It will ruin your life.
You'll have nothing after you smoke crack.
Crack is basically like
the refined form of cocaine.
When you have cocaine,
obviously it's cut with a few things.
And then what you do with crack is you
heat it up and it burns off all that stuff,
which means that you have the pure cocaine.
It's 80% to 100% more pure than cocaine.
Crack gets its name from
the sound it makes when you smoke it.
It's like a crackling and popping sound.
It comes in block or crystal form
and ranges in color
from white to yellow to pale rose.
It's not translucent, you can't see through it.
It looks like a rock, it's hard like a rock.
-- You can just snort it.
-- I snorted it.
-- Shot it up or I would smoke it.
-- Put it in the pipe and smoke it.
You can snort it, inject it or smoke it.
I did it for my first time on my 13th birthday.
Around 17.
I was 21 when I first smoked crack cocaine.
I'd say 23 to 24 years old.
It was curiosity, my buddies were doing it.
My friends asked me to try some cocaine.
We ran out that night
and our drug dealer offered us crack instead.
Boyfriend told me,
"This is going to be fun."
"You can do it just once, it's not going to
be a big deal." And so I tried it.
I took them just to be cool, just to fit in.
And I smoked it, and within the first
20 minutes of starting to smoke it,
I was scraping the pipe -- I had run out.
I was looking on the floor
to see if I had dropped any.
After about 10, 15 minutes afterwards, you
really want it again.
Right when you take the first hit
and you blow out, you're instantly high.
And that's what you're reaching for every
single time.
I thought that, you know, if I kept smoking it,
I would get it -- and I never did.
That's what makes it addictive --
is, you never reach that same level of high
that you do when you very first hit it.
And you spend days and days and days
chasing that same high.
Started spending all my money on it, started
skipping work.
I would sit and smoke --
thousands of dollars, no problem.
The comedown is the most horrible part
of crack. You can't sleep, you can't think,
you don't want anybody to be around you.
You want to just curl up into a ball and cry.
You're nauseous and
you're sick to your stomach.
Slow thinking, lethargic feeling,
not wanting to do anything.
I didn't sleep for a long time
and I started with, like, a little bit seeing stuff.
It makes you insane. You're going to do
anything that you possibly can to avoid that,
because it hurts.
You're heart feels like it's going to pop out
of your chest, because it's going so fast.
And you honestly feel like you might die.
I was living on the streets, sleeping in
abandoned garages, eating out of garbage cans.
One time I went over to
one of the guys' house.
I went inside.
The guy's like, "This is what it is."
And I tried to argue prices with him,
which wasn't at all intelligent.
And he took all my money out of my pockets
and he told me I wasn't allowed to leave.
I was tied down to the chair.
And the guy was walking around the house
with a gun and he was all pissed off,
because he thought that I was a narc
and that the cops were coming because of me.
And all the time I'm just begging to him,
"Let me live. I didn't do nothing.
I don't know what you're talking about."
I was only 14 or 15 years old
when that happened.
I went from being a very successful
business person,
had my own apartment, living
in New York City, to --
I wake up one day, I'm 30 years old,
I'm living with my parents again
and I'm actually stealing my mom's purse
to get money for crack.
I went from being in this upper-middle-class
family, wonderful home,
to going from crack house to crack house.
It's where you go and do drugs,
smoke crack nonstop.
Usually there's somebody at the door that asks
you what you want.
You would have to either give him money or give
him drugs for just letting you in the door.
You would walk in to the crack house,
it would be extremely dirty.
Dishes piled up all over the place, cockroaches
on the ground, crawling all over.
You walk around the house -- it doesn't matter
if there's babies there,
it doesn't matter if there's young children.
There's crack pipes all over, there's --
the paraphernalia that goes along with using it.
People that have been there for 2, 3 days,
just all strung out in the corner.
A guy came in to buy some crack
and he had a bunch of money.
They sold him some fake crack,
so he came back in the house
and pretty much 7 guys just jumped him
and took his money
and beat him up pretty bad.
There was blood everywhere;
and they laugh about it,
because it's funny to them: they got money
and they got to keep their drugs.
I've seen females sell their children.
I've seen mothers not even feed, not even care
about their children -- just for some crack.
The girls, you know, they just
sell their bodies for these drugs.
I mean, 10-20 dollars at a time.
I went out and I found some guy,
had sex with him, got money,
went to the crack house.
I smoked crack all night. That's all I did, was:
I met guys and had sex with them for crack.
I didn't want to be called a crack head,
but that's what I became.
Nobody wants to talk to you because
of what you're doing.
The ones that love you
cry when they talk to you.
My mom couldn't sleep -- ever.
You know, she lost her job.
My dad had two heart attacks
from stress, from trying to find me
in the streets.
So many things were affected with my family
because of my drug use.
I lost who I was over the 6 years.
I turned into someone
that I never thought I would be.
My focus isn't as sharp as it used to be.
You'll still have your mood swings. You'll still
have anxiety.
I still can't breathe right.
Walking up a hill, or walking up the steps,
I can't breathe. It hurts.
You think you're going to get this
great sensation and you only get it once --
you're going to be fighting to get it
for the rest of your life. It's not glamorous at all.
Jail, prison, you're going to
get caught up eventually.
You're either going to end up in jail,
you're going to end up dead
or you're going to have to go to rehab.
If I didn't have drugs in my life, I'd have
achieved and accomplished so much more.
It's a lot of pain, turmoil, trouble,
heartache, and it's not worth it.
If I had somebody's story like mine
or if I had more education on crack cocaine,
I would have never picked it up -- ever.
If I would've known what it would have
done to me physically,
what it would have done
to my family,
what it did to my career -- all that stuff --
I wouldn't have done it.
You know, it was something
that I tried and regretted.
It's a hard decision to make for yourself.
But it's a decision
that judges the rest of your life.
You know, somebody says, "Oh, let's try this"
at a party, "We're just going to have fun tonight."
"You know, it's a weekend thing." But it's
not like that. It's not just a weekend thing.
And it starts off so simple
and turns into a nightmare.
