Cocaine has been a white-collar drug for the past years, as seen in popular media culture, from music to movies. Take the cult movie classic Wolf of Wall Street.
This movie was set in the 1980s, when using cocaine was quite popular and even a socially normal thing to do.
The Wolf of Wall Street is an example of when even using fake coke for over seven months every day caused some actors to develop bronchitis and even feel sick.
Imagine the effects using actual cocaine would have on an individual and what it’s even more potent form could do. The smokeable version of cocaine is known as crack.
Cocaine is usually found in powder form, while crack is the rock form. Today, the purity of crack is highly risky, with the chance of it being cut with drywall and rat poison even.
However, this was a different story in the 1980s when the crack epidemic was at its zenith, and the US started its war on drugs.
10 /10 What Is Crack?
The term “crack” was first seen in a New York Times article in 1985 to describe cocaine shipped to the United States, coming most often from Colombia and into Miami.
While crack traveled through the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, the price of cocaine there dropped to a fiercely low price.
From there, it would head to Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, New York, and more.
9 /10 Running The Numbers
Between 1982 and 1985, over 1.6 million more people started using cocaine. This was due to the intense and instant high that came from using crack.
This kept users coming back for more and more robust levels of addiction, leading to this higher number of users.
Crack was also easier to make, more cost-effective, cheaper to purchase, and therefore more accessible.
The cost of a vial was between $5 and $20, with a vial being about 1/10 of a gram of powdered cocaine.