Cocaine and crack
Cocaine, freebase, or crack. Cocaine is a powerful short-acting nervous system stimulant and also acts as a local anaesthetic. Depending on the form it comes in, cocaine can be snorted, injected, or smoked.
From
Cocaine comes from the leaves of the coca shrubs (Erythoxylum coca and E. novagranatense), which grow naturally in the mountainous regions of South America. The greatest exporters of cocaine are Columbia and Peru, but it also comes from countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador. Indigenous people who live in the Andes chew the leaves to provide vitamins and mild stimulation that lets them work harder at high altitudes. When the Spanish Conquistadores invaded, they decided that coca use was degenerate and part of a pact with evil, so they banned its use. It's also reported that they made it legal again when they found it made slaves work harder in the gold mines.
Shortly after this, they began exporting coca leaves to Europe, although leaf-chewing didn't prove popular. The alkaloid form of cocaine was first purified in 1855 by a German chemist called Friedrich Gaedcke, and the technique was perfected four year later by Albert Niemann. Cocaine gained popularity as an anaesthetic in the 1880s, and Sigmund Freud wrote a treatise about the drug in 1884 where he stated that "the use of coca in moderation is more likely to promote health than impair it."
Coca-Cola was developed in 1886 and contained cocaine-laced syrup. It was marketed as both a brain tonic and a temperance drink (because it didn't contain any alcohol), but public pressure forced the manufacturers to remove the cocaine from 1903 onwards.
Chemistry
The most common form of cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride, which is a white crystalline powder. It is an alkaloid that strongly stimulates the central nervous system once it reaches the brain. It also causes local blood vessels to close temporarily, and causes numbness wherever it touches the body by affecting nerve signals. Cocaine affects the brain by stimulating the release of natural chemicals such as dopamine and noradrenaline, while also blocking their reuptake, giving feelings of energy and euphoria.
Production
Coca leaves are mashed up and mixed with a combination of acid and water, then the fluid is drawn off and mixed with ingredients such as lime and petrol to make rough granules of cocaine base (also called paste or pasta). The cocaine base is taken to laboratories where it is purified with kerosene and a number of other washing and distilling processes to make cocaine hydrocloride that's roughly 90% pure. To produce freebase coke, cocaine hydrochloride is washed with alcohol or ammonia to make it smokeable. Crack is also a smokeable form of cocaine, made by heating cocaine with water and a substance such as baking soda, which removes the salt.
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