High Price

safer because the stomach can be pumped in case of an overdose—this isn’t possible with smoked or injection overdoses.
    Once in the stomach, cocaine is dissolved and moved to the small intestine, where it can pass into the bloodstream. This process is called absorption, and many factors can influence it. If, for example, you’ve recently eaten a large meal, this will delay absorption and consequently, the onset of drug effects. By contrast, eating cocaine on an empty stomach speeds absorption and produces faster effects. As you’ve probably experienced, the same is true with alcohol. Drinking on an empty stomach produces more immediate effects than drinking immediately after having consumed a large meal.
    After cocaine has successfully entered the bloodstream via the digestive system, however, its journey is not yet complete. Before it can reach the brain, it must first get through the liver due to the anatomy of the blood vessels it first enters upon leaving the intestines. Since the liver contains proteins that specialize in breaking down chemicals, including cocaine, in order to protect the brain and to make any poisons we eat less destructive, this can significantly reduce the impact of drugs taken orally.
    This phenomenon is called first-pass metabolism. It’s why—although many of them don’t know the mechanism—experienced drug users seeking intense highs tend not to prefer eating their drugs or swallowing them as pills. The high from oral drugs typically comes on more slowly, larger doses are required to produce a strong sensation, and factors like recent meals and variance in liver processes can sometimes obliterate the effects entirely.
    Snorting cocaine powder, on the other hand, bypasses the liver. Blood vessels lining the nose take it directly to the brain. Consequently, about five minutes after snorting a line, you “feel it.” In contrast, oral administration takes half an hour to “hit you.”
    If you really want to get drugs to the brain fast, however, intravenous injection or smoking is the way to go. These routes produce the most intense high—and are associated with greater rates of addiction. Once injected, cocaine passes through the heart and is then transported immediately to the brain. As a result, the onset of psychoactive effects is almost instantaneous. That, of course, makes injection the riskiest form of drug use, not only because contaminated needles or unsterile technique can spread HIV and other diseases but also because overdose may occur quickly as well.
    Smoking cocaine, on the other hand, avoids the risk of blood-borne disease but gets the drug to the brain just as rapidly as injecting. It exploits the large surface area of the lungs, which have lots of blood vessels to move the drug quickly from the blood to the brain, again, skipping the liver. Recall, however, that the hydrochloride form of cocaine cannot be smoked: those who sprinkle cocaine powder on their cigarettes or joints are probably wasting most of it because making powder hot enough to smoke tends to destroy it. In contrast, freebase or “crack” cocaine is stable at temperatures that vaporize it and that allows smoking rock to be as intense as injecting powder.
    And that’s why the two forms have the same addictive potential: cocaine powder can be injected, producing a high just as intense as smoking crack or freebase. Different intensities result from different routes of administration, but the drug itself remains the same. The following analogy illustrates this point. Consider leaving snowy New York for Miami Beach’s South Beach via a luxury limo or private jet: both will get you to a highly pleasurable beach vacation eventually, but the jet will do so far faster. Similarly, injecting drugs intravenously or smoking them hits the brain more rapidly, producing a more immediate and intense effect than taking the drug by mouth. Despite this, the effects produced by the drug are qualitatively similar. Unfortunately, this is a distinction that lawmakers have yet to understand.
    And to be fair, when crack cocaine first appeared, the truth was not initially clear. In the 1980s, even some researchers were not sure whether it was a new drug, which allowed hysteria and anecdotes to create a devilish image of it. The desire by casual cocaine users, those who snorted the drug, to distinguish themselves from people who shot or smoked the drug helped to fuel claims of unprecedented levels of addictive behavior