Cocaine can affect your relationships, job, finances, and overall health. If you notice that your life is being impacted by cocaine abuse, then it’s time to get help for your addiction.
If you’ve attempted to cut back or quit but haven’t been successful, you may have an addiction. Some therapies can help you stop being successful.
There may be a lot of inquiries concerning your health and substance use during your initial session. This enables the treatment provider to create a personalised treatment plan that suits your needs.
Some therapies can help you stop being successful – a rehab key worker will be assigned to you to help you with your treatment plan.
Read on to learn more about cocaine addiction, how to spot signs of cocaine addiction, and how to get the right help for you.
How Can You Spot Someone Suffering From Cocaine Addiction?
Recognising the psychological, behavioural, and physical signs of cocaine addiction is the first step in helping a loved one so you can tell when they need assistance.
Here are some signs of a cocaine addict you should watch out for:
- To purchase cocaine, they "borrow" or steal money, sometimes even from family members.
- They no longer participate in activities and events they formerly loved.
- When they haven't used cocaine for a specific period, they exhibit signs of agitation and irritability.
- They behave covertly and fabricate information regarding their locations and cocaine usage.
- Despite the harm it is doing to their lives, they don't seem to be able to stop abusing cocaine.
- To acquire the desired high, they must use more cocaine more frequently.
If you see any of these symptoms, it may be a clue that the individual has a problem with cocaine and requires help from a specialist.
What Are The Effects Of Cocaine?
Cocaine can operate relatively quickly, depending on how it is consumed—for example, whether it is smoked, snorted, or administered intravenously.
The effects of cocaine on the brain increase dopamine release. Dopamine is a chemical that helps the brain recognise pleasant emotions and “reward” the actions that first generated them.
The perceived “high” of cocaine usage and its addictive potential is partly caused by this rise in dopamine.
Several desired side effects are present along with the high following usage, the short term effects include:
- Euphoric Sensations
- Grandiosity And Exaggerated Self-Worth
- Increased Mood
- Increased Vigor
The long-term effects are:
- Tachycardia.
- Arrhythmia, or an abnormal heartbeat.
- Elevated blood pressure.
- Myocardial infarction, or the loss of heart muscle as a result of inadequate oxygenation brought on by insufficient blood supply.
- Angina, or tightness of the vessels-related chest discomfort.
- Deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, heart attack, and stroke are all caused by blood clots.
The Health Risks Of A Cocaine Addiction
People who use drugs or participate in high-risk activities related to drug use put themselves at high risk of catching or spreading viral illnesses such as hepatitis, the AIDS virus, or the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
This is because viruses may transmit through bodily fluids like blood.
It mostly occurs in two ways:
- When drug use impairs judgment and users engage in unprotected intercourse with an infected partner. Men and women are both susceptible to this.
- When drug users share needles or other drug-related equipment and inject drugs.
The brain is affected by drug use, which also changes your judgment and decreases your inhibitions. When you’re high, you could be more inclined to make poor choices that increase your risk of contracting or spreading HIV, such as taking other drugs or having sex without a condom.
Additionally, if you inject drugs, sharing needles or tools (or “works”) needed to make drugs, such as cotton, cookers, and water puts you at risk for contracting or spreading HIV as well as hepatitis B and C.
Because blood can contain HIV, the needles or other implements may have blood on them. For the same reason, you shouldn’t share needles or equipment used to inject silicone, hormones, or steroids.
Cocaine can also be dangerous for people with high blood pressure or an existing heart condition. That being said, even those who are healthy could be at risk for a fit, heart attack or a stroke. The risk increases if you mix cocaine with alcohol or with other drugs.
Regular cocaine use can also damage the cartilage in your nose – which can result in you losing the cartilage and having a misshapen nose.
How Is Cocaine Addiction Treated?
Nearly 6% of all admissions to substance misuse treatment involved cocaine. The bulk of people who seek treatment for cocaine (68 percent in 2013) smoke crack and are likely polydrug users, meaning they use multiple drugs.
Those who provide treatment for cocaine use should be aware that drug addiction is a complex disease involving alterations in the brain as well as a broad range of social, familial, and other environmental parameters.
The treatment of cocaine addiction (cocaine detox/ cocaine rehab) must take into account this broad context as well as any other founder mental disorders that call for additional behavioural or pharmacological interventions.
Behavioural approach: Contingency management (CM), commonly known as motivational incentives, is one type of behavioural treatment that is effective in treating cocaine use problems in patients.
Patients who refrain from using cocaine and other drugs are rewarded through programs using a voucher or special award system. The patients receive points, or “chips,” based on drug-free urine tests in the midst of drug rehab, which may be redeemed for things that promote healthy living, such as fitness classes, movie tickets, or supper at a nearby restaurant.
Patients who first abstain from cocaine and remain in therapy may benefit the most from CM. Recently, it was established that this strategy works well in community rehabilitation programs
Pharmacological approaches: There are currently no drugs available to help treat cocaine addiction, although scientists are looking into several neurological targets.
While dopamine has received most of the attention in previous studies, researchers have shown that cocaine usage also affects other neurotransmitters like serotonin, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), norepinephrine, and glutamate.
Drugs that target the dopamine receptor, a variety of dopamine receptors that are extremely prevalent in the emotion and reward regions of the brain, are now being tested by researchers.
In other studies, substances (such as N-acetylcysteine) are being tested to correct the excitatory (glutamate) and inhibitory (GABA) neurotransmission balance that chronic cocaine use upsets. Animal studies are being done on drugs that affect serotonin receptors.
