds. Crack increases motor activity and arousal and reduces the perceived need for food and sleep. It increases heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and body temperature. Crack can also change heart rhythm, dilate pupils, and produce sweating, pallor, restlessness, and excitement.

High doses of crack can cause a variety of adverse reactions. These include bizarre and violent behavior; extreme anxiety and restlessness; twitches, tremors, spasms, and loss of coordination; hallucinations and delusions; and chest pain and nausea.

Long-Term Effects

Crack users can experience long-term physical and psychological effects. As with other forms of cocaine, chronic users of crack experience restless ness, extreme excitability, tremors, anxiety, insomnia, and paranoia. In addition to physical effects similar to those caused by short-term use, chronic users may suffer loss of appetite and weight, dehydration, constipation, rapid tooth decay, and difficulty in urinating.

Repeated use of the drug eventually decreases sexual desire, often leading to total abstinence from sex. Impotence in males also may occur. Because it is smoked, crack may cause chronic sore throat, heavy congestion, severe coughing, black sputum, and lung damage.

Repeated use of large quantities of crack can cause hypertension, seizures, respiratory arrest, and cardiac failure. A chronic user is likely to withdraw from others, focusing on the internal sensations caused by the drug. What may have started as a social experience becomes a solitary one. The social effects of crack use include family problems, crime and law-enforcement problems, work-related problems, financial problems, violence, and community breakdown.

It must be remembered that crack is a killer--it can cause death by cardiac arrest or respiratory failure!

Source: Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, 1993.

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For more information,contact the
Missouri Department of Mental Health, Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse
P.O. Box 687, 1706 East Elm
Jefferson City, MO 65102
573-751-4942
1-800-364-9687