Effects of Cocaine Abuse

Continued use of cocaine can cause severe medical conditions such as:

• Heart Problems: Cocaine significantly affects your heart and cardiovascular system. The immediate high increases your heart rate and blood pressure, leading to a heart attack and other related problems. Cocaine can cause heart inflammation, leading to life-threatening complications, including heart failure.

• Fatal Overdose and Possible Death: Cocaine is a central nervous system (CNS) stimulant. It gives you the feeling of happiness and makes you want to repeat the intake when the high drops; you find yourself repeating the process and eventually overdose on the drug. This can be lethal and cause death.

• HIV and Hepatitis B and C Infections: Sharing needles and piercing objects when injecting cocaine leads to blood poisoning, which can cause blood infections. Such as HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C. if you are under the influence of cocaine, your sexual drive is highly spiked, which can lead to unprotected sex with an infected person since your judgment at that time is compromised.

• Mental Health Problems: You may suffer from depression, anxiety, and paranoia. Due to the neurochemicals reinforced in your brain within a short period, the crash from the high makes you irritable and anxious and triggers stress. Repeated performance can cause long-lasting mental problems.

• Respiratory Illness: Smoked cocaine damages the lungs and worsens asthma and other respiratory diseases. The nasal cavity may collapse after snorting cocaine for an extended period, leading to impaired sinuses and nosebleeds.

• Weight Loss and Malnutrition: Snorted, smoked, or injected cocaine makes you lose appetite and, after a while, lose weight and eventually become malnourished.

• Cognitive Defect: A wide range of cognitive functions become weakened, e.g., sustaining attention, performing motor tasks, and impulse inhibition.

• Memory Loss: When you use cocaine for a long time, the continued alteration of neurochemicals in your brain becomes impaired and alters your everyday functions, e.g., your reaction time reduces, your attention span becomes short, and eventually, you become forgetful or forget entire episodes of your life.

• Neurological Problems: You can suffer from intracerebral hemorrhage (bleeding within the brain), balloon-like bulges in the walls of cerebral blood vessels, besides stroke and seizures.

• Financial and Social Issues: Continued use of cocaine becomes an addiction that leads to impulsive reasoning, which makes decision-making not always objective. You might get into debt to support your drug abuse, sell personal items to buy cocaine, or engage in dangerous behavior to support your addiction. This does not only affect you; it also affects your friends and family members.

• Failed Relationships: Your relationships, be it with a partner, co-workers, or friends, depend heavily on your ability to act responsibly towards them. Cocaine alters your reactions and actions, damaging work relationships and performance. If you cannot act responsibly, your relationship with a partner may be irreparably affected by your cocaine abuse.