this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Based on what? I don't think I've heard that story.
She got off to a little bit of a shaky start, but I feel like she settling in, now? I need to catch up, though.
Based in this context is slang, from the term Free Based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_base
Oh shit, isn't that how... Richard Pryor died?
(I don't know much about drugs :S)
Well, freebased cocaine is apparently potent as all hell, because it's pure, you can get rid of all the shit your deal, and their dealer cut it with. Otherwise, the chemical effects are identical to snorted cocaine, if slightly stronger for being purified and directly inhaled.
But these days Based doesn't actually refer to the drugs themselves.
The evolution of slang is interesting. Originally Based had the obvious negative connotations. You were "based" if you were high as fuck, or people thought you were high as fuck.
Then it slowly morphed into a sort of "unapologetically yourself with anti-authoritarian overtones". Now it's sort of a catch-all for "good" but maintaining some of those anti-authoritarian overtones.
Yikes.
I can give more context here.
See, in the US, possession of Crack cocaine (freebased cocaine) is punished much more harshly than possession of powdered, snortable cocaine.
This is because of the racial component. Snortable cocaine is the preferred drug of Wall Street and the rich, whereas crack was the preferred drug of the inner city (black people).
So the punishment for crack was set at something like 500 times worse than the nose candy version.
As a note here, the way to make crack is simply to throw cocaine in water and heat it while slowly adding baking soda, the active chemical is still the same between the two, it's just made more biologically available via freebasing. So yeah, stupid, racially motivated laws played a part in creating the slang term.
Yeap. I'm afraid you speak truth, right there.