It will help you understand why so many cocaine addicts relapse again and again. Finally, it will discuss newer and possibly better treatment becoming available for the crack addict. Stimulants are used to increase alertness and to brighten mood. Increased alertness and brightened mood sound very positive. The introduction of new stimulants, throughout history, has traditionally been welcomed as a very positive step until their true danger was realized.
Stimulants make people feel better.
Stimulant problems did not begin until about a century ago, when German organic chemists were able to extract and purify the drug Cocaine Hydrochloride from the leaves of the South American Coca plant, scientifically known as Erythroxylon Coca. The Coca leave was well known to native cultures for thousands of years and to Europe for hundreds of years. Chewing the Coca leaf was as much a part of the working ritual in some places as the morning coffee break is in our culture. Purifying cocaine changed all that. Using this new, pure form of cocaine, it became possible to inject it with the recently available hypodermic syringe.