Effects of Cocaine

07/24/2008

Cocaine's psychostimulant effects

The intensity of cocaine’s impact on the central nervous system depends largely on dose. At low doses, cocaine’s are fairly similar to those of caffeine: it combats drowsiness and fatigue, increases energy and alertness, and enhances mental acuity. With increasing doses, most users begin to experience negative effects-such as nervousness, jitteriness, sleeplessness and agitation-and at very high doses, feelings of suspicion, hypervigilance and paranoia are common.

Extremely high doses of cocaine-like extremely high doses of many stimulant drugs-can produce a toxic psychosis, with symptoms similar to the delirium of high fever. However, toxic psychoses appear to be rare among cocaine users, probably because of the body’s protective mechanisms referred to previously. In addition, because cocaine is relatively short acting, when psychosis does occur, it tends to be short lived.

Permanent psychosis is found occasionally among cocaine users, but there is no evidence of a casual link, and, for most people, even heavy and prolonged use appears to have no permanent impact on the mental health, personality, mood, cognition, memory, or perception. Among people predisposed to behave violently, cocaine may increase the likelihood of their involvement in violent episodes, but there is no evidence that cocaine causes generally nonviolent people to behave violently.

Some researchers have identified crack as more violence producing than cocaine powder, and journalists have been prone to attribute increase in violent crime to the pharmacological properties of crack. Crack use by women has also been blamed for rising rates of child abuse. However, to the extent that crack users seem to “lose their motherhood instinct” and begin to abusing or neglecting their children, it is probably due to the pharmacology of the drug that to the lifestyle that accompanies heavy involvement in the street drug scene-regardless of the drug. In fact, research on a variety of drugs shows that the same drug is associated with very different behaviors in different cultures, which indicates that there is no direct link between any specific drug and any specific behavior. In this culture, crack-like alcohol-is associated with violence primarily because it is often used in social settings in which violence is already common. 

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