Bertie Wooster wrote:BlkbrryTheGreat wrote:Are you sure he just wasn't stupid initially??
I think being stupid is a prerequisite for fucking around with crack.
No, just overconfident. I know more than a few pipe-heads who got their start just experimenting with it, smoking their first rock just to see what it was like, or because they were looking for a quick good time. The common theme was, "I won't get addicted the first time." Which is perfectly true; you DON'T get addicted your first time. But crack hits your brain HARD, and from everything I've ever heard, for about ten minutes you feel like the king of the world--the stuff lights up your pleasure centers like a Jenna Jameson blowjob after 10 years of celibacy. And then you come down like a ton of bricks. That right there is where a lot of addictions start: they smoke again right away because they don't want to have to ride out that low.
Others do walk away after the first hit. They might stay away for days, weeks, months. Some do stay away forever, but not nearly as many who thought they would. Eventually they go back because the high is just that good, and hey, they didn't get hooked the first time, so why would they get hooked if they hit a rock again? Then a funny thing happens--the high isn't quite as nice as the first time and the low is a little lower and a little longer. Again, some still walk away, but only the ones with incredible willpower are going to be able to stop the downward spiral at this point. The gaps between when they smoke get smaller and the amount they smoke each time gets larger. At some point they stop chasing the high and are smoking just to not feel the low, because cocaine causes your brain to slow down or halt production of the chemicals that make you feel good naturally (heroin is even worse in this respect, but heroin addiction is easier to treat because you can step an addict down to less potent opiates initially). And that's basically all she wrote--the addict will end up dead of an overdose, dead of other causes, or in rehab (I don't count jail because crackheads who end up in jail are either going to smoke crack there, die there, or, if they're incredibly lucky, end up in a rehab program and stay clean).
Yes, it's stupid to take that first hit. But lots of otherwise intelligent people do stupid things--sometimes catastrophically stupid things--all the time, because of a lapse in judgement, or they weren't paying attention, or they thought they were tougher than they really were. The problem with crack is that the price of that lapse in judgement or overconfidence or just plain unthinking blunder is the individual's slow self destruction. To say all crackheads are morons is wrong, and frankly, dangerous, because I know more than my share of smart people who are just as badly hooked as complete morons, and more than a few of them started out by saying "I won't end up a crackhead, because I'm too smart."
