It makes you feel very happy and alert for a short time. But it carries many risks, including overdose and serious physical and mental side effects as well as addiction. If you or someone you know has problems with cocaine use, seek help from a doctor or mental health professional. Cocaine, white crystalline alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant (Erythroxylum cocaine health risks coca), a bush commonly found growing wild in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador and cultivated in many other countries. Cocaine acts as an anesthetic because it interrupts the conduction of impulses in nerves, especially those in the mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and throat.
Short-term side effects
- Most deaths due to cocaine are accidental but may also be the result of body packing or stuffing with rupture in the gastrointestinal tract.
- Although most overdose deaths involve opioids, 182,502 persons died of overdoses involving stimulants (with or without other drugs) in the United States during January 2021–June 2024, accounting for 59% of all overdose deaths.
- After repeated use of the drug, the brain adapts physically and chemically in an attempt to restore a natural balance.
- More than 2.7 million Americans have used cocaine at least once in their lives.
- People may take the drug until they run out or become exhausted.
- These patients rarely presented with straightforward cocaine intoxication; their clinical pictures were complex, often dominated by opioid overdose or cardiac complications.
Cognitive behavioral therapy may help people recover from cocaine use disorder. Cocaine overdoses present as heart attack or stroke, disrupting body temperature regulation and causing psychosis and other mental health symptoms. The Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) found nearly three-quarters (72.5%) of cocaine-related emergency visits involved at least one other substance, most commonly alcohol or opioids.
- Among U.S. youth, the perceived risk of cocaine use has declined.
- A physical manifestation of his anhedonia occurred when Alvy and his friends were preparing to use cocaine.
- That means it takes less of it to cause negative effects like anxiety and convulsions.
- In a 2021 national survey, about 4.8 million people in the U.S. ages 12 or older said they had used cocaine in the past year.
- Scientists don’t know exactly how it works to reduce cocaine use.
- Asking for help is a huge and important step toward recovering from cocaine use disorder.
As people keep on using cocaine, their brains get used to the huge overstimulation and they need stronger, more frequent doses. Counseling and other types of therapy are the most common treatments for cocaine use disorder. Sessions with a trained therapist can help you make changes to your behaviors and thought processes. You may need to stay in a rehabilitation center (also known as rehab) for intensive therapy and support. If you do attend rehab, continuing treatment afterward (aftercare) is important to help you avoid relapse. Drug use disorder, or addiction, is a complicated disease that involves changes to your brain structure.
What Does It Mean To Have a Substance Abuse Problem?
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), coca cultivation and cocaine production has risen sharply. Colombia’s coca fields expanded 10% in one year — from 230,000 to 253,000 hectares. UNODC estimates Colombian production reached nearly 2,650 metric tons of pure cocaine in 2023 — a 53% increase. The cocaine supply is so high that prices in the United States have fallen by almost half, to $60–$75 per gram, compared to five years ago.
More overdoses, emergency room admissions, addiction, and death.
They may also use medication to treat other complications you have. A typical dose of snorted cocaine is between 30 and 70 milligrams. The 2021 survey found no differences in rates of cocaine use among different ethnic and racial groups in the U.S. Others dissolve the drug in water and inject it with a needle. When injected, it goes directly into your bloodstream for a very strong and near-instant effect.
It’s important to remember addiction is a chronic disease. It’s not a sign of weakness, bad judgement or other personal characteristics. The best way to support someone coping with addiction is to encourage them to find help. It’s also important to remember cocaine use often has a ripple effect, putting stress and strain on relationships. If that’s your situation, consider participating in a support group. While cocaine and crack cocaine highs are brief, the drug may stay in your system for up to three days.
Understanding More About Cocaine Addiction
NIDA is a biomedical research organization and does not provide personalized medical advice, treatment, counseling, or legal consultation. Information provided by NIDA is not a substitute for professional medical care or legal consultation. Powder cocaine (cocaine hydrochloride) must be heated to a high temperature to be smoked (about 197 °C), and considerable decomposition/burning occurs at these high temperatures.
Whatever your goals, it’s the struggle to get there that’s most rewarding. It’s almost as if life itself is inviting us to embrace difficulty—not as punishment but as a design feature. Cocaine is a powerful drug that can cause serious side effects that can happen very quickly after you start using the drug.
Instead, conversations focused on status, pleasure, or nostalgia. This recalibration of risk perception may be fueling renewed interest and experimentation. When people take cocaine, their blood pressure goes up and their heart races.
Cocaine has many street names like snow, nose candy, coke, Big C, flake and blow. These unpleasant effects often make you want to use the drug again. When you snort it, it takes slightly longer to feel the effects. Benthamiana also naturally contains nicotine, separating the cocaine from nicotine and related alkaloids would be challenging.
What are treatments for cocaine use disorder?
Another reason cocaine can lead to substance use disorder is that each time you use it, your body builds a tolerance. That means you have to use more and more of the drug to get high. Use of cocaine is less common in the U.S. than misuse of prescription painkillers (reported by 2.4 million people in the 2021 survey), or use of hallucinogenic drugs (2.2 million). Instead of using baking soda as you would with crack, you add ammonia to “free” the cocaine base from its natural form. It’s most often smoked in a pipe in the same way as crack. For this reason, you might hear the terms “crack” and “freebase” used interchangeably.
Drugs like cocaine powerfully activate reward and reinforcement mechanisms in the brain. Reward refers to the euphoria or high produced when taking the drug (equivalent to “liking”); reinforcement refers to the desire to take the drug again (“wanting”). Recreational cocaine is typically not taken by mouth due to its poor bioavailability, instead it is usually snorted or injected. Cocaine hydrochloride can also be chemically converted into its free base form, crack cocaine, which can be vaporized.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
As a result, the user can no longer feel pleasure from their usual activities and must take cocaine to feel normal. Addiction to this powerful stimulant develops easily, in part because the effects of the drug only last for a short time. To sustain the high, users will often take cocaine repeatedly in a short period. Chronic use leads to a physical tolerance to the drug which forces the user to take increasingly higher doses to continue or produce the same high. This can swiftly lead to physical and psychological addiction. The World Drug Report 2025 confirms global cocaine production is at an all-time high, as are seizures, users, and related harms.