In the first installment of a series that deconstructs illegal drugs, Puff the Mutant Dragon analyzes why people snort cocaine but smoke crack:
Solid cocaine HCl contains positively charged cocaine ions and negatively charged Cl ions. They’re held together by the attraction between opposite charges, which is very strong, so vaporizing cocaine HCl isn’t easy. In fact, you’d have to heat it high enough you’d kickstart some chemical reactions that would destroy your cocaine, and now you just defeated the whole purpose of the experiment. So that’s why you can’t really smoke coke.
In crack cocaine, on the other hand, the molecules don’t have any charge, so the forces that hold the crack cocaine molecules together are much weaker and you can vaporize it at a reasonable temperature. Inhaling the vapor puts it into circulation much more rapidly and the maximum blood concentration or Cmax that you reach is generally higher.
The Dish 