Crack

Abstract

To the Editor.— The increasing availability and use of "crack," a potent, smokable form of cocaine, is worrying because of the drug's extremely high potential for causing addiction and serious health problems. Drug dealers in many areas have switched from selling cocaine hydrochloride powder to selling crack: tiny crystalline chunks or "rocks" of freebase cocaine that are typically smoked in a glass water pipe (Time, June 2,1986, pp 16-18). There is an urgent need to inform physicians and other health professionals about this problem, but to our knowledge no reports on crack have yet appeared in the medical literature. We now report data from a recent survey of crack users who called our "800-COCAINE" national hotline¹and voluntarily consented to an anonymous research interview. A random sampling of 458 primary cocaine users who called the hotline during May 1986 revealed that 144 (33%) were using crack. The majority of