Crack Cocaine Research Paper

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Crack Cocaine: A Devastating Substance Abuse Disorder Alisha Nalezinek Northwestern State UniversityAbstract Crack cocaine is a drug that hurts the lives of many people including the substance abuser. People need to find a safer way to escape from their problems. In the 1980’s, crack cocaine spread across the United States and became very popular. Crack cocaine is a form of cocaine that it typically smoked, and it will be on the American drug scene for years to come. People that use crack may become violent, but it is a cheap drug to buy. A crack user may develop many health problems. The unborn babies are innocent victims of the substance abuser. Middle-income and upper-income women in their twenties and thirties have given birth…show more content…
Moreover, people have been using crack cocaine for several years as a means of dealing with problems they have in life. Crack cocaine is a drug with widespread availability that makes a person from any part of the world addicted and as a result, that person takes unbelievable changes with his or her life to feed the dependency affecting the lives of many people. The…show more content…
By the mid-1980’s crack cocaine had permeated cities across the United States, and because of the price and the availability it appealed largely to poor and disenfranchised people (Falck, Wang, & Carlson, 2007). Crack cocaine is a crystallized form of the drug cocaine that is typically smoked (Vaughn, Fu, Perron, Bohnert, & Howard, 2010). In 2005, more than a quarter-million people in the United States between the ages of twelve and forty-nine years old smoked crack cocaine for the first time, and this was an increase in substance users from 2004 (Falck et al., 2007). Today, crack cocaine is a stimulant drug with euphorigenic and reinforcing properties that has become a staple in America’s street drug pharmacopeia, according to nearly eight million people that have confessed to being a user most of their life (Falck et al., 2007). Frankly, smoked crack cocaine has high abuse and dependence liabilities which is equal to the injection of cocaine HCI, but many users who have experienced both methods of administration rated the high associated with smoking greater, and liked it better, than the one produced by injection (Falck et al., 2007). When crack cocaine is smoked, the body takes it up quicker than powdered cocaine, because the lungs possess a greater permeable surface (Vaughn et al., 2010). The physiological and psychoactive effects of
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