Signs That Someone Is Using Crack Cocaine

Crack cocaine was created during the 1970s as a less expensive and faster acting alternative to pure cocaine. Drug dealers, particularly in urban communities throughout the United States, produce this street drug by cooking cocaine with ammonia or baking soda, creating a rock-hard smokable drug known as "crack." Since 1992, nearly two million people have used crack cocaine each year in the United States, despite the decline in the drug's total popularity since its peak in the late 1980s.

Short-Term Behavior

• Users of crack cocaine will experience short but highly intense periods of euphoria lasting between 5 and 15 minutes depending on the potency of the particular batch. The fast-acting nature of crack cocaine excessively stimulates neurotransmitters in the brain known as dopamine, which regulate one's sense of happiness and pleasure. A dramatic "crash" follows this period of short-lived euphoria, typically marked by increasingly depressed, paranoid or aggressive behavior.

Short-Term Physiological Effects

• Shortly after inhaling crack cocaine, the user's pupils will dilate and his heart rate will increase in response to the intense stimulative effect of the drug. As the "high" of smoking crack continues, the body attempts to handle the increase in heart rate by constricting blood vessels and breathing more rapidly.

Long-Term Behavior

• Regular use of crack-cocaine causes the body's emotional state to crumble under the frequent drug-induced highs and lows, leading to troubling behavioral changes such as increased irritability, rapid mood swings and depression. As the user becomes more addicted, the drug becomes an all-consuming goal, causing violent, risky and aggressive behavior to the exclusion of all previous interests to obtain that next high.

Long-Term Physiological Effects

• While the effects of smoking any substance are negative, smoking crack-cocaine is particularly toxic to the user's system. Some common signs of prolonged crack-cocaine use include violent and sometimes bloody coughing fits and difficulty breathing. The user can also experience chest pain and seizures, in response to repeated and excessive stimulation of the heart and brain.