Cocaine: pharmacology, effects, and abuse

Drugs - Cocaine

COCAINE

Cocaine is an addictive stimulant drug that is prohibited for use in the United States except in medical applications. It comes from the coca leaf and originates from the South American tropics where indigenous people have used it extensively since ancient times. Generally, it is chewed in its raw (leaf) form by laborers because the stimulant effects of the drug include bursts of physical energy and reduce need for sleep over the short-term. It also has a hunger inhibiting effect. Coca leaf can also be processed into a more concentrated form of the substance in a cocaine paste that is subsequently dried into a fine granulated powder form which increases its chemical potency and also dramatically increases its psychoactive and other physical effects on the body, producing a euphoria that can result in very strong physical and psychological addiction in users.

Cocaine was legal in the U.S. until the early twentieth century; it was actually one of the key ingredients in the original formula for Coca Cola as well as in many of the so- called medical elixirs commonly peddled from pushcarts and carriages throughout the 19th and very early 20th centuries until being outlawed by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914

Prior to that, powdered cocaine had been a fashionable "snuff" carried by users in a small tin and snorted into the nose in small pinches to boost mental alertness. The renowned psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was a frequent user who wrote extensively about the benefits of the drug; according to modern criteria, many contemporary experts consider Freud to have been a cocaine addict. In modern recreational usage, cocaine is typically purchased in powdered form and consumed in the same manner that Freud preferred, whereby it is snorted in small quantities into the nose where it is quickly absorbed into the blood stream through the nasal membranes. It passes readily through the blood-brain barrier and produces a mental "high" that many users perceive as euphoric. The euphoric cocaine high is very addictive and in experiments on laboratory animals, mice and chimpanzees given the choice between food and cocaine typically prefer cocaine to such an extent that they will ignore the lever rewarding them with food and continually select the lever that provides cocaine until they die of starvation. In the 1970s and 1980s, cocaine became an extremely popular recreational drug in the U.S. partly because of the social perception that it was the drug choice of the wealthy elite. It was sold and consumed by club goers and was available at upscale parties about the same way that ecstasy has become a popular club drug today. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new from of cocaine was introduced that produced an even more powerful and more addictive high. "Free base" cocaine is the product of a chemical process in which certain molecules of the compound are separated out using ammonia solutions and various other processes. Instead of being snorted like powdered cocaine, free base cocaine comes in a paste or "rock" that is smoked from a glass pipe.