here’s a question to baffle the literati. If one uses cocaine on a regular basis, but that regularity is once per month in small doses, is the person an addict? Are they in a serious health problem, or are they okay and having fun?
bump
There was a very similar thread here previously, but based on alcohol.
It’s not a similar thread if it’s about alcohol. If a person uses cocaine every month in small doses, they are very likely to, at some point, begin using it more frequently, perhaps far more frequently. Also, cocaine can be cardiotoxic (causing death of heart muscle) even in small doses, and people have been known to die suddenly after using it for this reason.
Also, people die over cocaine. Whole populations are oppressed because of cocaine, and governments are corrupted by it. All kinds of violence occur at various stages in the manufacture and distribution of cocaine, ranging from assassinations in distant countries to street-level violence. There is probably no less ethical product you could buy (probably not even heroin, and it’s certainly far worse than diamonds or oil).
This isn’t baffling. The person is probably not an addict in the way that someone who uses cocaine every day is an addict, but the substance in question is very dangerous and has an extraordinarily large potential for psychological addiction. And they’re very likely to turn into a self-absorbed, egocentric jerk.
Seeing as how this is GQ and not GD, can you offer cites for any of the opinion you presented here as fact, Roches?
And peculiar hailstone, not to go all junior Mod on you, but since you started a thread about bumping threads I’m going to suggest here that you wait longer than 22 minutes before bumping your threads. Wait more like 22 hours and give the Teeming Millions a chance.
excuse me. next time i won’t write bump. would that keep your dander low?
Uh, Roches, only the ethically compromised buy oil?
It has nothing to do with my dander. It has everything to do with not wasting your time bumping a thread that’s been in existence for less than half an hour. Hard as it may be for you to imagine, not every one of your numerous threads is immediately captivating to the general populace of the board, nor will every question be answered instantaneously. I’m sorry that you chose to take amiss what I intended as a helpful suggestion, but I would further suggest that the possibility exists that someone who’s been on the boards for four years might possibly have a better idea of the ebbs and flows of the board than someone who’s been here for four days. Obviously, you don’t know the rules and customs of this board, otherwise you wouldn’t have opened a thread (in the wrong forum) about the etiquette of bumping threads at all. You needn’t worry, though, in future about my offering you suggestions. You’ve made it clear that you aren’t interested.
Please enjoy the rest of your thread.
It IS a similar thread. This forum is GQ and the OP was about the definition of the word ‘addict’ relating to Cocaine. The thread I linked to was about the definition of the word ‘addict’ in relation to Alcohol.
Your post is opinionated, non-factual and does not even attempt to answer the OP. If you want to have a rant about Cocaine usage then open a thread in the pit.
There is no flat answer to this question – “Small doses” is subjective. Purity of cocaine (and potentially dangerous substances cocaine is cut with) must work into the equation. Individual body chemistry must be considered. What could be “okay and fun” for person A, who could do this every 30 days and live to be 90 years old, may kill person B the first time s/he tries it.
I would not personally define someone who engagaes in a habit once a month as an “addict” , but I am not a doctor so take that for what it’s worth.
I think we need to distinguish between being a drug abuser (a term which itself is open to a lot of debate, but which need not involve addiction) and drug addict, which refers to a person unable to quit taking the drug.
Formally speaking, i.e., dropping off extended metaphors trendy medical and/or otherwise, addiction necessarily involves withdrawal symptoms, distinctive unpleasantnesses that the addict experiences when deprived of the drug or attempting to come off it.
Cocaine addiction does not reconcile with withdrawal symptoms that only kick in if you cease getting your cocaine on a once-monthly basis. People who are addicted to cocaine get the sharp hooks within hours of their last dose, it’s rather famous for that.
The “extended metaphors” of which I speak are concepts such as “addicted to marijuana” (it isn’t addictive) or “addicted to LSD” (likewise). People speak of “psychological addiction” and of someone being “addicted” because they “crave the drug”, but mostly that’s politicized nonsense unless this type of addiction can be distinguished from my intermittent craving for a good steak or a basket of well-fried calamari with marinara sauce. And “distinguished” has to be qualitative, it can’t be “well, what makes it addictive in this case is that it’s a drug, dude”.
In my medically underinformed opinion, cocaine is a sufficiently risky substance with enough nasty primary and side effects to enough people enough of the time that I’d be wary of saying there’s any use of it that doesn’t scroll off into drug abuse. But anyone who snurffs a line or smokes some crack in a pipe every 25-35 days and has no difficulty putting it down in the mean time is no addict.
Referring to every ill-advised use of illicit recreational drugs as “addiction” weakens the impact of the word, which oughta scare the hell out of people and will cease to do so if misapplied. Genuinely addictive drugs are out there, including many forms of amphetamine ranging from crystal meth to adderal, diazepines like valium and clonazepam and paxil, opiates like morphine and heroin, synthetic opiates like dilaudid and demerol and codeine, and legal recreationals nicotine and alcohol. Some of these addictions are miserably horrid to kick, and the horrors of getting hooked by a recreational substance you can’t easily decide to stop taking if and when you no longer want to be on it are just in a totally different category than those of simply being subject to the effects of an intoxicant that doesn’t penalize you for walking away from it.
Which would make them a likely prospect for banning at no distant date! 
So I guess the lesson here is that dope and The Dope don’t mix, kids!
Well, I risk the ire of many groups (some professional) but here’s how I see it personally, and I think most doctors would generally agree:
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They are not physiologically addicted. I’ve seen studies that hint otherwise, but to me: 30 days far more time than needed to clear cocaine (and its immediate effects) completely from the system. There are no direct sequelae 30 days after a dose. IMHO, calling this ‘addiction’ would severely straining the word
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They are not psychologically addicted by most definitions. Some groups might consider long term patterned abuse like this to be a possible “addiction”, but I’d consider it [at high risk of being] a very brittle pre-addictive state with a high potential for collapse into addiction. I’d interpret “long term” to be on the scale of (on or more) years, when we’re talking about monthly doses.
On the other hand, regular use without (what I consider) formal psychological addiction can still induce sporadic powerful cravings much later, often triggered by external stimuli. The perceived “need” can be quite strong (e.g ex-smokers who ‘relapse’ years or decades later.) Call this an addiction or not, it’s definitely a potential on-going burden that anyone would rather be without.
- Are they risking serious health problems. Yes. Among other things, cocaine can make cardiac muscle “irritable” (sensitive and hypercontractile). This can cause alternate conduction pathways to become viable. I’m not talking about damage done by cocaine -that’s a different matter- I’m talking about the normal fiber-to-fiber variations and patterns found in any heart. A little bad luck, and your heart might fall into (for example) a self-sustaining cyclical pattern or a rapid irregular pattern that doesn’t pump blood effectively. Death can follow in minutes.
I’m not saying this is the most common cause of cocaine-induced death, or even the “greatest risk”. I don’t know the stats on the various pathophysiological mechanisms, and I can’t think of any general clinical use for them [when treating, you deal with what you’re facing, common or not]. I’m saying that this one risk, to which no one can know they are immune, is enough to say that any use of cocaine carries a certain [small] risk of death – even in otherwise healthy people who are well experienced with the drug.
- Are they doing cumulative damage to themselves? I’ve seen enough accounts and studies (of varying strength) that I really don’t want to venture an opinion. I’m not sure that it’s particularly relevant, since each use carries an immediate risk of death. Sure, it might be nice to think that you can stop, and it’ll be “no harm, no foul”, or to know that if you stopped years ago, it’s like you never strayed, but as I said: you deal with what you have. As a practical matter, does it really matter if you get a little bit of consistent damage with each dose, or when you know you’re risking a larger, sporadic risk from a “bad event”.
Does it matter if you kill a few brain or heart cells with every dose, or maybe kill a larger number, possibly unnoticed, every five or ten doses ‘if things go bad’? Such answers would be fascinating and useful to a research scientist, but I don’t see how they could be of more than academic interest to a user in the long term.
- Are they okay and having fun? Even by the most optimistic scenario, **I’d say they might be [currently] okay and having fun while dancing on a high wire. ** Personally, I’d consider it my duty as a friend to get them to stop before they fall off, even if they’re sure they won’t (or don’t care if they do)
I’m not moralizing. I wouldn’t judge a circus tightrope walker, but I’d recognize their work was very dangerous. Alas, with cocaine every user seems to think they are an expert on their use. When I think of all the injuries from dumb amateur stunts, or even the general ‘ignorance’ Cecil’s been trying to fight, I’d call it a common human trait – powerfully enhanced and reinforced by the effects of cocaine. Either way, the fun stops when someone loses [more than] an eye
This is not medical advice. It is at best a medically informed personal opinion. IMHO recreational cocaine use isn’t good. Period.
I tend to think that a person has a definite substance problem when they continue to use a substance despite strong negative consequences. Especially if they use the substance in a situation which really, really, really calls for abstinence at that time. Such as showing up drunk for a big meeting with the boss, showing up stoned at court, showing up tripping on acid at your parent-teacher conference.
If those things are happening, I personally think you can toss the whole “physical/psychological addiction” jargon out the window and assume that said person has significant substance abuse problems.
Does cocaine once a month indicate a problem? If they’re spending money they can’t afford to, or getting arrested every time, or snorting it in wildly inappropriate situations, the frequency of the use doesn’t matter a damn.
IMHO
I’m going to offer some personal anecdotes, because this subject has touched me personally several times.
I have two friends who use cocaine intermitently - approximately every night for four or so nights, then not again for a while. They do space out their usage, but don’t worry about it particularly. They also use meth periodically. They seem to have no problems with addiction or inappropriate usage, by Qadgop’s definition, to either substance.
I have another dear friend who used crack cocaine very carefully, not exceeding once every three weeks. He has not had any previous problems with addiction to anything, and he’s been exposed to a lot. After a mere 6 usages (with 3 weeks space between them) he lost control completely on the 7th usage. This scared him terribly, and he swore off crack completely. Until three weeks later, when he again couldn’t control himself (missed work, was abusive to his girlfriend, wouldn’t stop doing the drug until it was all gone - total loss of control). He’s clean now, but it took hard, hard work on his part and major intervention and massive support on the part of his girlfriend and other friends.
So yes, you can get addicted to crack cocaine even when you are spacing the usages out far longer than it takes for the drug to clear your system. I do not know if the same is true of regular cocaine. I do know that I would not wish that particular nightmare on my worst enemy.
mischievous
I really didn’t expect that kind of response. But here:
It’s not a similar thread if it’s about alcohol.
Alcohol and cocaine are very different drugs. The arguments put forth to illustrate that occasional use of alcohol is not dangerous do not necessarily apply to cocaine. It may be possible that even occasional use of cocaine is dangerous.
If a person uses cocaine every month in small doses, they are very likely to, at some point, begin using it more frequently, perhaps far more frequently.
I can’t find any references for this, but there’s an interesting thing about underreporting of use in Drug Alcohol Depend. 2000 Jan 1;57(3):193-202. This statement was made by extension of the idea that cocaine is psychologically addictive.
Also, cocaine can be cardiotoxic (causing death of heart muscle) even in small doses, and people have been known to die suddenly after using it for this reason.
A Medline search obtains the following references, among others (47 in total for ‘cocaine cardiotoxicity’):
Drug Chem Toxicol. 2000 May;23(2):339-48
Acad Emerg Med. 2001 Mar;8(3):211-22. (This is about mixtures of cocaine with alcohol, which would be common in a club setting)
J Clin Anesth. 1999 Aug;11(5):419-24
Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 1999 Jul;63(3):489-500.
…people die over cocaine…
I thought this was well-known. I don’t really have access to anything that searches news wires but I am quite certain that it would be possible to find a large number of stories about people that were killed in cocaine-related murders. My argument is that an occasional user of cocaine may not want to use a product that is associated with such violence.
There is probably no less ethical product you could buy (probably not even heroin, and it’s certainly far worse than diamonds or oil).
I suggested heroin as another drug that has a lot of violence and political corruption attached to it, as evidenced for example in the Taliban’s opium export. North Korea also obtains significant funding from the sale of heroin. Similar activities occur with cocaine. I was not suggesting that diamonds or oil are unethical to purchase and I certainly did not suggest that people who purchase oil are unethical, but there are definite ethical issues associated with both of these products.
The person is probably not an addict in the way that someone who uses cocaine every day is an addict, but the substance in question is very dangerous and has an extraordinarily large potential for psychological addiction.
This was my key statement, and I’m not sure if it was considered. Though it is largely opinion, it directly addresses the OP. The full text of an article on the neurobiology of psychological cocaine addiction is available here. I said ‘large potential for psychological addiction’; this does not imply that it would be impossible to continue using the drug occasionally forever. It does mean that there is a significant probability that use would escalate, probably more so than alcohol, or, say, marijuana or LSD.
And they’re very likely to turn into a self-absorbed, egocentric jerk.
I really did intend this to be opinion, based loosely on anecdotal evidence, but Actas Esp Psiquiatr. 2002 Mar-Apr;30(2):91-8 describes the unusually high incidence of antisocial personality disorder in cocaine users. It is possible that people with this disorder (typified by arrogance, egocentricity and lack of shame) are more likely to become cocaine users rather than the drug inducing the disorder. A number of other studies describe cocaine addicts who have antisocial personality disorder.
Hopefully, these references will illustrate that my first post was not based on wild Republican opinion; some of it was opinion based on facts for which I did not recall the sources. I should also qualify the entire post with my own opinion on recreational drugs: “Drug abuse is a public health problem, not a legal problem.” - R. M. Julien, A Primer of Drug Action
Some long-time Dopers know I used to work in the addictions field. As a disclaimer, I wasn’t a “counselor” or work directly with patient treatment, however, I was required to learn something of addictions to do the job and picked up more knowledge after four years in the business.
For those in the trenches, that is, those actually working to help people solve their problems, the working rule of thumb for any substance use is this: is it causing a problem?.
Does your use of a substance cause legal, financial, social or family problems? If it does, you have a problem that needs to be taken care of.
(note that this approach avoids some of the squabbling over ethics you can fall into here)
Thus, if the hypothetical person in the OP snorted once a month, could afford the snort, function in society (go to work, pay the bills), it wasn’t disrupting their family life/initimate relations, and they avoided arrest and legal complications… well, they’re not addicted. PLEASE NOTE that that statement does not address the legality, morality, or possible future consequnces of their drug use, it only discusses today
Some drugs are more likely to cause problems than others, and some individuals are more likely to have problems than others. There ARE people who have tried heroin, didn’t like it, and never used it again. There are a LOT MORE who got hooked the first or second time they used it. Alcohol, for most people, is less likely to cause problems/addiction but there are some individuals for whom it is poison from day one. Cocaine as originally used by the natives of South America isn’t terribly destructive or addictive - people use it for decades and are fully functional members of their society. Cocaine that is refined and mainlined or snorted is a much, much more problematic substance. Opium, even in it’s “natural” state of poppy tar has long been known to be a problematic substances - now that it’s refined it’s even more so. Pot? Much less likely to be a problem, but it really does seriously mess up some individuals. I don’t buy the argument it’s less dangerous than alcohol. I don’t think it’s any more dangerous than alcohol, either. Even something as common and innocuous as caffeine can become a serious problem in some individuals, causing both physical and mental problems.
As for “what is addiction”… it has more to do with the mental effects than the physical. I realize this is news to some people. Fact is, you can have someone - let’s say they were in a horrible accident and required lots and lots of painkiller - who is physically dependent on morphine, that is, if they stopped taking it suddenly they would have withdrawal symptoms, but who is NOT an addict. That is - they don’t take the substance to get “high”, they don’t engage in drug-seeking behavior, they don’t screw up their lives to get the drug. You taper the dose so they come off the drug with minimal symptoms and they don’t endure cravings, they don’t mentally suffer, they get off the drug and have no desire to take it afterwards. That’s not addiction, that’s appropriate medical use.
On the other hand, you get something like cocaine that doesn’t cause withdrawal symptoms anything like what you get with heroin and you have people willing to kill, allow themselves to be sexually used and abused, and who would sell their mothers, wives, and children to get even a crumb more of the drug — THAT’s addiction. When you seek the drug even at great cost to yourself.
And that’s why we have terms like “gambling addiction” - it’s a recognition of the same compulsive mental state that drives a person to act against their own interests, sometimes in extremely harmful and painful ways. (The theory I’ve heard is that they’re hooked on the adrenalin rush and the sensations of all the stress hormones running through them, plus the jolt from the occassional payoff)
Since a lot of the same techniques (although not all of them) that work for drug and alcohol addictions also help … oh, call them “pseudoaddictions” if you can’t handle “addictions” - these other conditions it seemed to make sense to speak of them as addictions.
So yes, it IS a related thread to the one about alcohol.
Of course, there are those who say that because crack use is illegal ANY use causes legal issues and therefore ANY use of ANY illegal drug is, by definition, “abuse” and “addiction”… but that’s stretching the term to breaking as I see it. I can see the argument for abuse - you are, after all, breaking the law - but that’s not addiction. Addiction is when you are compelled to ask the nice police officer who just cuffed you if you can have your baggie of white powder back and, by the way, can you borrw the straw from his soft drink for just a minute…