Surely, when someone hears the word cocaine, all he/she could think of is addiction. Cocaine gives the impression of negativity to people, either emotionally or ideally. Indeed, it is a substance known to be easily abused and thus, users eventually become addicted to it and the cycle goes on and on. Like any other drugs, cocaine addiction can harm lives. It changes anyone, his perspectives, his motives, perception, and behaviors.
Cocaine is a powerful and extremely addictive drug. It is extracted from the leaves of coca bush. There are two primary forms of cocaine. One is the powdery type. It is used for snorting up the nose. The second is freebase, which is better recognized as crack cocaine, used for smoking. A small percentage of cocaine addiction is done intravenously. When cocaine is snorted, the cocaine powder gets inhaled up into the nose where it is readily absorbed into the bloodstream. Dopamine gets released when cocaine reaches the brain which stimulates feelings of pleasure. The crack cocaine, commonly called as “crack” is the name for the smokable form of cocaine. Crack is the street name given to the type of cocaine that has been processed into a smokable drug. Smoking crack cocaine sends large quantities of the drug to the lungs, producing an quick and extreme euphoric feeling. The rush is usually very strong, but does not last very long. The rocks of crack cocaine are ignited in a crack pipe and the resulting vapors get deeply inhaled.
A person abuses the use of cocaine when he takes in the drug for pleasure purposes and in inappropriate dosage. With frequent use, the person becomes tolerant with the drug and then becomes dependent with it. The person seemed to be craving for the drug every now and then. Cocaine addiction is characterized as regularly craving for the drug despite the negative consequences of cocaine to the person’s body and mind. The physical signs of cocaine abuse can vary, depending on the person. For one, cocaine acts as an appetite suppressant so cocaine abusers often aren’t hungry and end up losing considerable amounts of weight.
Getting addicted to cocaine is like submitting yourself to be controlled by the drug. Cocaine addicts are normally not interested with ordinary activities because they only focus on obtaining and taking the drug. Thus, people around these addicts are affected because they act together every day. Cocaine addiction often involves not only compulsive cocaine use but also a wide range of dysfunctional behaviors. This can often impede with normal functioning in the family, workplace and community. Cocaine addiction also can place people at higher risk for a wide variety of other illnesses. These illnesses can be brought on by the addiction type behaviorswhich includes poor living and health habits that often accompany the lifestyle of an addict and the toxic effects of the cocaine itself.
Experts in the field of medicine is focusing their time on the certain drug that can cure cocaine addiction. The compound GBR 12909 was initially tested as a potential antidepressant. With GBR 12909, the patients’ cocaine-seeking behaviors were eliminated within a few hours without disturbing food-seeking behavior. Studies have shown that both GBR 12909 and cocaine inhibit the action of a protein called the dopamine transporter. By reducing the transporter, both GBR 12909 and cocaine elevate the levels of the pleasure-inducing chemical messenger dopamine outside the nerve cells, a process that increases and prolongs dopamine’s pleasurable effects. However, GBR 12909 acts more gradually and elevates dopamine levels less than does cocaine. By attaching to the dopamine transporter, GBR 12909 also blocks cocaine from binding there. GBR 12909′s chemical attractiveness for the transporter is 500 times that of cocaine, so it binds to the transporter and stays there for a long time. While it’s sitting on the transporter, cocaine has no access to the transporter, so the cocaine can no longer act to induce euphoria. The treatment using GBR 12909 should be extended so that the medication to have time to bring the dopamine transporter levels back to where they were before the patient started taking cocaine. The breakthrough in the discovery of GBR 12909 could be a gateway to help cocaine addiction victims in dealing with the problem they are so afraid to face.
Cocaine addiction is quite a hard condition. One should seek medical attention.
