I can back that story up. Once I was at a party and ended up buying some for the group. Being my first time, I only did one demure cautious line. I found it mostly unpleasant… the rush was overwhelming, the snorting unpleasant, the taste bitter. But there was a seductive feeling of being “king of the world” that caught my attention.
The next day I found myself looking at the bag of leftovers thinking… perhaps I did it wrong? Took too much? I gave it another try and ended up consuming the entire bag in a sitting. It was 5x as much as I took the previous night, and didn’t even reach a point of satiety. That’s when I knew cocaine was a bottomless pit. Fortunately, it never came up again, and I had the sense not to seek it out.
Not sure that qualifies as “instant addiction”, because I was able to walk away. But coke is undeniably a slippery slope like none I’ve seen.
Have there been any studies of what percentage of the people who’ve died in the current opiate crisis first got hooked on lawfully-prescribed medicine, and how many were using drugs “recreationally” from the outset?
I don’t know if there are any neatly-packaged numbers like you (reasonably) want to see, but there’s shitloads of material out there about the US’s opioid crisis. Here’s a start:
my (limited) understanding of it is that the recent huge upswing in addiction and overdoses does have firm roots in the pharmaceutical industry, with companies like Purdue Pharma pitching drugs like Oxycontin to physicians and understating their potential for being addictive. Doctors write scripts handing these things out like candy, people get addicted to them (in numbers far greater than Purdue claimed) and when they can no longer afford it (or get cut off by their physician) often turn to heroin bought off the street.
and we're seeing a lot of these overdoses because it's adulterated with fentanyl, which is so potent that it's therapeutic doses are measured in *micro*grams.
Going by this one, at least we can say that heroin carries a higher risk of addiction than cocaine, tobacco, alcohol, amphetamine, cannabis, etc., etc.
