Headlines scream: “Crack Cocaine Causes Star Athlete’s Death”; “Crack: Instant Addiction”; “Crack: An Invitation to Sudden Death”; “Are Crack Babies Doomed to Failure?”

Is crack really as bad as the newspapers make it sound?

What Does Crack Do?

Crack is really a form of the drug cocaine. Cocaine is usually injected or snorted. Crack is smoked. And that is one thing that makes crack even more dangerous than cocaine in its other form. Cocaine gets into the body easily through the lining of the nose. When crack is smoked, the drug goes much more quickly to the brain. And that’s the main place where the drug acts.

Crack can make blood pressure soar. It can leave the user on an emotional roller coaster-the skyhighs are soon replaced with deep-in-the-pits lows. It can make the heart pound or fail altogether. It can cause damage in the brain-a stroke-leaving a person unable to talk, unable to use parts of the body-or dead.

Crack can make users feel good for a few minutes. Then it leaves them wanting more-and more-and more crack. The desire for more crack can get so intense that nothing else seems good or worth looking for-not food or fun or friends-nothing, just crack.

How Does Crack Act?

Everything that crack does happens because crack and cocaine affect chemicals in the brain that help messages travel between nerves. The brain keeps everything in the body working together so that all the actions are balanced. Cocaine and crack mess up that balance.

Nerve cells don’t touch each other. When a message needs to travel from one nerve to another, a chemical is released to carry the message across the gap between cells. That chemical is called a neurotransmitter. The chemical goes from one cell to the next and starts the message traveling along the next cell. To keep the system working, almost as soon as the chemical is released, it is removed. In that way, the next nerve starts working, then stops. Then another message can be sent to the nerve. You could picture the message like a flash of lightning. As long as the transmitter is there, the light is on. To work correctly, the light should only flash on, then off.

Crack and cocaine keep the transmitter from being removed. The second nerve stays on. There is no flash of light, but a steady light. This is what causes the good feeling, the high, that occurs with the use of crack. Nerves that send a pleasure message stay on, and the message keeps being sent.

But after a short while, the transmitter doesn’t work well. The first nerve cell that makes the chemical stops making more. Eventually, the transmitter that had been released disappears. There is no more chemical in the first cell, so that nerve cannot send another message.

The transmitter molecules that stay around and keep acting cause the “high.” The fact that the nerve cannot make enough transmitters to send another message is part of the reason that after the high, a crack user feels really down.

What Can Go Wrong?

The nerves giving pleasurable feelings are not the only nerves that crack or cocaine affect. The same transmitter molecule is part of the nervous system that controls heart rate and blood pressure.

Certain nerves, among other things, can cause blood vessels to constrict. This makes blood pressure rise. Think about what happens when water is forced through a narrow hose. The water pressure goes up. The same thing happens with blood pressure. If the diameter of blood vessels gets smaller, blood pressure will rise.

Normally, when this happens, the heart beats more slowly. That means less blood comes out of the heart each minute. Even if the blood vessels are narrower, there is less blood, so the blood pressure doesn’t change very much. That’s part of the body’s balancing act.

Crack makes blood vessels become narrower. But crack also acts on other nerves to keep the heart from slowing down. Now the same amount of blood is being forced through smaller openings. Blood pressure rises.

Sudden high blood pressure can cause blood vessels to split or break. (Imagine that hose with a weak spot in its side. When the water pressure in the hose gets too high, that weak spot can eventually break.) These weak spots in blood vessels are called aneurisms. An aneurism can burst if blood pressure is too high. Usually no one knows that an aneurism is there until it bursts. When a blood vessel in the heart muscle burst, then the part of the heart that the blood vessel fed has its blood supply cut off, causing a heart attack.

Crack may also cause heart attacks by constricting the blood vessels that feed the heart muscle. There may be no aneurism, but when the diameter of the artery gets too narrow, the blood supply to heart muscles is reduced or stopped. Again, the person has a heart attack “with no warning.”

If the blood vessel that bursts is in the brain, a stroke may occur. Often the person loses the use of part of the body. The ability to speak, to read, or even to connect thoughts and words together may be lost. If the damage is too great, the person can die. Usually the stroke or heart attack comes as a complete surprise. No one can predict exactly when a blood vessel will burst. A person may have smoked crack before, but this time the damage is done.

Strokes are rare in young people. But smoking crack makes a stroke six times more likely to happen. In one study, half of the stroke patients under age 35 had the stroke within six hours of using drugs.

The danger of crack doesn’t stop with the person who smokes it. In a pregnant woman, the drug will cross the placenta so that the unborn baby is also exposed to crack.

Babies born addicted to crack are a major problem today. These babies are often born too soon and too small. They can suffer from stroke, cerebral palsy, or birth defects. And that’s after they survive crack withdrawal as newborns. Because the problem of crack babies is fairly new, no one knows just how big their problems will be as they get older. So far, many of the children who were born addicted to cocaine seem to have learning problems.

Older children exposed to secondhand crack smoke could test positive for cocaine. This suggests that damage to children may come indirectly when others around them use drugs.

Problems associated with crack use are not new. But the frequency of problems is increasing. Crack has become readily available and is relatively cheap. As its use rises, so do the problems of crack addiction.

Crack is dangerous-to the person using it and to those who are close to that person.