Don’t believe what you see in the movies.

Too often, cocaine is portrayed as a glamorous drug. It is, in the
popular imagination, the plaything of stockbrokers and socialites,
dandies and debutantes; it’s sniffed in fancy clubs and opulent mansions,
where everybody’s rich and no one’s the wiser.
Cocaine as it’s portrayed in mass forms of entertainment is
harmless, trivial: There are no consequences of its use, except of course for
the gilded good times that result from it. Put simply, cocaine is
fun—and with a few quick hits you can make yourself part of the party. Tough
to beat that, right?

Not exactly.

The truth, unfortunately, is a long way from what gets depicted on
the silver screen. Cocaine—cocaine as it actually is, cocaine away from
the bright lights and big stars—is nothing if not bad news. In reality,
the drug is a scourge: It wrecks lives, ruins families; it haunts
addicts like a bad dream, leaving them bereft of everything save the
miserable compulsion of their habits. Cocaine in fact, in other words, is far
cry from cocaine in fantasy—and far too many people learn the lesson in
the hardest of all possible ways.

The good news, though, is that the hardest way isn’t the only way.
Cocaine abuse isn’t—doesn’t have to be—an undefeatable opponent; indeed,
there’s hope for victory—for addicts and the people who care about
them—in a sober understanding of the drug itself. Addiction is by its very
nature a disease rooted in ignorance and myopia: Addicts are addicts
because they don’t know—can’t see—anything beyond their need to use.
Recovery, it follows, must and can only be a process of learning—of
understanding the facts, and being able to employ them to good ends. Healing,
ultimately, has got to come from the truth—and the truth can only be
known to those individuals willing face it. Anything less just isn’t good
enough.

And so: What’s the truth about cocaine? How can we go about
understanding the drug, and facing it as it actually is? Statistics, for their
part, tell some of the story. In 2003, a study conducted by the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services found that 34 million Americans
age 12 or older—almost 15 percent of the total population—had tried
cocaine at least once in their lives. That figure made cocaine the second
most commonly used illicit drug in the United States, trailing only
marijuana. Every day, 5,000 new users experiment with cocaine. One in ten
workers report having used it on the job. Perhaps most troubling of all,
up to 75 percent of people who try cocaine will eventually become
addicted to it. Of those addicts, only a quarter will be able to quit
without help.

But numbers, as dramatic as the might be, are still only numbers,
and there is more to cocaine than just statistics. Remember, drug abuse
is always a uniquely personal phenomenon: No two addicts or addiction
cases are ever the same; the reality of the disease—the real reality of
the disease—can only ever be found on the most intimate scale. To that
end, a thorough understanding of cocaine addiction must account for the
individual nature of the thing: How does cocaine work? What makes it
so addictive? And perhaps most importantly of all, what are the impacts
of its long-term use?

Cocaine is a stimulant. Whether snorted as a hydrochloric salt or
smoked as a base, the drug stimulates the central nervous system by
blocking the reuptake of dopamine in the brain. A cocaine high is a state of
pleasurable excitation; users report feelings of energy and euphoria,
coupled with a heightened level of mental awareness. That high,
unfortunately, is followed by a corresponding low, which is generally
associated with feelings of restless irritability and strong cravings for more
cocaine.

Much of cocaine’s addictiveness lies in the fact of these lows:
Users are induced to use again—and again and again and again—by the
physical and psychological discomfort of sobriety. On a chemical level,
cocaine’s addictiveness lies in its affects on dopamine mechanisms in the
brain. Sustained cocaine abuse is associated with a decline in the body’s
natural dopamine production, meaning that cocaine users come to rely
increasingly on the drug as their sole source of neurological
stimulation. Cocaine addicts use, that is, because they have no other way of
feeling good.

Finally, the side effects. Cocaine abuse, to put it bluntly, is
serious business. Physically, it’s associated with insomnia, loss of
appetite, respiratory arrest, seizure, and stroke. Psychologically, chronic
cocaine abusers are prone to anxiety, depression, paranoia, delusions,
hallucinations, and full-blown psychosis. What’s worse, the
extraordinarily addictive nature of cocaine means that addicts can’t stop using,
even when they want to—even when the drug has started to tear them apart
from the inside. It is, in the end, a fate far removed from that
depicted by Hollywood—and a fate that no one should have to learn about the
hard way. If nothing else, then, we might hope that awareness can be the
first step on the road to recovery.

(Source: http://www.gdcada.org/statistics/cocaine)

Filed under: Drug Addiction, Addiction on March 29th, 2007