You know the feeling. It sends you to the minimart at midnight for chips, makes you down a pint of ice cream in seconds, destroys your promise to lay off the caffeine and cigarettes. Maybe it's a video game you can't stop playing or a shopping mall that seems to swallow your wallet. An out-of-control craving, a mindless compulsion, an irrepressible urge. Drug abusers call it jonesing.
But experienced addicts will tell you that you don't really know what jonesing is all about until you've tried crack. Smoked cocaine is probably the most addictive substance used by humankind. Its effects are so potent and immediate—crack reaches the brain within 20 heartbeats of inhalation—that a single hit can hook you.
And once you're hooked, you're cooked. There's no approved medical treatment for cocaine addiction: no therapeutic equivalent of the methadone dose, the Antabuse pill, or the nicotine patch. Instead there are rehab centers, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, a shrink in the afternoon, group therapy at night. And the success rates of these programs are sobering in themselves. Most people in talk therapy for cocaine addiction, for example, are still using. At a typical long-term treatment center, only 25 of every 100 residents are still completely clean three to five years after they leave.
