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Drug Information – Cocaine

What is Cocaine?
The drug cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride. It is derived from the leaves of the erythroxylon coca bush, which grows in parts of South America.

Cocaine and Crack, What is the Difference?
Crack is cocaine. Cocaine is the powdered form of the drug and crack is the smoke able form. Crack gets its name from the crackling sound it makes when it is burned in a glass pipe. Cocaine is a white fine textured powder, like flour or baby powder. It is usually sniffed up the nose, but it is sometimes diluted and injected into a vein. Crack is chemically processed into small, rock-like chunks that are white or light colored. Powder cocaine is often cut with other substances like strychnine (rat poison), caffeine, cornstarch, or talcum powder. Some of the additives add to the drug’s toxicity.

One important difference between powder cocaine and crack is that crack takes effect in about 10 seconds instead of 15-30 minutes. Crack’s high lasts less than 10 minutes, rather than 30-60 minutes for cocaine. The faster and shorter high of crack makes it even more quickly addictive than powder cocaine. Both are illegal, highly controlled drugs with severe mandatory jail time attached to possession.

What are the Street Names of Cocaine?
Both powder cocaine and crack are sometimes called Coke, C, or Cane. Cocaine in powder form may be called lines, rails, blow, snow, or flake. Crack is sometimes called rock or base.

Coked Up
A cocaine high may make users feel joyful or excited, at first. On cocaine, people have poor judgment and decision making skills. They often go many hours without wanting sleep or food. Users are exceedingly talkative, nervous, jumpy and paranoid. Anxiety, especially about being caught using, is typical. Cocaine abusers tend to be irritable and irrational, and are often out of control or violent.

What does using cocaine do to the Body?
In the short term, cocaine can cause: dilated pupils, constricted blood vessels, dry mouth, increased heart rate and blood pressure, decreased appetite, abdominal pain and nausea, blurred vision, fever, extreme mental alertness and insomnia, tremors and dizziness, muscle twitches and spasms.

What are the long term effects of using cocaine?
There is no safe way to use cocaine! The health risks become much worse when combined with alcohol or other drugs. Cocaine’s many dangers include: Mood disturbances, nosebleeds; lost sense of smell; permanent nasal damage, auditory hallucinations, lost control of bowels and bladder, irregular heart rhythm; and altered blood pressure, heart infection or heart attack, difficulty breathing or respiratory failure, brainfections, strokes, seizures, and coma, risky behavior, including unsafe sex, infertility in both sexes, miscarriage or birth defects, sudden death.

Addiction
Cocaine is wickedly addictive. A cocaine high lasts less than thirty minutes, then users spend the other 23 ½ hours looking for more. Anyone can become addicted to powder cocaine or crack; some immediately. Addiction studies have shown that laboratory rats will choose cocaine over food and water. Rats will also take huge electric shocks or press a lever over 10,000 times to get a dose of cocaine.

Contact our defense lawyers, at Law Office of Anthony B. Cantrell, to discuss your drug charges today.

Law Offices of Anthony B. Cantrell
Cocaine Charges Defense Attorney
San Antonio, Texas
New Braunfels, Texas
866-604-7814