Eh ^ what he said... Its a way of smoking cocaine, in a different form, instead of snorting it. but yeah thats how it works
From where i'm from, it means to mix the coke and some baking soda on a piece of tin foil and adding water, spreading out the coke+soda mix all over the foil and letting it dry out, making it able to smoke...
freebase is a chemistry term, nobody has mentioned that. cocain is not the only grug that can be freebased. so can DPT and a few others.... cocaine is HCL i *think* crack is HBR chemists, correct me if im wrong!
mmmmmmmmmmph... most "drugs" (especially psychedelics & stimulants)(well...) are "alkaloids"... this means that they are by nature, mildly alkaline, or "basic" (the opposite of acidic)... in their natural state (and often as marketed), each molecule of the alkaloid is "hooked up" with a molecule of an acid of some sort (citric, meconic, hydrochloride, sulfuric... there's a lot of different acidic molecules) because, well, the "salts" thus formed tend to be more water-soluble (they also tend to be more difficult to smoke, due to much higher melting points (& boiling, or vaporization points; indeed, sometimes a salt form of an alkaloid decomposes as it boils)... a "freebase" is formed when a solution of the alkaloid salt is mixed with a bit of other basic material (lye, baking soda, washing soda, ammonia, etc. are all alkaline, or basic), which causes the alkaloid salt to be unhooked from its acid molecule partner, thus "freeing the base"... and "freebases" usually have different solubilities compared to the alkaloiid salts (thus the "rocks" of crack cocaine are little nodules of "freebase" cocaine, which is not water soluble at all), and they also tend to vaporize at much lower temperatures... ~ okay?
Freebasing means "wearing no underwear".......................... No I'm sorry, that's "freeballing" Never mind.
Around here, freebasing is also used for methamphedamine. A small pile of the drug is put on a glass shard, the lighter is held under the glass shard until the crystals melt into a liquid, then you wait like, 2 minutes or so until the liquid is a solid again, then the lighter is held under the shard again, this time the user empties a pen out so its hollow, and inhales the vapor that comes off of the freebased meth.
im pretty sure theres a difference between crack and freebase. http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/cocaine/crack_info1.shtml
cocane freebase is prepped by dissolving the cocaine HCl in water & doing an A/B phase extraction using water & an organic solvent (the coke is dissolved in water & an organic solvent (like ether or naphtha) is added along with a basifying agent (alkaline chem like lye or sodium carbonate; the cocaine leaves the water layer for the organic layer & the organic solven is evaporated; the remain solid is cocaine base (no HCl molecule to make a "salt") crack dissolves the cocaine HCl in water & just basifies the solution by adding baking soda; the cocaine base precipitates right out of solution as little nodules (rocks) (often with a bit of water & bicarb trapped in the nodules, so when heated for smoking, the water & bicarb makes little "crackling" sounds... ~ don't mess with pure cocaine HCl. or freebase or crack forms... much safer is to drink coca tea or chew coca leaves...