Word: cracking
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...becoming all too familiar in cocaine-treatment centers around the nation. In the popular imagination, cocaine has long had an almost glamorous aura about it: the champagne of drugs, a high for the upwardly mobile who use rolled-up $100 bills to snort lines of expensive white powder. Crack, by comparison, is so inexpensive that it is proving to be an equal- opportunity narcotic, one that does not discriminate among its victims...
...Crack is cocaine intensified. Its effects are cocaine's--but amplified, sharper, meaner, uglier. The assault on the body, brain and nervous system occurs in swifter, more profound fashion. "Crack, even more than plain cocaine, puts users at extremely high risk," says Dr. Nicholas Masi of the cocaine addiction treatment center in Plantation...
...Crack's immediate effects are readily observable: chronic sore throats and hoarseness are common. Crack can leave a user gasping for breath and vulnerable to emphysema. But these complaints pale in comparison with the even more dangerous changes that crack triggers in the body. Crack, says Masi, "throws the entire cardiovascular system into turmoil. Your blood vessels rapidly constrict. You're a key candidate for respiratory failure." Dramatically increased blood pressure and heart rate can lead to coronary attacks, and the intense stimulation of the brain may trigger convulsions...
...feeling of stimulation and sexual excitement, soon followed by sadness and depression. Much later come irritability, sleeplessness and paranoia. The fourth stage, says Siegel, "is a schizophrenic-like psychosis, complete with delusions and hallucinations." One nightmare common to addicts is that bugs are crawling over their skin. Heavy crack smokers can go through all four stages in a single drug binge...
...stronger the craving for cocaine, the less a crack user cares for food. "You don't eat when you're smoking," says one California addict. Rats supplied with unlimited cocaine will use the drug until they die, ignoring food and water. Such intensely addictive behavior has helped change scientific opinion about cocaine's grip. Says Dr. Jeffrey Rosecan of New York City's Columbia-Presbyter ian Medical Center: "If anyone had doubts as to whether cocaine is physically addicting, all he has to do is look at a couple of crack users...