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This article is from the Kool-Aid FAQ, by Paul and Bess Dawson-Schmidt dawsons@visi.com with numerous contributions by others. 12 What else can I do with Kool-Aid?
Practical street drug question: in 2012, what drugs do you cook for injection?
Given the physical evidence of a hypodermic and a cooking spoon, in 2012 in a major city, what are the likely drugs in use?
I know the top answer used to be 'heroin' but I've been told (and very very possibly misinformed) that's no longer the case for the most popular street forms of heroin. So another way to frame the question, in part, would be: Do common street-available forms of heroin require cooking before injection?
Background: the prospective user would be experienced with injected street drugs.
Can You Shoot Crack With Orange Juice
posted by lodurr to Health & Fitness (14 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite- Yes you can shoot up crack you just have to add a citric acid to it because water wont disolve crack use a few drops of vinegar in a spoon with a 10 oe 20 dollar rock mix with plunger and filter with cotton draw up and iv it your good togo! But drugs are bad!
- Happy crack gets its name because of its addictive properties, its sugar high, and its cocaine-like appearance. Kids frequently get suspended at school for carrying it around, and often get in the same amount of trouble as if they had brought real crack to school.
Major city would be located in the American southwest, BTW, since I see from other posts that geography can make a difference for the nature of the product.
posted by lodurr at 5:58 AM on October 14, 2012
Heroin, oxy, coke, meth, MDMA in that order in my anecdotal experience. I've never heard of heroin that one wouldn't cook, which is done to liquefy for injection. Add water and heat to get it to disolve.
posted by ill3 at 6:16 AM on October 14, 2012
If it isn't heroin, it is probably either coke or oxy. But people shoot up all sorts of stupid-ass things like adderal and synthetic opiates with acetaminophen in them.
You can both snort and smoke heroin.
posted by A god with hooves, a god with horns at 6:32 AM on October 14, 2012
that's no longer the case for the most popular street forms of heroin.
Street heroin no longer has to be injected - most of what's around these days is strong enough that it can be snorted or smoked, which didn't used to be true a few decades ago. However, injecting is still (and always will be) by far the most effective bang-for-buck way of taking heroin, albeit also the most dangerous. It's still the method of choice for the hardcore addict who needs to wring the absolute most high from every dime.
If not heroin, I would say, in rough descending order of probability: other opiates/opiods, coke, amphetamines.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 6:59 AM on October 14, 2012 [1 favorite]
Meth and coke do not need to be cooked prior to injection.
posted by sacrifix at 8:24 AM on October 14, 2012
The wikipedia article on drug injection is pretty detailed and (AFAICT, given my own second-hand experience) pretty damn accurate.
FWIW, my understanding is the same as sacrifix's. There's nothing that absolutely has to be injected. If you want to inject heroin, you still need to heat it first. If you want to inject (for instance) cocaine, it will dissolve in water without heat.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:43 AM on October 14, 2012 [1 favorite]
There's at least one hypodermic & at least one spoon used for cooking, so-identified by a guy I don't trust very much as a person but trust to recognize street drug paraphernalia. And as noted, they're tentatively associated with a person known to be very familiar w/ IV use.
In retrospect, I think the main thing I want to understand is whether commonly available forms of heroin need to be cooked before injection. And it sounds like 'mostly yes.'
Sorry if I seem vague, but I did this non-anonymously so it would be easier to keep track of, and I don't want too many identifiable details here (mostly for trust's sake). It's a new manifestation of a pre-existing problem.
posted by lodurr at 11:23 AM on October 14, 2012
Ketamine?
posted by esmerelda_jenkins at 12:48 PM on October 14, 2012
Right. So from a chemical point of view, here's the deal.
In many drugs (both street drugs and pharmaceuticals), the active chemical itself is alkaline or basic. It can either be distributed as a pure 'free base,' or combined with another chemical to form a salt. Salts generally dissolve really easily in water, without any heating. Their solubility also makes them snortable: they dissolve right away into your nasal mucosa. Free bases don't dissolve as easily in water, so they need to be 'cooked' before injection and it doesn't make as much sense to snort them. On the other hand, free bases are better for smoking, since their evaporation point is farther away from their burning point. Smoking a drug in salt form is wasteful: a lot of the active ingredient just burns up before it reaches your lungs.
This is for instance the difference between powder cocaine and freebase. Powder is a salt, cocaine hydrochloride. Freebase is, like the name says, a free base. Crack is just cheaper, less pure freebase. The crack epidemic was really an 'affordable sloppily-manufactured freebase epidemic,' but that doesn't make for as catchy a headline.
(Googling around to make sure I had my facts straight, I found that apparently some people do inject crack, which was news to me. As the chemical facts would predict, you do have to cook crack in order to get it to dissolve.)
There's the same distinction with heroin. White powder heroin is a salt. You can snort it; and if you want to inject it, you can dissolve it without cooking; but it's wasteful to smoke it. Cheaper, less pure forms ('black tar,' 'brown tar,' etc.) contain heroin in free base form. It makes less sense to snort them; if you want to inject them, they need cooking first; but you can smoke them without worrying about waste.
So basically what a burnt spoon tells you is that your friend is injecting something that he bought in free base form. Could be cheap heroin. Could be some sort of pharmaceutical opiate. Could apparently be cocaine. Could conceivably be some other drug entirely.
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:49 PM on October 14, 2012 [12 favorites]
Thanks, all. I'm gonna call this answered.
This was an exercise in trust-but-verify. We had some doubts regarding the source (more his emotional state than veracity), and this was at a distance, and tentatively implicating someone who's got about 9 months clean. You want to trust in a situation like this, but you have to accept the possibility that trust would be misplaced. We now have some good reason to believe the works were someone else's, and being used to cook meth for injection. But this is the bitch of caring about someone who's been hooked on street drugs: just bringing up the possibility has made it necessary to question.
posted by lodurr at 1:20 PM on October 14, 2012
In the southwest and the northwest, injecting meth is not unheard of, and there are needle exchanges that handle meth and heroin.
posted by PinkMoose at 1:45 PM on October 14, 2012
You don't cook crack - you break it down with a citric acid such as lemon juice. Rule of the thumb is you never cook any form of cocaine, ever. Powder coke, of course, dissolves easily in plain unheated water.
Heroin in the US these days comes in two forms: a tan/light brown/off-white powder found primarily on the east coast; and tar heroin, found pretty much everywhere else. Tar can come in the form of really oily, sticky black stuff or in almost glass-like hard pieces - or anything inbetween.
Both forms of heroin can be prepared for injection by either heating up and cooking or by just mixing with water (commonly called a 'cold shot'), though generally speaking the harder tar is the longer it takes to dissolve in water without cooking.
When preparing an ever-popular speedball (heroin and coke or, less commonly, meth), the heroin is usually added to the spoon/cooker first and dissolved through the user's chosen method. The coke/meth is then added to the solution after the heroin has been thoroughly dissolved and, if cooked, cooled.
As far as I know (and as far as I've ever seen), meth is never heated for injection. Maybe some of the newer strains of ice have to be heated to dissolve properly, but I seriously doubt it.
lodurr, I have a lot of experience with IV drug use on both sides of the street. Please feel free to hit me up if you need any help with what's happening, from advice to questions to whatever. My email's in my profile.
posted by item at 9:28 PM on October 14, 2012 [2 favorites]
You don't cook crack - you break it down with a citric acid such as lemon juice.
(Thanks for the correction. I was startled it was injectable at all.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:49 PM on October 14, 2012 [1 favorite]
I was startled it was injectable at all.
It's kind of a stupid thing to do, and not just for the obvious reason. It's a surefire way to get an abscess, as crack is chock-full of even more nasty, unclean, and infection-encouraging shit than even powdered coke is, plus the lemon juice is hell on the veins. Some people use a pinch of powdered Kool-aid mix to break down crack, as it's relatively high in citric acid. It's really odd watching someone shoot up a bright purple or green concoction, like something out of a bad 90's sci-fi movie.
In some parts of the world, and probably only until a few decades back, heroin processing hadn't reached the highs (ha!) it has today and it had to be broken down with lemon juice/citric acid as well. This process is described repeatedly in the book Christiane F., the autobiography of the Bowie-obsessed teenaged junkie in 1970's Germany. I don't know how every junkie back then wasn't covered head to toe in abscesses - or maybe they were.
One other thing I left out of my last comment: there's a third type of heroin available in the States, though it's just an offshoot of tar and thus its availability is in more or less the same geographic areas. It's called 'cheeva/cheeba' or 'boy' (or, increasingly, 'cheese', though when it's called this there tends to be very little actual heroin in the product), and it's tar mixed with a cut (usually some type of pill) in a coffee grinder to make a powder that can then be shorted or shot. It's really just a way for low-level dealers to make their tar go further - a lot further sometimes, as it can be cut with Benadryl or OTC sleep meds to give the heroin a little more 'nod', a desirable effect to a lot of users because good dope makes one nod out. It's a different overall effect in the end, however, not one sought out by experienced users, and this type of heroin is found mainly on the streets sold by super low-level dealers.
posted by item at 6:57 AM on October 15, 2012 [2 favorites]
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