Drug Slang Origins – How Cocaine Became Crack

One of the common drug slangs that you will hear just about anywhere is crack, which, as you may well know, stands for cocaine. But have you ever wondered why the drug became called as such? Here is a story that may interest you, a story on how cocaine became known as crack.

The Origins of Cocaine

Once upon a time, leaves called coca were grown in the South Americas, the land of the Incas. The Incas are a very religious people, and their priests would attempt to communicate with their gods by ingesting coca leaves.

But that all changed when the Spanish conquistadores came. They proclaimed the coca leaf as the gift of the devil and banned its usage. However, they had to reverse that ban because their Inca slaves would not work the fields or the mines, without a dose of the coca leaf. Eventually, the coca leaf found its way to the conquistadores themselves, who then brought the leaf to Europe.

The coca leaf took Europe by storm. Some ate the leaf as medicine, while some took it in to get that special high that only the coca leaf can give. Many learned men experimented with how to use the coca leaf, and one enterprising young doctor named Albert Niemann extracted the active ingredients of the coca leaf. He purified these extracts and called it cocaine.

Cracking Cocaine

Cocaine, unfortunately, has limits to how much joy it can give the mind. The people who used it are always in search for the purest form they can get because only pure cocaine can raise the consciousness to the peak of euphoria that the drug haze provides. In order to create this kind of purity, enterprising drug users found a way to form a salt out of cocaine extracts, called cocaine hydrochloride. Cocaine hydrochloride is cocaine in powder form, the one snorted for the high.

For the reckless thrill-seekers, however, snorting the powder is not enough. They need to smoke it. They found out that if cocaine hydrochloride is converted into a purer, more concentrated, “free-base” form, it can raise the level of pleasure it brings to the brain. So, the method of heating the powder in a solution created with baking soda was invented to create the free-base form. While the powder is being heated, it produces crack sounds. This is why the free-base form of cocaine is called “crack.”

Cracking the Mind

Of course it could be said that the reason why cocaine is called crack because it can “crack” up the mind. You see, what cocaine basically does is to induce the flow of dopamine into the pleasure centers of the mind. What usually happens with dopamine is that it always flows back to the cell that produced it. Cocaine prevents this from happening and the joy juice just fills up the brain until euphoria explodes in it. So, the joy juice that is dopamine cracks up the mind because of cocaine.

Of course, this kind of euphoria never lasts. The mind actually becomes numb to the effects of cocaine, and the addiction develops because of the desire to achieve the same kind of high, even more. Unfortunately, it just results in bad trips, no matter how pure the crack is.