Crack the Market: Commodification and Commercialization

In 1972, a drug aficionado could stop by his local “head shop” and pick up a copy of The Gourmet Cokebook: A Complete Guide to Cocaine , published anonymously by the aptly named White Mountain Press. In it, he could find a simple recipe for cooking up a batch of crack. It was easy: Mix equal parts of powder cocaine and baking soda in a pot, add water, boil, let cool, and then break the hardened, desiccated mass into small pieces – rocks – suitable for smoking. Smoked cocaine, the cokehead learned, produced a more intense, if shorter-lived, high than snorted cocaine. Smoked cocaine goes straight into the lungs, where it is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream, from whence it zooms into the smoker’s brain; physiologically speaking, this is a much more efficient and effective process than snorting cocaine. Nasal membranes just cannot compete with the lungs for getting the drug to where it counts.