Author: Charles Frank

Cocaine: Effects, Mixing With Alcohol, Addiction, and More

It’s like living with a fire alarm that never stops ringing. If you want to learn more about the side effects of cocaine, click “View Gallery” below. The FDA hasn’t approved any medicine to treat cocaine addiction. But there are a few medication options doctors are having some success with. You may develop depression, unpredictable mood changes, paranoia, or even violent behaviors toward yourself and others.

Health Conditions

  1. It’s most often smoked in a pipe in the same way as crack.
  2. Some contingency management programs use a voucher-based system to give positive rewards for staying in treatment and remaining cocaine-free.
  3. Abusing cocaine can lead to many problems with mental health as well as changes to the brain that take a very long time to correct.

Adrienne Santos-Longhurst is a freelance writer and author who has written extensively on all things health and lifestyle for more than a decade. When snorted or gummed, coke needs to get through mucus, skin, and other tissues. It bypasses all that when you inject or smoke it, allowing it to enter the bloodstream almost immediately.

General Health

Long-term cocaine use can induce symptoms similar to schizophrenia, including hallucinations and delusional thinking. Imagine being constantly on edge, suspicious of everyone and everything around you. It’s a living nightmare that can persist even after cocaine use stops. Consider seeking emergency medical attention if you experience any notable side effects while consuming cocaine, especially a potential overdose. If you keep using cocaine, your brain’s circuits become more sensitive. This can lead to a negative mood when you don’t take the drug.

Lifestyle

This means they may find it difficult to manage their use of cocaine and may experience addiction in the most severe cases of SUD. Repeated use of cocaine may cause the brain to be more sensitive to the negative or toxic effects of cocaine, such as anxiety, at lower doses. If a person uses cocaine, it can have both short- and long-term effects on their brain.

Physical Brain Changes

The rate of cocaine use is highest among people ages 18 to 25. As a person grows older, their brain will naturally change and begin to lose gray matter. In a healthy brain, this is a decades-long process, and it does not appear until a person has reached older adulthood. Memory problems, changes in cognitive ability, and even dementia are linked to reduction of gray matter. If you’re worried about your cocaine use and want help, you have options. Consider talking to your primary healthcare provider if you’re comfortable doing so.

Cocaine is an addictive stimulant drug that is categorized as a Schedule II substance by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Before you decide to abuse the drug, or even if you already have, consider the severe effect cocaine can have on your mind. The short-term physiological effects of cocaine include constricted blood vessels, dilated pupils, and increased temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure.

That’s a lot of noses, veins, and lives affected by this deceptively innocent-looking white powder. If you or a loved one has a substance use disorder, help is available. Consider speaking with a mental health professional or looking into treatment programs. In early tests, a vaccine helped reduce the risk of relapse in people who use cocaine. The vaccine activates your immune system to create antibodies that attach to cocaine and stop it from making its way into your brain.

Tasks that once seemed daunting now appear manageable, even trivial. It’s this heightened alertness and concentration that led to cocaine’s popularity among professionals in high-pressure fields. But like all things that seem too good to be true, there’s a catch.

Withdrawal can be difficult, so it may be best to do it with the help of a medical professional. At the same time, you might develop what’s called sensitization to the drug. That means it takes less of it to cause negative effects like anxiety and convulsions. Along with the physical risks, cocaine use can affect your life in other ways. The brain, now accustomed to elevated dopamine levels, requires more of the drug to achieve the same high.

A behavioral therapy component that may be particularly useful for helping patients achieve initial abstinence from cocaine is contingency management. Some contingency management programs use a voucher-based system to give positive rewards for staying in treatment and remaining cocaine-free. Cocaine is an “upper” (stimulant) that gives its user a false sense of power and energy, making the user feel euphoric, confident, and less inhibited. When users come down from the high, they are usually depressed, edgy, and craving more drugs. No one can predict whether they will become dependent and addicted, or whether the next dose will be deadly.