Cocaine Is Appallingly Dangerous

Cocaine Is Appallingly Dangerous

Cocaine could make you feel euphoric, invulnerable and masterful. For millions of initiates it was considered the perfect recreational drug.

Then the casualties begin to mount among high-visibility users. There was the growing roster of professional athletes who admitted they could not control their cocaine intake and entered treatment programs.

Now, on the basis of evidence from both avenues of research, physicians and pharmacologists have begun to try to bring the public image of cocaine into line with scientific reality. Their conclusion cocaine is one of the most dangerous drugs on the underground market.

Hallucinations and hot lines:

Cocaine, researchers now know, is physically debilitating, whether you snort it, swallow it, inject it or smoke it. Long-term users can develop chronic sore throats, inflamed sinuses and, sometimes, holes in the cartilage of the nose. The drug can trigger heart attacks and worsen preexisting weaknesses of the heart. Current research also points toward the possibility that high doses of cocaine cause permanent brain damage.

Almost invariably, the more cocaine a person consumes, the more pronounced these symptoms become. Some scientists surmise that cocaine can skew brain chemistry enough to stir up an underlying disorder like schizophrenia, which, with out this chemical prod, might otherwise have remained buried.

Rising Overdoses:

For the casual users, the most frightening finding to emerge is this: taken in any form, and at almost any dose, cocaine can be fatal. Sudden deaths from cocaine are still rare, considering that an estimated 22 million people have by now tried the drug. But seemingly anyone is in jeopardy, for the deaths to have been almost totally random.

People die after a small dose. It depends on their tolerance. A very few people apparently lack an enzyme that breaks down the drug, and so are likely to have a fatal reaction to minute amounts of it.

Cocaine-induced deaths can be hard to identify, since many users also take alcohol, barbiturates or heroin, and since the bodies may be free of cocaine, which is rapidly metabolized.

Seventeen% of high school students try cocaine before graduating.

Pleasure circuit:

Cocaine had the result of a kind of cultural and scientific amnesia. Doctors knew that the drug was dangerous, and that some people died from minute doses pure cocaine used as an anesthetic in surgery.

Novocain and other local anesthetics cocaine numbs the parts of the body it touches first, for sniffers, usually the nose and throat. But like amphetamines and other stimulants, it also sets the sympathetic nervous system humming raising blood pressure, speeding heartbeat and respiration, and generally stepping up the body’s metabolism.

The stimulation is what makes cocaine so appealing to many. One user, a high-powered futures trader in his mid-30s, took the drug to help him work 20 hours a day. Unfortunately, cocaine did not help his financial judgment: he lost four million dollars in just a few months.

High risks:

Many scientists are now revising their notions about cocaine addiction. People do seem to develop tolerance, which is part of the classic definition of addiction. They need larger quantities of the drug to get high, and may never again experience the ecstasy of their first episodes.

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The appalling quality of cocaine these days

Analysis of street cocaine found in Britain has shown that your typical sample is about 10% pure, with the
rest being made up, essentially, of anything white and powdery, including some rather nasty chemicals:

Much of the seized cocaine is found to have been cut with phenacetin - a pharmaceutical drug banned some

years ago in Britain and most other nations for causing kidney failure and cancer.

Other drugs used for cutting or "bashing" cocaine include lignocaine (a dental painkiller), tetramisole (used for  de-worming pets) and boric acid (used to kill cockroaches).

Not that such revelations are likely to dampen demand for what is essentially Britain's national drug. After all,
the risk of an agonising death from cancer hasn't put many people off bacon, and cocaine feeds into the
celebrity-obsessed, superficially success-oriented bling culture of Blatcherite Britain; and even if people

know that the £2.50 line of coke they do is unlikely to be like anything their footballer/WAG/indie-star idols touch, suspension of disbelief is a powerful thing.

The problem, of course, is that cocaine is, by definition, sold by criminals, and there is no incentive for anything remotely like fair dealing. One answer, of course, would be to legalise cocaine and regulate it as stringently as alcohol and tobacco are. As soon as that happened, coke dealers would go the way of bathtub gin merchants and the quality and reliability would go up; Waitrose would carry organic, fair-trade cocaine from day one, and for those on a budget, £3.79 would get you a line of Tesco Value coke (3% purity, but cut with thoroughly innocuous substances). Lidl would undoubtedly come to the party with a janky-looking faux-authentic store brand; "Medellin Hills", perhaps, or "Mr. Montana's"?
Of course, legalising drugs is the sort of thing only somebody with an excess of common sense would advocate, and there is no way that it would ever happen in the real world. Thankfully, there are other, more politically viable, possibilities. Given that the majority of the active ingredient in street cocaine is not actually cocaine but various tranquillisers (hence the feeling of numbness which many naïve cokeheads assume as proof of the drug's authenticity), the next logical step would be to do away with the illegal substance altogether and sell perfectly legal pseudococaine. It'd have the right colour, texture and consistency for doing a social line at a party, would function excellently as a prop for one's fantasies of celebrity glamour, and would even give one a mild buzz, though would contain nothing more dangerous (or illegal) than a few stimulants and tranquillisers, heavily diluted.