When 40% of all drug-related emergency room visits are from just one substance, you know you’re dealing with something that shouldn’t be messed with. Thermal injuries. Hypothermia.
Kidney damage. Crack lung. Crack belly, not to mention the deadly “excited delirium” the most terrifying consequence of a life on crack.
You’ll hear about these things and much more in today’s episode of The Infographics Show - What Happens To Your Body If You Do Crack. Before we get to the horrors that long-term use does to the human body, we should try and figure out what makes people keep reaching for the pipe even when they know it’s doing untold damage. People who’ve done crack just about all say the same thing about their very first hit.
It’s like a super-orgasm, like your brain is on a rocket ship on a mission to planet Euphoria, or as one user said, you feel “like Superman for ten minutes. ” And there’s the problem: ten minutes. It might even be less, more like five minutes.
Another crack user said his first time featured “orgasmic feelings running up and down my spine, exploding into infinity. ” And at the end of that very positive review, he said, “Best 5 minutes EVER. ” After the intense blast-off, your spaceship comes hurtling back down to Earth and lands with a resounding thud.
That’s when the novice user might utter the infamous words, “Have you got any more? ” Crack is very moreish. Over 6 million people over the age of 12 in the U.
S. will know this, because statistically, they’ve tried crack at least once in their lifetime. When you snort the powder version of cocaine, the drug enters your bloodstream via blood vessels in your nose, which is a longer route to get all those happy chemicals - mainly dopamine - flooding into what experts call your brain’s “hedonic hotspots.
” When you take a hit of a crack pipe, the smoke hits your lungs and disperses into your bloodstream fast, making the high immediate. So, you take that first hit of the pipe- your heart rate suddenly increases, your pupils dilate, and your blood pressure and temperature rise. If you do too much, you might feel restless and a bit anxious.
As you’ll see later, some people can get very aggressive. They can become paranoid and delusional. With all these quick and intense changes going on in the body there’s the risk of overdose, even on your first time.
Maybe you didn’t get the memo about not overloading your pipe. At best, you might just feel nauseous, but at worst, you could be on your way to an early death. If you live in North America, you have the added danger of your crack possibly being mixed with fentanyl, the US’s public enemy number one.
In a 2023 study, 12–15% of cocaine samples that went to a lab contained this very strong synthetic opiate. Experts are calling this era of contamination the “fourth wave” of the opioid crisis, meaning a new wave of deaths. A guy in the US was recently sentenced to 16 years in prison because the crack he sold was mixed with fentanyl and four people died in a single day.
The National Institutes of Drg Abuse, or NIDA, said there were just over 27,000 overdose deaths from cocaine mixed with opioids, mostly fentanyl, in 2022. For most of the 2000s, it was less than 5,000 a year. NIDA said there have been many deaths involving all kinds of stimulants, stating that drug overdose deaths involving stimulants rose from around 12,000 in 2015 to over 57,000 in 2022.
Nearly 70% of stimulant-involved overdose deaths in 2022 also involved fentanyl. From 2000 to 2014, the death rates were anywhere from about 3,000 to 10,000. But you don’t need fentanyl to die on crack.
Your blood vessels constrict, your heart starts to beat like a drum and bass song, and your blood pressure goes through the roof. This might be more intense because you’ve been drinking alcohol. When you mix the two, a psychoactive metabolite called cocaethylene can be produced, which makes the whole crack experience even more intense.
It can lead to cocaethylene toxicity, which is associated with seizures, liver damage, and compromised functioning of the immune system. It’s said that cocaethylene can make the risk of an immediate death on crack 18 to 25 times more likely. In a study of 124 dead crack users in the 1990s, 10% of the deaths were from an overdose.
The rest died from diseases and murder. So, even on that first time, you can draw the short straw by doing the wrong pipe. Maybe you keep hitting that pipe all night, and then suddenly you have chest pain.
This might be acute cocaine toxicity, which can have lethal effects on the cardiovascular system. You can die from stroke or a heart attack. Many of the cocaine-related ER visits in the US are people complaining of chest pain.
Since coke inflames the heart muscle, and makes it harder for the heart to contract, the pain could be an aortic rupture. We guess another term for that is an exploding heart, but don’t quote us on that. You can even overheat like an old car you’ve decided to floor all the way to Las Vegas, leaving you slumped on the ground dying from hypothermia.
And then there is the risk of seizures. This can also happen on your first-ever crack odyssey, especially if you hit that pipe hard. In 1986, the American basketball star Len Bias, took some cocaine, not crack cocaine, had a seizure and died.
The medical examiner said the normal electrical control of his heartbeat was interrupted, resulting in the sudden onset of seizures and cardiac arrest. We don’t know how much coke he’d done in his life, but he was 22 and supremely fit, and we doubt his career allowed him to be stoned every day of the week. You obviously don’t have to be a chronic abuser to go down with a seizure.
But let’s say you survived your first night on crack and like so many people on this planet, you gave it another shot. While crack isn’t as physically addictive as a drug like heroin, it’s very, very psychologically addictive. In 2022, about 920,000 people aged 12 or older in the US bought crack, but it’s not certain how many kept buying it.
It’s thought about 10-20% of users in general will become addicted. You being you – you never do things by halves – you started smoking enough rocks to power a train. One of the problems with this was extreme agitation.
You became paranoid during your daily binges, just like 68 to 84% of users who do crack long-term. One day you looked out of the window one day and swore you saw FBI agents hiding in the garden. This was cocaine-induced psychosis, a fear and loathing which can happen to 55% of habitual users.
All that dopamine rushing around your brain has a downside, which is anger, aggressiveness, hallucinations, delusions, and other psychotic symptoms. The extra norepinephrine, a hormone, that crack gives you also doesn’t help. It puts you in a super alert state all the time, so you’re constantly in fight or flight mode, which is bad for your heart and blood pressure, but also messes with your mind.
As we said at the start, the worst thing that can happen when you lose your mind on crack is delirium, not just a paranoid hallucination, but all-out delirium. This can actually kill you. Medical papers call it “excited delirium” although we particularly like the term “acute exhaustive mania.
” In 2005, a man in the US had a fight with cops outside a fast food restaurant. The man was restrained then collapsed and died. Excited delirium was blamed.
Being held down seems to make it worse. In a study, coked-up rats also didn’t like being restrained, dying more often than coked-up rats allowed to run around and do drug-fuelled rat things. So, now you’ve been on crack for a while, you’ve experienced paranoia.
Your heart is being damaged from the constant work it has to do. But you’ve also noticed it’s becoming a bit harder to breathe. The reason for that is a thermal injury to your throat.
After all, you’ve been taking in really hot smoke all day for months on end. The other day you passed out and had to be taken to the hospital. Doctors told you that you had “crack lung.
” The symptoms were a bit like pneumonia. An acute case can happen up to 48 hours after your last smoke. Another symptom of smoking crack day in, day out is bronchitis.
You could also get chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. So, after that initial rocket ride, things aren’t looking too good these days, but it’s going to get worse. Your teeth have started falling out.
For one thing, since you started doing crack, you don’t care much about dental hygiene. All that really matters to you is getting your next rock. On top of that, you spend much of your life clenching your teeth when you’re high, which has weakened them.
And then the crack constantly entering your mouth means less saliva production, and this is also bad for your teeth. Then came the constant stomach aches, which are a result of what is sometimes called crack belly. Reduced blood flow to all your organs isn’t good, and that includes your gastrointestinal system.
Your rocket ship is broken. The FBI is still in your garden, now with armed Mossad agents, Osama Bin Laden, and Mr Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street, and the fact is, at some point you’ll probably run into fentanyl-laced rocks you might not wake up from. If you get out now, you might be able to reverse some of the damage you’ve done.
Once the money runs out, you might end up like the 46% of users in a study in the US who committed a violent crime to get more crack. Crack messes with your brain’s prefrontal lobe, the part that regulates impulse control, so doing something stupid to get your next hit becomes more possible. Sure, if you stop now, you’ll experience intense anxiety and cravings during the initial “crash”, and there’ll be a period of intense depression, anxiety, and even some hostility and paranoia, but the sun will come out again, once your brain regains its normal non-crack-addicted circuitry.
Just don’t go back on it again. If you do, you might experience the “kindling” effect, which means a lot of the psychiatric symptoms, the paranoia, the seizures, the psychosis and suspiciousness, seem to happen with lower doses. Now you need to watch “Real Reason Fentanyl Is So Deadly.
” Or, have a look at “The Only Drg You Can't Survive.
