Smoking crack cocaine is far more dangerous than snorting cocaine.

Crack cocaine began showing up on inner-city streets in the 1980s, primarily because it was so inexpensive. Crack was sold for $5 to $10 a rock, compared to up to $100 a gram for powdered cocaine, making it an affordable high for the poorest of society. Also, it was smoked in a pipe, rather than snorted, which meant that the cocaine was delivered to the bloodstream more quickly; in other words, it was easy to get high in a hurry.

None of this was a good thing, of course. And the news media responded by painting crack cocaine as the worst villain in illegal drugs. But is smoking crack cocaine really so much worse for your body than snorting cocaine?

According to a 1996 survey of scientific literature published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the differences between crack and cocaine may have been exaggerated. While crack does get into the system more quickly, the high may last longer, and there's evidence of more dependency on cocaine when it's smoked, the physiological and psychoactive effects of the two substances basically are the same -- or, at least, not as different as people tend to think. Additionally, as the researchers noted, there's evidence that snorting cocaine is actually a "gateway" behavior that can lead to smoking crack as well.

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