Crack is a form of cocaine that survives heating so you can vaporize it. Chemically, the freebase rather than a salt compound. As with other drugs, the inhala

Crack is a form of cocaine that survives heating so you can vaporize it. Chemically, the freebase rather than a salt compound. As with other drugs, the inhalation route is probably more addictive. It's certainly faster onset and more euphoric. You could very easily make crack cocaine from regular cocaine in your kitchen with cheap supplies. One would have to truly enforce a cocaine ban to effectively prohibit crack availability. So what happened to crack? That's a fair question. It's much less commonly used today than 30 years ago. My impression is that the American legal changes probably had some influence in suppressing it. Laws which make it much cheaper and safer to hold cocaine rather than crack obviously dis-incentivize producing the freebase form until the final consumer. And a new user is unlikely to go through the hassle of attempting to perfect cooking crack with their first gram of coke. So a simple influence there about the method of consuming the drug may have done a lot of the work. Here in Canada, we had no legal changes in the 80s/90s during the so-called crack epidemic. (We treat crack cocaine like cocaine, legally.) Crack's use waxed and waned with its popularity in American culture. The crack epidemic is also part of a much larger story about North American urban decay and shifting economic patterns. The conditions that gave birth to it are no longer true, so one wouldn't expect it to necessarily repeat. At least not in the same form. The epidemic of cheap inhaled stimulant abuse you are worried about is arguably happening right now with methamphetamine, anyway.