Cocaine Addiction Symptoms and Recovery

Cocaine is a stimulant that’s powerfully addictive. It’s known in the streets as snow, rock, crack, coke, and blow. It’s made from coca plant leaves from South America. Even though healthcare professionals can use the drug for medicinal reasons like local anesthesia for use in surgeries, cocaine is an illicit drug of sorts.

Its street drug form looks like flour from a distance or a fine crystal powder that’s crystalline in appearance up close. Street dealers might mix cocaine with things like flour, talcum powder, or cornstarch as fillers to increase their profits and make their stash of coke grow. It’s also mixed with other drugs such as amphetamine for extra stimulation.

How Is Cocaine Used or Taken?

Cocaine users typically take the drug in what’s known as binges. It involves taking the drug over and over again in a short period of time and in increasingly higher doses to maintain the high. This is because the longer you use cocaine the more desensitized you’ll get, thus requiring you to take higher doses every time just to get the same initial high of your very first dose.

There are a myriad of ways to take cocaine. They include:

• People use cocaine by snorting the powder through the nose, usually with a straw or rolled-up paper (like dollar bills).
• They can also rub the drug through their gums.
• They can also rub the drug through their gums.
• Some even dissolve the powder in water for the sake of injection into their bloodstream for an instant stimulating high.
• There are also those who inject a combination of heroin and cocaine, which is a combo that’s known as a Speedball.
• Another popular method of taking cocaine is smoking it. Specifically, they should smoke coke that’s been processed into a rock crystal that’s known as freebase cocaine.

This type of cocaine is known on the streets as crack, because the freebase cocaine rock produces a crackling noise as it’s heated up, which in turn produces vapors you can inhale into your lungs.

How Does Cocaine Affect Your Brain?

Your dopamine is increased through cocaine. Dopamine, incidentally, is a natural chemical messenger or neurotransmitter that’s responsible for controlling movement and pleasure. It also affects your brain’s reward circuit, which is what the brain depends on when it comes to controlling pleasurable feelings.

In other words, it results in the following:

• Dopamine’s Effects: Usually and typically, your brain releases dopamine in your reward circuits when reacting to potential rewards, such as when you smell good food, you’re up for a raise, you’re about to get a date, your business has turned a profit, your first child is born, or after you’ve ended up achieving high academic marks.
• Mitigating Dopamine Recycling: The dopamine is then recycled right back to the cell that released the chemical, which shuts off the signal between your nerve cells. Coke works in giving you stimulating, pleasurable high as though you’ve achieved something major in your life by preventing the recycling of dopamine.
• Cocaine-Induced Dopamine Flood: Taking coke essentially causes excessive amounts of dopamine build up between your nerve cells. This dopamine flood or torrent of sorts disrupts your brain’s normal communication, leading to an outright cocaine high. You’ll feel satisfied, pleasured, and giddy with a sense of accomplishment from simply taking cocaine.

What Are the Short-Term Effects of Cocaine?

The short-term effects of coke on your health include the following:

• Irritability
• Mental alertness
• Extreme happiness and energy
• Hypersensitivity to touch, sight, and sound
• Paranoia or extreme and unreasonable distrust of others

There are cocaine users who findthat taking cocaine assists them in performing simple mental and physical tasks in a quicker manner. However, there are those who instead undergo the opposite effect. Huge cocaine doses can lead people who take them to exhibit violent, unpredictable, and bizarre behavior, in fact.

In terms of how long cocaine highs last, here’s the gist:

• The effects of cocaine kick in rather quickly then dissipate within a few minutes to an hour’s time.
• The method of use dictates how intense and how long the effects should last.
• Smoking or injecting cocaine usually results in stronger or quicker effects, but they’re also short-lived at about 5 to 10 minutes.
• Snorting produces a longer-lasting high, but its length is about 15-30 minutes.

In regards to the other health effects or side effects of using cocaine, they include the following:

• Nausea
• Restlessness
• Dilated pupils
• Faster heartbeat
• Constricted blood vessels
• Tremors and muscle twitches
• Raised body temperature and blood pressure

What Are the Long-Term Effects of Cocaine?

As a recreational drug, cocaine is quite popular because of its supposed beneficial effects on energy, motivation, and mood. However, people who are addicted to and/or abusing cocaine may take it intravenously by injection, snort, or smoke it in a haphazard and uncontrolled manner, leading to serious adverse effects in the long term.

The long-term effects of cocaine on your health depend on the method of use or dosage delivery into your body. They include the following:

• Consuming Cocaine Orally: Because of the reduced blood flow, you may experience severe bowel decay.
• Snorting Cocaine: You can end up with complications like issues when swallowing, frequent runny nose, nosebleeds, and outright loss of your sense of smell.
• Cocaine Injection by Needle: By injecting yourself with cocaine by needle, you increase your risk for tetanus, infection, HIV or Hepatitis C(HCV) contraction as well as other blood-borne sicknesses.
• The risk for the blood-borne diseases originates from injecting cocaine with dirty needles. If you’re irresponsible with your needle use and don’t use sterile needles, then you’re practically asking for trouble.
• Consuming Cocaine in Any Form: Take note that the HIV risk isn’t exclusive to needle users of cocaine. There’s still risk of HIV among all cocaine users regardless of delivery because of the side effect of judgment impairment.
• In other words, cocaine users can end up engaging in risky sexual encounters with partners who are HIV-positive. Then again, this is mostly a behavioral side effect rather than a side effect from your method of cocaine consumption.

The other long-term effects of coke include:

• Irritability
• Malnutrition
• Restlessness
• Severe paranoia
  • Losing touch in reality
  • Auditory hallucinations or hearing noises that aren’t there
• Movement disorders
  • Parkinson’s disease
• Reduction of appetite

Cocaine Abuse Symptoms and Complications

As established above, cocaine is a drug that increases dopamine availability. Dopamine is responsible for processing of reward cues, the regulation of movement, and the generation of euphoric emotions. Then again, it’s also linked with a great potential for abuse and addiction.

Cocaine addiction is associated with greater risks for:

• Death
• Disease
• Psychiatric disorders

Typical Signs and Symptoms of Cocaine Use

If you’re currently using cocaine, then you can end up with the following signs and symptoms:

• Rising agitation
• Effusive enthusiasm
• Changes in concentration and focus
• Increased movement and hyperactivity
• Uninhibited behavior or loss of inhibition
• Signs of involuntary movements like muscle tics
• Increased common cold-like symptoms and/or nosebleeds

Adverse Effects of Cocaine Abuse on the Heart

Cocaine abuse can also result in cardiotoxicity or a poisoned heart, which entails the following symptoms:

• Cocaine-Induced Heart Failure: Your heart might fail to beat because of cocaine abuse.
• Aortic Rupture: The major artery of your hear can end up ruptured, leading to an extremely dangerous situation.
• Cardiomyopathy: Cocaine abuse can induce heart muscle inflammation or cardiomyopathy. It can also damage the muscles of the heart by inducing cell death the higher the doses you take.
• Blood Loss and Cardiac Function Reduction: Because of the reduction of your cardiac function and severe blood loss, you might end up with a decline in life quality and health.
• Cellular Effects on the Heart: The cellular effects of cocaine are cumulative to the point that it can cause serious diseases such as cardiac arrhythmias and heart attacks, which could be life-threatening.
• Endocarditis: The inner tissues of your organ can lead to inflammation whenever you take in intravenous cocaine or cocaine that you inject into your veins so that it can travel through your bloodstream.
• Cocaine-Induced Heart and Brain Damage: Even if the heart were “merely” damaged instead undergoing organ failure, your risk for stroke or brain damage (due to blood supply interruptions) can go way up.

Adverse Effects of Cocaine Use on the Kidneys

Cocaine abuse can also do a number on your kidney or your body’s blood toxicity filter, thus leading to several kidney complications or even outright kidney failure. Prolonged coke usage is linked to inflammation or swelling of important microstructures of your kidney, or Kidney Microstructure Inflammation.

Adverse Effects of Cocaine Abuse on the Brain

Abusing cocaine can also induce adverse changes in your brain chemistry. These alterations are linked with the increased “need” for your cocaine over a period of time (since getting addicted with coke is easy in light of the desensitization effect and needing to take higher doses to get the same initial high).

Brain changes from coke mainly manifest in the form of behavioral abnormalities. These anomalies of sorts can include the following:

• Psychotic Symptoms: Cocaine psychosis can include heightened paranoia and losing your focus to reality.
• New-onset ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder): If you didn’t have ADHD before, you might end up with ADHD due to
• Unusual Erratic Behavior: Cocaine can make you behave erratically, which can result in accidents involving unintentional trauma.

Adverse Effects of Cocaine Abuse on Your Mental and Bodily Functions

Even cocaine users who consider coke as a recreational drug that should be taken moderately and responsibly like alcohol can still end up at risk of neurological alternations that can affect the quality of their life. Recreational coke usage is linked with:

• Reduced Ability to Control and Regulate Behavior): Your ability to be patient and to control your impulses might be altered after extended usage of cocaine.
• Reduced Ability to Control Movements: Even the ability to move your body, to walk, to stand, and to sit down without ending up with twitches or shakes might be affected by cocaine use.
• Reduced Ability to React to Environmental Stimuli: Things that would normally stimulate you if you weren’t a cocaine user might seem boring to you now after cocaine abuse.
• Reduced Ability to Carry Out Daily Activities: Daily ordinary activities like going to the bathroom, eating at the dining table, brushing your teeth, or getting up from bed might be altered due to cocaine’s effects on your body and mind.
• Reduced Ability to Carry Out Normal Cognitive Performance, Pay Attention, and Make Decisions: By using cocaine in the long-term, your abilities for decision-making, attention, and cognitive performance will all suffer.

Cocaine Abuse Treatment

You have loads of choices available to you when it comes to treating cocaine addiction and mitigating your propensity for abuse on this substance. You can get cocaine rehab and therapy in inpatient facilities. They’re preferable to outpatient centers because they accommodate the patient for the whole duration of the 30-day to 90-day treatment.

• Reduced Ability to Control and Regulate Behavior): Your ability to be patient and to control your impulses might be altered after extended usage of cocaine.
• Inpatient Therapy: On one hand, the doctors, counselors, and caretakers can offer a more intense, individualized, and carefully monitored service compared to the comparatively less intense treatment of an outpatient service involving 12-steps to recovery or nightly meetings for group therapy.
• Outpatient Therapy: On the other hand, cocaine addicts can enter outpatient rehabilitation through regular clinic or rehab center appointments. They can go through 12-steps services or group therapy in case they want to still maintain their everyday home and work life while undergoing treatment.
• Behavioral Therapy: The nature of inpatient and outpatient cocaine abuse treatment can be both behavioral and pharmacological. Behavioral treatment of cocaine abuse involves psychosocial treatments that address the reasons behind your addiction and is indicated by current research to be particularly effective on cocaine addiction.
  • Contingency Management: This is an example of behavioral therapy linked to cocaine use abstinence. This variant of behavioral therapy uses incentives like cash or prizes in order to encourage you to abstain from cocaine. You can also be rewarded by other positive parameters, like better social interactions.
  • The idea here is to replace the rewards-based, dopamine-heavy effects of cocaine with actual achievement and rewards, including your biggest achievement of all as an addict—getting over your cocaine addiction altogether. Alas, its long-term effects are uncertain and less efficient over time even though its in-treatment short-term results are promising.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT involves addressing the reasons behind the substance abuse itself. You might have psychological issues that led you to abuse cocaine among many other substances.
  • You can also end up becoming addicted to cocaine by accident, using it to live out your life normally as a high-functioning addict until you fell off the slippery slope of dependence. The idea here is to change your maladaptive ways of acting, thinking, and reacting to mitigate any behaviors you may have that can contribute to cocaine dependence.
• Pharmacological Therapy: Pharmacological therapy, also known as pharmacotherapy, involves using drugs to get over drug addiction. As an addict, you may need controlled doses of other drugs in order to get over your addiction to cocaine, which is itself a drug. This isn’t as ironic as you think it is. It makes perfect sense to sometimes use medications to help treat your drug addiction.
• To be more specific, you might need pharmaceutical help for pain relief, nausea, and the like to control relapse or withdrawal symptoms. You can also need these medicines to help out the detoxification process and its set of side effects. They can also tackle your dependence to the substance itself by mimicry.
  • Mimicry Therapy: Sometimes, the drugs can mimic the substance you’re abusing but to a different or reduced extent. The dosage of these medications are tapered or reduced over time in order to wean you from dependence. There are also times when chemicals from the substance can be used to accomplish this type of treatment, as in the case of nicotine patches when attempting to kick your smoking habit.
  • Methylphenidate Treatment: This emerging pharmacological therapy for cocaine abuse is typically prescribed for ADHD treatment. This substance is similar to cocaine in terms of their shared neurological effects. However, the stimulant effects of this drug last for a longer period of time while not eliciting as extreme of a reaction when compared to coke.

Take note that medically assisted treatment of any kind is program-specific. What’s applicable to one program might not be applicable to another program.

The Bottom Line

It’s easier said than done to get over cocaine addiction. However, careful treatment of the holistic variety that covers both your mental and physical help can serve as your pathway or gateway towards recovery and sobriety. With that said, like with any other medical condition, an ounce of prevention is even better than a pound of cure and rehabilitation. Read up on the dangers of coke so that you can avoid it like the plague or a snake pit (especially if you already have an addictive personality in the first place).

Cocaine Addiction Rehabilitation Program at Lanna Rehab

Contact the dedicated staff and crew of Lanna Rehab in order to get help for cocaine addiction rehab. Even if you have co-occurring conditions or addictions, they’ll be there to take care of you and give you a safe place to heal.

They have all sorts of sponsors, counselors, consultants, nurses, doctors, and staff as well as various recovery techniques and detoxification services. Your road to sobriety starts at Lanna Rehab in Thailand. Call their toll-free telephone number for more info. They’re available 24/7.