Cocaine Definition, Uses & Addiction

Cocaine use disorder (addiction) can affect your personal relationships. Cocaine is a very addictive stimulant drug. Tell them you love and support them but can’t support their drug use. It’s hard to stop using crack on your own. It’s a stimulant, which means it speeds up the messages that move between your brain and your body.

Cocaine- and levamisole-induced vasculitis (CLIV) is often used as an umbrella term for the vasculitic and necrotic complications seen with levamisole-adulterated cocaine, including both LINES and CLAAS. Levamisole is known to cause an acute condition involving a severe and dangerous lowered white blood cell count, known as agranulocytosis, in cocaine users, and may also accentuate cocaine’s effects. Under the former FDA pregnancy category system, cocaine was classified as a Category C drug. Cocaine hydrochloride can also be chemically converted into its free base form, crack cocaine, which can be vaporized.citation needed

Insufflating (snorting) cocaine commonly causes increased mucus production due to irritation and inflammation of the nasal passages. Depression is modestly linked to current drug use in cocaine users but does not clearly predict treatment participation or future use. Research has shown that both acute and chronic cocaine use can lead to significant reductions in cerebral blood flow, disrupt neurovascular interactions, and impair brain function.

Who Controls the Cocaine Trade?

While cocaine and crack cocaine highs are brief, the drug may stay in your system for up to three days. But it carries many risks, including overdose and serious physical and mental side effects as well as addiction. In early tests, a vaccine helped reduce the risk of relapse in people who use cocaine.

What is cocaine?

Today, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) classifies cocaine as a Schedule II drug, recognizing its high potential for abuse but still permitting its limited use for medical purposes. Cocaine is not included on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines; the list formally excludes “cocaine and its combinations” as therapeutic alternatives to ophthalmological preparations. It is legal for people to use coca leaves in the Andean Community, such as Peru and Bolivia, and Argentina, where they are chewed, consumed in the form of tea, or are sometimes incorporated into food products. In the United States, cocaine is regulated as a Schedule II drug under the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that it has a high potential for abuse but has an accepted medical use. Chronic use may result in cocaine dependence, withdrawal symptoms, neurotoxicity, and nasal damage, including cocaine-induced midline destructive lesions. Street cocaine is commonly snorted, injected, or smoked as crack cocaine, with effects lasting up to 90 minutes depending on the route.

Snuff spoons, hollowed-out pens, cut straws, pointed ends of keys, long fingernails or artificial nails, and tampon applicators are also used to insufflate cocaine. Most banknotes have traces of cocaine on them; this has been confirmed by studies done in several countries. Nasal insufflation (known colloquially as “snorting”, “sniffing”, or “blowing”) is a common method of ingestion of recreational powdered cocaine. Recreational cocaine is typically not taken by mouth due to its poor bioavailability, instead it is usually snorted or injected. However, apraclonidine has largely replaced cocaine as the first-line pharmacologic agent for the diagnosis of Horner syndrome in routine clinical practice. Karl Koller’s groundbreaking discovery of cocaine as a local anesthetic is regarded as the second most significant advance in the history of anesthesia.

Cocaine is a powerful stimulant drug that’s extracted and processed from coca plant leaves in South America. Cognitive behavioral therapy may help people recover from cocaine use disorder. Can you help someone who is addicted to crack cocaine? Symptoms include a high heart rate and blood pressure, seizures, hallucinations, and trouble breathing. It’s possible to die from an overdose of crack or any other type of cocaine.

Since the 1980s, the cocaine trade was dominated by centralized, hierarchical drug cartels such as Medellín and Cali, along with their successors and early FARC factions. Experimentally, cocaine injections can be delivered to animals such as fruit flies to study the mechanisms of cocaine addiction. In animal studies, nicotine exposure in mice increases the likelihood of later cocaine use, with clear molecular changes in the brain. The Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB) is a U.S. government dataset created in the 1990s that compiles vetted data on cocaine trafficking and seizures in the Western Hemisphere “transit zone,” involving 26 U.S. agencies and 20 foreign partners. When the paste is smoked, individuals are exposed not only to the addictive effects of the drug itself but also to the dangerous residual chemicals, which can cause significant harm to the lungs, nervous system, and overall health. This substance is favored in these areas primarily because it is inexpensive and more accessible than refined cocaine.

What Is Cocaine?

• But doctors can legally use it in limited ways for medical purposes.
• In urine from heavy cocaine users, benzoylecgonine can be detected within four hours after intake and in concentrations greater than 150 ng/mL for up to eight days later.
• When snorted (intranasal use), cocaine powder is inhaled through the nostrils, where it is absorbed into the bloodstream through the nasal tissues.
• The duration of cocaine’s euphoric effects depends upon the route of administration.
• Conflicting findings have challenged the widely accepted view that cocaine functions solely as a reuptake inhibitor.

Over time, using cocaine may increase the risk of medical issues, some of which may be life-threatening. One study showed 15% of people who used cocaine became addicted to the drug within 10 years. As people keep on using cocaine, their brains get used to the huge overstimulation and they need stronger, more frequent doses. But that cocaine-driven dopamine release or rush fades quickly, leaving them wanting more of those feelings — and the drug.

• At the same time, you might develop what’s called sensitization to the drug.
• The increased concentration of dopamine in the synapse activates post-synaptic dopamine receptors, which makes the drug rewarding and promotes the compulsive use of cocaine.
• The provisions as to how much a coca farmer can yield annually is protected by laws such as the Bolivian Cato accord.
• Nasal insufflation (known colloquially as “snorting”, “sniffing”, or “blowing”) is a common method of ingestion of recreational powdered cocaine.

Cocaine Overdose

With excessive dosage, tremors, convulsions, and increased body temperature are observed. Acute exposure may induce arrhythmia, including atrial fibrillation, supraventricular tachycardia, ventricular tachycardia, and ventricular fibrillation. This irritation leads to symptoms such as a runny nose, nasal congestion, and excessive or thickened mucus. Cocaine use has been linked to homicide, with up to 31% of homicide victims testing positive for the drug. Cocaine intoxication mirrors core traits of narcissism—both involve a dopamine-driven, compulsive drive for reward. Cocaine produces a spectrum of psychiatric symptoms including agitation, paranoia, anxiety, irritability, psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, violence, as well as suicidal and homicidal thinking.

How can I help someone who is addicted to cocaine?

Cocaine use may make the brain’s stress receptors more sensitive to stress, so people react more strongly to stressful situations. Withdrawal is the term for the physical and mental symptoms people have when they suddenly stop using a drug. Cocaine highs are very brief, so people who use often have a relentless need for the drug. An overdose may happen the first time someone uses cocaine. A cocaine overdose is an immediate and potentially life-threatening side effect.

Overdose

Cocaine is sometimes referred to on the street as blow, coca, coke, crank, flake, snow, or soda cot. As a result, these illicit coca crops are a primary target of ongoing government-led coca eradication efforts. The test can easily generate false positives for common substances and must be confirmed with a laboratory test.

Indeed, behavioral therapies are often the only available and effective treatments for many drug problems, including stimulant use disorders.38 They also may experience allergic reactions, either to the drug itself or to additives in cocaine, which in severe cases can result in death.26 Specific routes of cocaine administration can produce their own adverse effects. This can lead to increased irritability, restlessness, panic attacks, paranoia, and even psychosis, in which the individual loses touch with reality and experiences auditory and visual hallucinations.2 With increasing doses or higher frequency of use, the risk of adverse psychological or physiological effects increases.2,3

Because there are no medications with an approved indication for cocaine use disorder, psychosocial treatments are the current standard. These modifications may result in lasting epigenetic “scars”, which are believed to contribute to the persistent epigenetic changes observed in cocaine addiction. A 2014 study found that increased cocaine use is linked to greater cognitive impairment, particularly in working memory, while reduced or ceased use can lead to partial or full recovery of cognitive function. Delusional parasitosis with formication (‘cocaine bugs’) is also a fairly common symptom. This may help explain why stress can lead to relapse in people trying to stop using cocaine.

Crack cocaine

Also known by street names such as coke, blow, or snow, cocaine is derived from the leaves of the coca plant, which are processed with a variety of different chemicals to create powdered cocaine.1 Researched, fact-checked and transparent articles and guides that offer addiction and mental health insight from experts and treatment professionals. Join our global mission of connecting patients with addiction and mental health treatment. Recovery.com combines independent research with expert guidance on addiction and mental health treatment. Long-term cocaine use dulls thinking processes and the ability to remember information. Over time, cocaine use may change other brain functions.

Some common teratogenic defects caused by cocaine include hydronephrosis, cleft palate, polydactyly, Cocaine Withdrawal Guide and down syndrome. As with all injected illicit substances, there is a risk of the user contracting blood-borne infections if sterile injecting equipment is not available or used. In a study of cocaine users, the average time taken to reach peak subjective effects was 3.1 minutes. Subjective effects not commonly shared with other methods of administration include a ringing in the ears moments after injection (usually when over 120 milligrams) lasting 2 to 5 minutes including tinnitus and audio distortion.

The ventral tegmental area seems to act as a critical integration site in the brain that relays information about both stress and drug cues to other areas of the brain, including ones that drive cocaine seeking. Acute exposure to cocaine has many effects on humans, including euphoria, increases in heart rate and blood pressure, and increases in cortisol secretion from the adrenal gland. Potential risks of levamisole-laced cocaine include autoimmune disease, neutropenia, arthralgias, retiform purpura, skin necrosis, and fever.

Cocaine increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine in the synaptic cleft, leading to heightened post-synaptic activation, with dopamine contributing to euphoria and arousal, and the other monoamines enhancing additional effects. Hair analysis can detect cocaine metabolites in regular users until after the sections of hair grown during the period of cocaine use are cut or fall out. In urine from heavy cocaine users, benzoylecgonine can be detected within four hours after intake and in concentrations greater than 150 ng/mL for up to eight days later. Depending on liver and kidney functions, cocaine metabolites are detectable in urine between three and eight days. Cocaine crosses the blood–brain barrier via both a proton-coupled organic cation antiporter and (to a lesser extent) via passive diffusion across cell membranes.