What's A Basehead?

I knew it was some kind of junkie and that Chuck D wanted them out of his 'hood, but nothing more than that.

Grandmaster Flash, in an interview with New York magazine, gives us the truth.

Here’s what it is. You had to have money to be a basehead. And I’m not
waving the flag like "Yay!" for it. It really was an awful habit, but you had to
be able to have … in order to get cocaine down to base, you have to cook it in
such a way and burn out any impurities that might be in what you’re sniffing to
get it down to base. So let’s just say — and I’m gonna be pretty bad here —
let’s say if it was a quarter in weight, by the time you purified it, it might
be ten times less that. So you had to buy a whole lot of cocaine to base.

You don't say, Mr. Flash.

Yeah. Base was a very expensive habit. I think you could buy crack for ten
dollars. To base you had to easily spend five, six, seven hundred dollars,
minimum.

And that, boys and girls, is how you lose all your money to drugs.