Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
6 months ago
You have to see real crack addiction in action. It’s not over-hyped at all. It’s just that not everyone gets addicted to it.
People get hung up on physical addiction, but the mental obsession is the real destroyer. Most folks aren’t wired for that kind of obsession. They can get physically addicted to opiates, quit, and never go back. I’ve seen exactly that. I’ve also seen folks become so obsessed with pot, that it makes your worst Central Casting street junkie look tame, by comparison.
True addicts don’t need physical addiction. It’s a mental disorder that doesn’t make sense to most people, but it’s definitely there.
Well I can't say I've known any crack addicts really, only met a couple people who have tried it. I've known some people who got into cocaine and were never quite the same, though. Also some people who started out fairly respectable, got into opiates, may or may not have robbed people and betrayed friends and family in service of the addiction, and then died to it.
But my criticism of the 'crack is scary' meme isn't coming from personal experience, really. From what I've read and from what I understand of the chemistry, and having lived through the era where crack was all over the news, and where possession of the drug got the harshest sentences... I do believe it was relatively over-hyped, and that a big part of what made crack scary is that it was something poor black people in cities did.
I lived in Downtown Baltimore, from 1980-83.
It was always a fairly gritty, blue-collar town, but crack moved in around ‘83, and that’s when it became The Wire. Before, I could walk through some of the toughest neighborhoods in town, and it would be OK (I was fairly scruffy, back then, but no Billy Badass). Nowadays, even the nice areas are a bit scary.
Crack was focused on, a lot, and there was definitely a racial aspect to law enforcement and hysteria, but the drug is still quite nasty. It’s more like the focus on cocaine was muted, as opposed to the focus on crack being overwrought.
That said, gambling can have extremely similar outcomes. You don’t want to stray too far from The Strip, in Vegas or Atlantic City.
Desperate people can get fairly rapacious; regardless of the source of their desperation.