According to the traditional public health models, illegal drug use falls into patterns. In line with this thinking, we are overdue for a heroin upswing since cocaine and crack in particular were the dominant street drugs in the eighties. Since public health models ignores such questions, it is up to us to ask. While the packaging of cocaine in cheap and accessible forms played a distinctly important role in the marketing of crack to previously uninitiated audience, even this can't explain completely why a formerly rich man's high became so widely used in the working class. To be sure, pharmaceutical properties DO have some impact.
Cocaine is the drug of illusion par excellance.
For a brief moment, the user feels invincible and able to compete. In the eighties, with the wholesale economic restructuring resulting in downsizing and speed-ups taking place in the American workplace, large numbers of people were thrown into profound insecurity combined with an increase in the rate and intensity of exploitation on the job. Put bluntly, you had to work harder or else YOUR neck could be next on the line. Cocaine helped you compete, to catch up. Looked at this way, it is no accident why cocaine became the drug of choice among autoworkers at Baltimore's Broening Highway GM plant.