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What Are The
Short-Term Effects of Cocaine Use?
What Are the
Long-Term Effects of Cocaine Use?
Are Cocaine Abusers at Risk for Contracting HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis B and C?
Q:
What Are The
Short-Term Effects of Cocaine Use?
A: Cocaine's effects appear almost immediately after a
single dose, and disappear within a few minutes or hours. Taken in small
amounts (up to 100 mg), cocaine usually makes the user feel euphoric,
energetic, talkative, and mentally alert, especially to the sensations of
sight, sound, and touch. It can also temporarily decrease the need for food
and sleep.
Some users find that the drug helps them to perform simple physical and
intellectual tasks more quickly, while others can experience the opposite
effect. The duration of cocaine's immediate euphoric effects depends upon
the route of administration. The faster the absorption, the more intense the
high. Also, the faster the absorption, the shorter the duration of action.
The high from snorting is relatively slow in onset, and may last 15 to 30
minutes, while that from smoking may last 5 to 10 minutes.
The short-term physiological effects of cocaine include constricted blood
vessels; dilated pupils; and increased temperature, heart rate, and blood
pressure. Large amounts (several hundred milligrams or more) intensify the
user's high, but may also lead to bizarre, erratic, and violent behaviour.
These users may experience tremors, vertigo, muscle twitches, paranoia, or,
with repeated doses, a toxic reaction closely resembling amphetamine
poisoning. Some users of cocaine report feelings of restlessness,
irritability, and anxiety. In rare instances, sudden death can occur on the
first use of cocaine or unexpectedly thereafter. Cocaine-related deaths are
often a result of cardiac arrest or seizures followed by respiratory arrest.
Q:
What Are the
Long-Term Effects of Cocaine Use?
A: Cocaine is a powerfully
addictive drug. Once having tried cocaine, an individual may have difficulty
predicting or controlling the extent to which he or she will continue to use
the drug. Cocaine's stimulant and addictive effects are thought to be
primarily a result of its ability to inhibit the re-absorption of dopamine
by nerve cells.
Dopamine is released as part of the brain's reward system, and is either
directly or indirectly involved in the addictive properties of every major
drug of abuse.
An appreciable tolerance to cocaine's high may develop, with many addicts
reporting that they seek but fail to achieve as much pleasure as they did
from their first experience. Some users will frequently increase their doses
to intensify and prolong the euphoric effects. While tolerance to the high
can occur, users can also become more sensitive (sensitization) to cocaine's
anaesthetic and convulsant effects, without increasing the dose taken.
This increased sensitivity may explain some deaths occurring after
apparently low doses of cocaine.
Use of cocaine in a binge, during which the drug is taken repeatedly and at
increasingly high doses, leads to a state of increasing irritability,
restlessness, and paranoia. This may result in a full-blown paranoid
psychosis, in which the individual loses touch with reality and experiences
auditory hallucinations.
Q:
Are Cocaine Abusers at Risk for Contracting HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis B and C?
A: Yes. Cocaine abusers, especially
those who inject, are at increased risk for contracting such infectious
diseases as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV/AIDS) and hepatitis. In fact,
use and abuse of illicit drugs, including crack cocaine, have become the
leading risk factors for new cases of HIV.
Drug abuse-related spread of HIV can result from direct transmission of the
virus through the sharing of contaminated needles and paraphernalia between
injecting drug users. It can also result from indirect transmission, such as
an HIV-infected mother transmitting the virus perinatally to her child. This
is particularly alarming, given that more than 60 percent of new AIDS cases
are women.
Research has also shown that drug use can interfere with judgement about
risk-taking behaviour, and can potentially lead to reduced precautions about
having sex, the sharing of needles and injection paraphernalia, and the
trading of sex for drugs, by both men and women. In South Africa, smoking
cocaine is far more common than injection.
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