Nabbed off the web, here is an except from Dale Pendell’s wonderful Pharmako/Dynamis, part of the indispensable Pharmako series, which you should go buy at once. This is probably one of the most vivid and beautiful descriptions of the disease to be rendered in the English language.

Stealing From Tomorrow

A peculiar clean taste, slightly chemical, but not unpleasant.  Once you taste it you’ll never forget.  Nothing else quite like it.  Treble notes.  Trace of metallic, trace of bitter.  Tongue numb.  Maybe it’s what sweet would be without sugar.

Seems like a convenient mode of ingestion of small quantities.

Keep wanting
to get back
to where things were clear.

“So good that if you use it once you’re hooked.”  Talk about good advertising!  Did the cartels pay for that line?

The free amine base is simply prepared by basifying.  The rule of thumb that alkaloid salts are water soluble and bases oil soluble hold well for cocaine.  A few drops of ammonia in an aqueous solution of the salt precipitates the base.  Extract the base with petroleum ether (not diethyl ether) or naphtha.

Add a layer of solvent, cap the container, and shake:  when the solution turns clear the precipitated base has dissolved in the solvent layer.  Draw off the solvent layer with a pipette (like, an eyedropper) and squeeze into a wide, flat-bottomed dish to evaporate off the solvent.  The crystals are quite beautiful.

This much is well documented.

The first flash is the best. Never
quite that good
after.

The fleeting quality of the hit…how an interruption, a word or request from someone else, the telephone ringing, your spouse wondering about the shopping, any outside engagement can dispel the brief enchantment.

So you try to avoid the interactions.

You go again, but as the metabolic half-life of the coke far outlasts the duration of the rush, the stimulant continues to build up in your system.  So you need a downer.  Something to take the edge off.  Some way to get leveled.

We’re talking poisons here.  But poisons going nowhere.

But you do it some more.  We can call it an Experiment.

Finally you do it even when you don’t like what it does to you.  You get too much edge.  You get too many jaggies.  So maybe you take something to take the edge off.  Speedballing.  Except maybe you take slightly more than you needed because you wanted to feel it and now you are drowsy, so you toke some more crack, or base.  That puts you too far on the stimulated side, so you try the cycle again.  Eventually you get leveled.

Brain won’t work.  Too jumpy to read.  Too bored to do nothing.
Toke.

Plenty late enough to go to bed.  Just one more hit.  Just one more lift.  Maybe a small one this time.

Small one didn’t do it.

Siren,
you hide your pain in the blinding whiteness
of your crystals.  You hide the night.
Already I can feel it:  tasks undone,
papers left scattered.  A slow accumulation
of flotsam.  Or a word too sharply spoken.
A craving that calls me, through any job or meeting.
during an evening with friends,
from my bed where I went thinking to sleep.
So quickly she makes her bed in your ear,
but she is not the singer, she
bringeth not the lyre, but the lie.

To keep the vapor
from condensing in the stem
I warm it first,

moving the pipe
back and forth slowly
over the flame

trying to heat
the whole pipe
evenly.

Brushing the long stem with a flame must be the lightest way to touch something.  It’s like polishing, or cleaning.

You can see the spots
that haven’t gotten hot enough
from the crud and stuff
in the pipe.  Stroke
the bowl a few times
and then come back
to the stem, twist
a little left or right
to try to get
the sides.  Wait till
it’s all hot to
put the sustained
heat to the bowl.

I like to see
the crystals melt
before emptying out
my lungs, exhaling, then
three or four
final stem passes,
back to the bowl
and inhale slowly, you want
that vapor to hit
the bottom of your lungs, pal,
then hold it in,
and hold, or even when
you can’t anymore just
breathe shallow.

The flame is like a brush.  It bends when I move the lamp.  I can bring the lamp around and along the stem and the flame tip follows precisely, always a little bit behind.

Like a tongue tip, lightly licking all along it.

You love it.  You want to do it again and
morning come and again and ever
so closer and ever and
I still haven’t slept.

If I could just find some activity that didn’t require concentration.

Morning is morning, but now is now.  Should quit this stuff soon.

Freebase is the hardest substance to leave in the cupboard that I know of. That doesn’t mean you can’t quit, you can.  But you’re going to have to leave town.

Buying in small quantities is safest.

No.  There IS no “safest.”

Coke can overpower the Critic, but in whose service?  It can put aggression on auto-pilot, a much-valued state of mind in our culture, but in whose service?

It turns out that stealing from tomorrow is just the first stage.

Stealing from tomorrow is like going into debt, spending tomorrow today, or tonight, actually.  So you’ve wrecked tomorrow.  Stolen all of its energy, stolen its waking hours, stolen its good will.  Tomorrow you will be behind all day.

If you get up at all!

After stealing from tomorrow for long enough,

weeks, maybe for months,

you start stealing from today.

Stealing from today means that the ally is not giving you power or aid or assistance in accomplishing some task.  Rather, the ally takes today for her own service.  Ingestion, filling the bowl, the preparation, the scoring.  And just the time taking the hits.  A little bit of time to space, to flash or level, and that’s about it for today.

Just the worship service.

Weren’t you supposed to get something from all this?

You’re doing your part for her.  That’s for DAMN sure!

But you’re not at the end.

Next is stealing from yesterday.

The third stage of the ally’s conquest.

Your savings, your bank accounts – nothing very esoteric there.

Sometimes your friends.  Sometimes your marriage.

Sometimes your children.

Your reputation.

And your memories.

Nothing very esoteric there.

Perhaps the best writing on the effects of cocaine is by David Lenson in his book On Drugs.  Lenson writes about the “runaway engines of desire.”  He suggests that the American power structures reacted with such intensity and virulence against cocaine because cocaine presents such a clear image and parody of consumerism.  You buy it, it’s gone, more makes you want to buy more.  But buying cocaine is buying the desire itself, the desire itself is the product.  A devilish perfection.

The desire, the consumerism, is too blatant, too obvious:  a parody of the holy rite, and hence condemned with all the fury of the Inquisition.

A citizen set fire to a house because it was a “crack house.”  Though he admitted setting the fire, the jury found him not guilty, using jury annulment:  an auto-da-fé for the Holy Cause is not a crime.

The hard part.

You do it instead of eating.
You do it instead of sleeping.
You do it instead of doing.

The hard part.
is stopping, sitting down.
The hard part,
the hard part concerns time.
The hard part is just sitting,
without inspiration,
with no ideas and not knowing…

No, that’s not it.  Lots of ideas.
The hard part is doing it.
And there is so much to do:
much more than you have time to do.
It’s easier to keep the accelerator pressed
and to keep rushing, touching this, touching that,
and to keep doing that.

The hard part is quitting.

Clear enough?