Cocaine: Abuse With Alcohol Increases Deadliness

Cocaine is a powerfully addictive stimulant drug.

What many people don’t realize that abusing cocaine with alcohol produces other chemicals in the body that can be deadly.

“Cocaine use by itself has been linked to an increase in the chances of heart attacks or strokes,” comments Mary Rieser, Executive Director for Narconon Drug Rehab GA. “This is deadly enough, but few people realize that mixing this with alcohol produces a chemical called cocaethylene. Cocaethylene is associated with a greater risk of sudden death than cocaine alone.

“Know your drug facts and help someone from becoming a cocaine addict. Drug addiction is not fun for anyone. Contact Narconon Drug Rehab GA if you need more information.”

How Is Cocaine Used?

The powdered hydrochloride salt form of cocaine can be snorted or dissolved in water and injected.

Snorting is the process of inhaling cocaine powder through the nose, where it is absorbed into the bloodstream through the nasal tissues.

Injecting is the use of a needle to release the drug directly into the bloodstream.

Smoking involves inhaling cocaine vapor or smoke into the lungs, where absorption into the bloodstream is as rapid as by injection.

Crack is cocaine base that has not been neutralized by an acid to make the hydrochloride salt. This form of cocaine comes in a rock crystal that is heated to produce vapors, which are smoked. The term “crack” refers to the crackling sound produced by the rock as it is heated.

All three methods of cocaine abuse can lead to addiction and other severe health problems, including increasing the risk of contracting HIV and infectious diseases.

The intensity and duration of cocaine’s effects, which include increased energy, reduced fatigue, and mental alertness, depend on the route of drug administration. The faster cocaine is absorbed into the bloodstream and delivered to the brain, the more intense the high.

Injecting or smoking cocaine produces a quicker, stronger high than snorting.

On the other hand, faster absorption usually means shorter duration of action. The high from snorting cocaine may last 15 to 30 minutes, but the high from smoking may last only 5 to 10 minutes.

In order to sustain the high, a cocaine abuser has to administer the drug again. For this reason, cocaine is sometimes abused in binges—taken repeatedly within a relatively short period of time, at increasingly high doses.

How Does Cocaine Affect the Brain?

Cocaine is a strong central nervous system stimulant that increases levels of dopamine, a brain chemical associated with pleasure and movement, in the brain’s reward circuit.

Certain brain cells, or neurons, use dopamine to communicate. Normally, dopamine is released by a neuron in response to a pleasurable signal (e.g., the smell of good food), and then recycled back into the cell that released it, shutting off the signal between neurons.

Cocaine acts by preventing the dopamine from being recycled, causing excessive amounts of dopamine to build up, amplifying the message, and ultimately disrupting normal communication. It is this excess of dopamine that is responsible for cocaine’s euphoric effects.

With repeated use, cocaine can cause long-term changes in the brain’s reward system and in other brain systems as well, which may eventually lead to addiction. With repeated use, tolerance to the cocaine high also often develops.
 
Many cocaine abusers report that they seek but fail to achieve as much pleasure as they did from their first exposure. Some users will increase their dose in an attempt to intensify and prolong the euphoria, but this can also increase the risk of adverse psychological or physiological effects.

What Adverse Effects Does Cocaine Have on Health?

Abusing cocaine has a variety of adverse effects on the body. For example, cocaine constricts blood vessels, dilates pupils, and increases body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. It can also cause headaches and gastrointestinal complications such as abdominal pain and nausea. Because cocaine tends to decrease appetite, chronic users can become malnourished as well.

Different methods of taking cocaine can produce different adverse effects. Regularly snorting cocaine, for example, can lead to loss of the sense of smell, nosebleeds, problems with swallowing, hoarseness, and a chronically runny nose. Ingesting cocaine can cause severe bowel gangrene as a result of reduced blood flow. Injecting cocaine can bring about severe allergic reactions and increased risk for contracting HIV and other blood-borne diseases. Binge patterns of use may lead to irritability, restlessness, anxiety, and paranoia. Cocaine abusers can suffer a temporary state of full-blown paranoid psychosis, in which they lose touch with reality and experience auditory hallucinations.

Regardless of how or how frequently cocaine is used, a user can experience acute cardiovascular or cerebrovascular emergencies, such as a heart attack or stroke, which may cause sudden death. Cocaine-related deaths are often a result of cardiac arrest or seizure followed by respiratory arrest.

Added Danger: Cocaethylene
 
When people consume cocaine and alcohol together, they compound the danger each drug poses and unknowingly perform a complex chemical experiment within their bodies. Researchers have found that the human liver combines cocaine and alcohol to produce a third substance, cocaethylene, which intensifies cocaine’s euphoric effects. Cocaethylene is associated with a greater risk of sudden death than cocaine alone.

How Widespread is Cocaine Abuse?

Monitoring the Future Survey

According to the 2007 Monitoring the Future survey—a national survey of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders—cocaine use among students did not increase significantly, though it remained at unacceptably high levels: 3.1 percent of 8th-graders, 5.3 percent of 10th-graders, and 7.8 percent of 12th-graders have tried cocaine; 0.9 percent of 8th-graders, 1.3 percent of 10th-graders, and 2.0 percent of 12th-graders were current (past-month) cocaine users.
National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)

According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 35.3 million Americans aged 12 and older reported having used cocaine, and 8.5 million reported having used crack. An estimated 2.4 million Americans were current (past-month) users of cocaine; 702,000 were current users of crack. There were an estimated 977,000 new users of cocaine in 2006—most were 18 or older when they first used cocaine. Among young adults aged 18 to 25, the past-year use rate was 6.9 percent, showing no significant difference from the previous year.

Source: NIDA

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