What is cocaine?

Asking yourself what is cocaine ?

Cocaine is a powerfully addictive stimulant drug made from the leaves of the coca plant native to South America. Although health care providers can use it for valid medical purposes, such as local anesthesia for some surgeries, recreational cocaine use is illegal. As a street drug, cocaine looks like a fine, white, crystal powder. Street dealers often mix it with things like cornstarch, talcum powder, or flour to increase profits. They may also mix it with other drugs such as the stimulant amphetamine, or synthetic opioids, including fentanyl. Adding synthetic opioids to cocaine is especially risky when people using cocaine don’t realize it contains this dangerous additive. Increasing numbers of overdose deaths among cocaine users might be related to this tampered cocaine. Common names for cocaine include:

• Blow
• Coke
• Crack
• Rock
• Snow

How do people use cocaine?

People snort cocaine powder through the nose, or they rub it into their gums. Others dissolve the powder and inject it into the bloodstream. Some people inject a combination of cocaine and heroin, called a Speedball. Another popular method of use is to smoke cocaine that has been processed to make a rock crystal (also called “freebase cocaine”). The crystal is heated to produce vapors that are inhaled into the lungs. This form of cocaine is called Crack, which refers to the crackling sound of the rock as it’s heated. Some people also smoke Crack by sprinkling it on marijuana or tobacco, and smoke it like a cigarette. Cocaine for sale on the dark web . People who use cocaine often take it in binges—taking the drug repeatedly within a short time, at increasingly higher doses—to maintain their high. Cocaine for sale on the dark web .

How does cocaine affect the brain?

Cocaine increases levels of the natural chemical messenger dopamine in brain circuits related to the control of movement and reward. ( where to buy cocaine online safely ). Wondering what is cocaine ? Normally, dopamine recycles back into the cell that released it, shutting off the signal between nerve cells. However, cocaine prevents dopamine from being recycled, causing large amounts to build up in the space between two nerve cells, stopping their normal communication. This flood of dopamine in the brain’s reward circuit strongly reinforces drug-taking behaviors. With continued drug use, the reward circuit may adapt, becoming less sensitive to the drug. As a result, people take stronger and more frequent doses in an attempt to feel the same high, and to obtain relief from withdrawal. Cocaine for sale on the dark web .

Short-Term Effects

Short-term health effects of cocaine include:

• extreme happiness and energy
• mental alertness
• hypersensitivity to sight, sound, and touch
• irritability
• paranoia—extreme and unreasonable distrust of others

Some people find that cocaine helps them perform simple physical and mental tasks more quickly, although others experience the opposite effect. Large amounts of cocaine can lead to bizarre, unpredictable, and violent behavior. Buying cocaine online . Cocaine’s effects appear almost immediately and disappear within a few minutes to an hour. How long the effects last and how intense they are depend on the method of use. Injecting or smoking cocaine produces a quicker and stronger but shorter-lasting high than snorting. The high from snorting cocaine may last 15 to 30 minutes. The high from smoking may last 5 to 10 minutes.

What are the other health effects of cocaine use?

Other health effects of cocaine use include:

• constricted blood vessels
• dilated pupils
• nausea
• raised body temperature and blood pressure
• fast or irregular heartbeat
• tremors and muscle twitches
• restlessness

Long-Term Effects

Some long-term health effects of cocaine depend on the method of use and include the following:

• snorting: loss of smell, nosebleeds, frequent runny nose, and problems with swallowing
• smoking: cough, asthma, respiratory distress, and higher risk of infections like pneumonia
• consuming by mouth: severe bowel decay from reduced blood flow
• needle injection: higher risk for contracting HIV, hepatitis C, and other bloodborne diseases, skin or soft tissue infections, as well as scarring or collapsed veins

However, even people involved with non-needle cocaine use place themselves at a risk for HIV because cocaine impairs judgment, which can lead to risky sexual behavior with infected partners (see “Cocaine, HIV, and Hepatitis” textbox). Cocaine for sale on the dark web . Other long-term effects of cocaine use include being malnourished, because cocaine decreases appetite, and movement disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, which may occur after many years of use. In addition, people report irritability and restlessness from cocaine binges, and some also experience severe paranoia, in which they lose touch with reality and have auditory hallucinations—hearing noises that aren’t real.

Can a person overdose on cocaine?

Yes, a person can overdose on cocaine. An overdose occurs when a person uses enough of a drug to produce serious adverse effects, life-threatening symptoms, or death. An overdose can be intentional or unintentional. Death from overdose can occur on the first use of cocaine or unexpectedly thereafter. Many people who use cocaine also drink alcohol at the same time, which is particularly risky and can lead to overdose. Others mix cocaine with heroin, another dangerous—and deadly—combination. Cocaine for sale on the dark web . Some of the most frequent and severe health consequences of overdose are irregular heart rhythm, heart attacks, seizures, and strokes. Other symptoms of cocaine overdose include difficulty breathing, high blood pressure, high body temperature, hallucinations, and extreme agitation or anxiety.

How can a cocaine overdose be treated?

There is no specific medication that can reverse a cocaine overdose. Management involves supportive care and depends on the symptoms present. For instance, because cocaine overdose often leads to a heart attack, stroke, or seizure, first responders and emergency room doctors try to treat the overdose by treating these conditions, with the intent of:

• restoring blood flow to the heart (heart attack)
• restoring oxygen-rich blood supply to the affected part of the brain (stroke)
• stopping the seizure

How does cocaine use lead to addiction?

As with other drugs, repeated use of cocaine can cause long-term changes in the brain’s reward circuit and other brain systems, which may lead to addiction. The reward circuit eventually adapts to the extra dopamine caused by the drug, becoming steadily less sensitive to it. As a result, people take stronger and more frequent doses to feel the same high they did initially and to obtain relief from withdrawal. Cocaine for sale on the dark web . Withdrawal symptoms include:

• depression
• fatigue
• increased appetite
• unpleasant dreams and insomnia
• slowed thinking

How can people get treatment for cocaine addiction?

Behavioral therapy may be used to treat cocaine addiction. Examples include:

• cognitive-behavioral therapy
• contingency management or motivational incentives—providing rewards to patients who remain substance free
• therapeutic communities—drug-free residences in which people in recovery from substance use disorders help each other to understand and change their behaviors
• community based recovery groups, such as 12-step programs

While there are no FDA-approved medications for the treatment of cocaine use disorder, NIDA supports a robust medication development pipeline in this area. buying cocaine online .

Learn More

For more information about cocaine, visit our:

• Cocaine webpage
• Commonly Used Drug Charts webpage
• NIDA for Teens Drug Facts on Cocaine – Offers resources for teens and teen influencers. Get the latest on how drugs affect the brain and body. Features videos, games, blog posts, and more! Where to buy cocaine online safely .

For more information about drug use and HIV/AIDS, visit our webpage, Drug Use and Viral Infections (HIV, Hepatitis).

How to buy cocaine

There’s an app for that

Technological advances tend to be amoral and human beings use them for good and ill. While there are an increasing number of apps designed to help drug and alcohol users in recovery, drug dealers are also taking advantage of apps to increase their customer base. Where to buy cocaine online safely . In a 2016 article for the Guardian, Leah Borromeo (@monstris) explored the use of such mainstream apps as  Instagram, Tinder, Kik and Depop for drug dealing. I have just (4 April 2018) updated the post with another app running in to legal challenges – weedmap.

How it works

The process is simple. On Instagram, people looking to buy drugs simply search via hashtags such as #weed4sale or the names of the drugs themselves (#mdma, #mephedrone etc). The customer then contacts the owner of the account and the deal moves along through direct messages. Where to buy cocaine online safely . In the case of Tinder, potential customers can swipe through profiles until they find a dealer and match with them. Buyers can either meet face-to-face or pay online and have their purchases posted to them. While online payments such as bitcoin and pre-paid gift cards such as Vanilla Visa are encrypted, Ms Borromeo says that more traceable measures such as unattributed bank transfers and PayPal are also used. Where to buy cocaine online safely ? This would seem to make it fairly easy for different police forces to boost their arrest rates. Online dealers mostly sell their drugs as “research” even though pills are put in bottles or blister packs and powders in capsules. In the UK, this means of selling New Psychoactive Substances or legal highs will soon (probably) be illegal once the government decides to implement the New Psychoactive Substance Act. It should have come into force on 6 April 2016 and is now scheduled for some time in Spring this year — the reasons for the delay are set out in this Guardian article by Alan Travis. How to buy cocaine .

A growing market

In addition to the (mis)use of mainstream apps, there are also a number of apps dedicated to accessing drugs. For a full rundown, check out this article by Annie Lesser but dedicated apps which piqued my interest for their ingenuity and entrepreneurship include: Weedmaps (sometimes called Yelp for pot)  the smartphone app Weedmaps enables users to locate dispensaries and delivery services selling the green stuff. The company has been among the breakout success stories of legalization thus far. While federal illegality in the US makes it very difficult for a company to sell cannabis in more than one state, Weedmaps faces no such constraints. As it is a technology company, content posted on its site by users isn’t regulated – even if that content relates to illegal practices. With customers on both US coasts, Canada and Spain, it’s one of very few international marijuana brands. When a visitor lands in Portland, Denver or San Francisco, they might not know the local dispensary or product names, but they know to check Weedmaps to find out. What is cocaine ? However, Weedmaps recently came under fire from Lori Ajax, California’s marijuana regulator, who said the company could face civil or criminal charges if it doesn’t stop promoting 900 unlicensed dispensaries in the state. The move comes as part of Ajax’s effort to stamp out the state’s gray and black markets; of the roughly 13.5m pounds of weed grown in California in 2016, about 80% was consumed illegally out of state. How to buy cocaine . Responding to Ajax, Weedmaps did something almost unheard of for a cannabis company: it politely told the regulator to get lost.

Buying cocaine online

Shutdowns of illicit marketplaces on the dark web lead to more drug trade in the streets. Illicit drug trade crimes for heroin, crack cocaine and marijuana increased by 5% to 10% in the US during the two weeks following shutdowns of dark-web marketplaces.

If you thought your nerdy classmate could never ever become a drug lord, you might have to change your mind. Online trade in illicit drugs has boomed during the last decade, with the fraction of drug users buying drugs online doubling from 2014 to 2017 in the US — from 7 to 14 per cent, according the Global Drug Survey. Trading illicit drugs online thrived thanks to cryptocurrencies and the rise of the dark web, a hidden part of the web where illicit drug markets prosper. These technological innovations allowed criminals to trade drugs online while being relatively anonymous and untraceable. Operators in the illicit drugs business moved online because dark-web marketplaces overcome some of the traditional problems of street drug trade. There is a much lower risk of being sold impure substances or incurring into violence while buying or selling substances. In fact, dark-web marketplaces face lower rate of scams and higher drug purity than the street drug trade, and people use them because they feel safer.

Cocaine for sale on the dark web

What happens when these websites get shut down? Do operators in the illicit drugs market start going back to the streets? Does this also cause an increase in property and violent crimes? My paper answers this question by looking at detailed data about crime in the US and combining it with information about shutdowns of dark-web marketplaces. How to buy cocaine .

I compare crimes in days immediately before and after shutdowns of dark-web marketplaces. I consider days immediately before shutdowns as a good proxy for what would have happened, in the days immediately after shutdowns, if dark-web marketplaces had not been shut down. Thanks to this counterfactual it is possible to see whether shutdowns of online drug trading platforms cause an increase in offline drug trading and crimes that are usually connected to it. Cocaine for sale on the dark web .

I find that online drug trading is closely connected to street drug trading. The two markets act as substitutes, with trade moving back to the streets when dark-web marketplaces get shut down. Drug trade, however, quickly moves back online as soon as new dark-web marketplaces open and gain the trust of buyers and sellers of substances. What is driving this result are crimes connected with the supply of drugs, such as distribution and transportation of illicit substances. An indication that it is harder for drug sellers to gain the trust of buyers after an unexpected shutdown of a dark-web marketplace. How to buy cocaine .

I find no impact on street crimes that are usually associated to drug trading, such as assaults, thefts, prostitution, and homicides. These crimes are normally associated with street drug trade as buyers tend to commit crimes to finance their addiction and drug cartels use violence as a tool for keeping their business going. Buying cocaine online . Cocaine for sale on the dark web .

To rationalise these findings, you need to think about the illicit drugs market as similar to the labour market. Looking for a new job is costly. You need to go through job listings, prepare a CV, get interviewed, and when you finally get a job that you like, you will think twice before going through that time-consuming and nerve-wracking experience again. The same holds for buyers and sellers of illicit drugs. When a buyer matches a seller they will normally engage in a long-lasting relationship. Shutdowns of dark-web marketplaces break this relationship, pushing un-matched buyers and sellers to look for a new match in the streets. However, buyers and sellers that were operating online are ready to go back to it, as soon as they have the possibility to do so, as they consider online trading safer. What is cocaine ?

These findings show how shutting down dark-web marketplaces has a relatively short-run impact on street drug trade. However, they prove once again how hard it is to fight drug trade and drug addiction by trying to eliminate all possible sources of illicit drugs, which is known as a supply-side policy. Drug users and criminal organisations quickly learn to adapt to these policies and find alternative ways to keep buying and selling drugs. This became incredibly clear during the COVID-19 lockdown, when dark-web marketplaces became even more popular, as trading in the streets became much riskier. buying cocaine online .