Cocaine: Once known as the "Champagne" of the drugs world, it was the glamour drug taken by Hollywood stars and rock and roll bands where tales of wild parties with goldfish bowls filled with cocaine have gone into legends. Once the expensive 'rich mans drug' it is now more likely to appear at the end of a dinner party than a bottle of Port.
Cocaine is a white powder derived from the leaves of the coca plant of South America, the indigenous people chewed the leaves to combat hunger and fatigue when working in the thin air of the mountains.
By the middle of the 1800s it was being lauded by the likes of Sigmund Freud, Conan Doyle had his famous detective Sherlock Holmes use it and it was a significant ingredient of Coca-Cola until 1906. Doctors and dentists were using it as an anaesthetic. Even Irving Berlin mentions it in his famous song ‘I Get a Kick Out Of You'.
The powder is ‘chopped' into lines which are then snorted up the nose, usually by using rolled up bank notes, a study done in London in the United Kingdom found that more than 15 percent of £20 notes had traces of cocaine on them. There are also other problems associated with snorting this white powder for as well as the addictive cocaine other ingredients are added, this is know as cutting. From an original say, kilo of pure cocaine from Columbia, it has probably been cut at every different staging point until it hits the street where it will be only one third or less pure. This means you are spending a lot of money buying two thirds of useless white powder. All types of substances are used, talc, milk powder, glucose and even sink cleaner.
Crack cocaine: This is the relatively cheap and highly addictive derivative made by cooking cocaine with either ammonia or sodium bicarbonate that has evolved from freebasing. It is a major drug of choice in the poorer areas of society, providing an intense high for relatively little money. Sadly, the user becomes addicted in a very short period of time which means that, combined with the fact that tolerance also increases, the habit becomes very expensive.
Other ways to use cocaine is to dissolve it and inject it directly into the blood stream or mix it with heroin which is known by such names as snowballing, speedballing amongst others. This practice sadly leads to more fatalities than either drug used on its own.
Cocaine though, in whatever form, is a highly addictive stimulant, one which gives the user the feeling of supreme confidence, alertness and energy. Generally, these are the qualities which make cocaine such a hard drug to kick.
The user becomes accustomed to having the feeling of energy and the 'buzz' which cocaine provides and feels low and depressed when the effect wears off and craves more for a return to the 'heights'.
Generally the effects of cocaine on the body are to send the body into overdrive; that is speeding up the heart rate to dangerous levels, resulting in nausea, high body temperature and involuntary muscle reflexes and cramp to name just a few symptoms.
Long term cocaine abuse can lead to heart problems or heart attacks, corrosion of the nasal cavity (even to the extreme cases where the septum that is the piece of skin between the nostrils falls out and the nose collapses) severe mental mood swings, paranoia and other traits which are often inherent in sufferers of schizophrenia.
© Ian Richards April 2006
