What is the difference between crack and powder cocaine?

Question

I am curious to know what the difference in ingredients is and why one seems so much more addictive than the other.

Answer 1

"Crack" has additional processing that turn it into a "free base" making the high shorter but more intense, the more intense high also requires less powder cocaine, making production cheaper. Freebasing chemically alters the brain more quickly than powder cocaine, leading to addiction much faster.

Answer 2

They are two different forms of cocaine.  One is used by predominantly white people and has less of a prison sentence and one is used predominantly by black people and has longer prison sentences.

Thanks to the laws making drugs illegal, you pay tax money to (a) imprison people who want to use it, (b) imprison people who want to sell it, (c) support all the jobs in law enforcement to try and eradicate it.  In addition, because drugs are illegal, that drives the price up, which in turn increases violence.  And, to top it off, the war on drugs has been a complete and total failure which has had virtually no effect on the trade and has only cost Americans more money and more lives.

Despite having gone through alcohol prohibition in the '20s and seeing it too fail miserably, apparently we still haven't learned our lessons as a country.