Caught Piping

POP STAR GEORGE MICHAEL has been caught misbehaving yet again in a public convenience. (Surely an inconvenience for him.) According to vague BBC radio news he was captured and cautioned in possession of "a class A and a class C drug".

I bet it's crack, I thought to myself.

And cheery-mcDeary, wasn't I bang on right?


Everybody who is into drugs seems to be doing crack these days.

A decade ago cocaine was approaching a peak in popularity to which it had gently climbed over the preceeding decade. When I first encountered drugs cocaine was still a dinner party drug for those rich enough not to know what to do with their money, a drug for rock stars, and was often uttered in the same breath as heroin. Heroin and cocaine. It was a hard drug. Less disrespectable than heroin, but not something one would idly brag about snorting, certainly not in mixed company.

Within half a decade the situation had changed to the point that coke ("charlie" as the new lower-class users referred to it) had become a posh version of speed. A man with and on coke felt he was "the man" and any shame surrounding the substance, at least among the weekend clubbing fraternity had evaporated. Nearly all of these users sniffed the drug. Crack was still considered scummy. A "black drug" (at least in America). Something desperate addicts might be glimpsed smoking on shadowy inner-city back stairwells (as I did a couple of times).

Crack, of course, is only cocaine mixed with baking soda, "washed" (with water for it to float in) under some heat source (e.g. a cig lighter flame). An oil forms atop the spoon. Fished out, a molten white substance quickly hardens and the so-called rocks are produced.

These can be shoved on a pipe which requires cigarette ash or some squiggly wire gauze as illustrated to suspend the melting coke allowing nearly 100% of the dosage to reach the lungs and hence the user's brain. Unlike snorty coke which comes on over five minutes or so, this of course hits the nervous system almost all at once in a super-compressed rush so powerful it can sometimes be heard as an ear-ringing echoing altered state. A very large pipe even blinds you with a snow-blind light in an infinite space (very close to an epileptic seizure, and crack can induce seizure disorders in those previously well). And then a high so immense it feels like surfing a double tidal-wave.

No wonder it's so very addictive.

As I say, crack is only a different form of cocaine, hence many a nose-up user has graduated, from boredom, curiosity (or nose-rotting desperation: don't forget ~ years of snorting eventually dissolve the separator of the nostrils) has "graduated" on to this intensely potent form of the drug. It's more widely available than ever before (from dealers who often retail grass as well). With Amy Winehouse and others widely known to be smokers any remaining stigma is vanishing. And years after the doom and gloom "crack crimewave to hit Britain" headlines it's actually happening.

I have little else to say on the subject. Coke never really got me until I picked up a taste for the so-called speedballs or snowballs, when it's mixed with heroin and injected intravenously as one hit: and this was some years into my hard-drug-using "career"... If the relative dosage is right this feels like an incredibly sugared-up version of heroin, flushing into the brain almost double the dopamine of a crack hit alone...

Highly, highly addictive...

Read the full News of the World article, George Michael had crack in the toilet

PS What's he doing in that Faith poster of his? Wondering whether his deodorant's up to the job..?