Cocaine, “The Central Nervous System Stimulant” once called the "rich man's drug", is now the drug of daily choice for four to five million Americans, without regard to economics status. Using cocaine has dramatically increased - from 15 million to 22 million - and is still rising. Every day some five thousand people try cocaine for the first time, seduced by the drug's reputation, however false it is. Those in their late twenties and in their thirties constitute the fastest growing proportion of users.

The prevailing mood of "live for self and pleasure" encourages impressionable young people to experiment with cocaine. 

Cocaine is a powerful psychoactive drug that works as a central nervous system stimulant and produces excitement, restlessness or artificial energy, and gives a false sense of intense euphoria. This stimulant causes its desired effects by a number of interactions with the brain. Its initial effect on the body is to raise the blood pressure by constricting the circulatory system and increasing the rate of respiration. By narrowing the blood vessel, cocaine acts upon the heart and circulatory system, increasing the heart rate, which then causes irregular heart beat, shortness of breath and angina.

Three basic methods of ingesting cocaine:

• snorting - the most popular. This is done by rolling paper or a dollar bill into a tube and then inhaling the powder into one nostril through the tube.
• cooked into a liquid and intravenously injected.
• freebasing - most dangerous method, also gives the most intense high. 

Cocaine is used for the same basic reasons and effects that other drugs are used for - to escape from our own imperfections and securities and from the discomfort or pain of reality. Cocaine users tend to be the go-getters. The users tend to have the perfect illusion for twenty or thirty minutes - they are smarter, sexier, more competent, more masterful than anyone else. It has been called the "ego-food."

What are the Dangers?

Cocaine is supposed to make you feel great; and, in truth, temporarily it does. But soon it enslaves and numbs the user. Few cocaine users see themselves in reality; few can see the physical, psychological, emotional, and often familial damage crippling their lives. One young user confessed, "After one hit of coke, I feel like a new man. The only problem I have is that the first thing the new man wants is another hit of coke." 

Coke is no joke. The euphoric lift, the self-confidence and control felt after a snort is followed by an intense letdown. Regular use can induce depression, edginess and weight loss. As usage increases, so does the danger of paranoia, hallucinations, physical collapse and total devastation of the nasal membrane.
Three-quarters of the users said they must take alcohol to "calm down".  One of cocaine's biggest risks is that it detours people from normal pursuits; it often entraps and redirects the user's activities into almost total preoccupation with the drug.

Is Cocaine Addictive?

Unfortunately, the addiction of cocaine is real, but it is so coy and deceptive that few ever realize the addiction until they are trapped. Cocaine does not produce the physical symptoms of narcotic withdrawal, continued use by snorting, injection or freebasing can lead to severe dependency.
Those who tout the safety of cocaine say it is not addictive in the classic sense associated with alcohol and marijuana. For this reason the term "addiction" must be clearly defined.
An addictive drug is one that can produce in a significant number of people at least three conditions:

1. compulsion
2. loss of control
3. continued use of the drug in spite of adverse effects

Continued use in spite of consequences is the ultimate loss of control: stealing or dealing drugs to support the habit; using cocaine regardless of its effect on your health; chronic use even after being exposed or having made the decision to stop.

The following information points out the dangers of addiction to cocaine, even though it may bend the standard definition of "addiction":

1. Fatal overdoses of cocaine either snorted or injected have been regularly reported and are on the increase. Death is caused by heart failure or respiratory paralysis; convulsions also occur.

2. Chronic effect: The frequent snorting of cocaine produces burns and sores of the membranes that line the interior of the nose. Ear and nose specialists see more and more frequently, in habitual cocaine users, perforations of the septum, the cartilage separating the nostrils.

3. Physical symptoms of heavy cocaine use include cold sweats, pallor, uncontrolled tremors, a sensation of heaviness of the limbs, aggressive behaviour, insomnia and weight loss.

4. Psychological symptoms are characterized by intense anxiety, depression and confusion, hallucination (the conviction that ants are crawling under one's skin, for example) and paranoia. These later symptoms often require hospitalization in a psychiatric ward.

5. Rapid, marked tolerance develops to cocaine use (making it necessary to increase the dosage in order to obtain the initial effect).

6. Cocaine and amphetamines are the only drugs that laboratory animals will administer to themselves repeatedly until they die. This is solid proof of the behavioral dependence created by cocaine, which has been called the great addicter because of the profound craving that it creates in the brain of the user.