It’s “Cocaine is a hell of a drug”, and that was Rick James.
I tried it a couple of times many years ago and it was mildly unpleasant, like if you drink too much coffee. It didn’t even keep me awake, let alone produce any sort of good feeling.
If someone offered it to me now though, I’d probably try again because caffeine affects me much more than it used to, so maybe cocaine would too. Finding something I like better than having a family, friends, houses, cars, teeth, etc. would be nice, because I like those things and anything that made them seem unimportant must be really great.
Never tried it, or even seen it recreationally, but over the years, I’ve had friends who used it, and my brother has admitted to doing it when he was young and stupid. None of them had anything positive to say about the overall experience.
I’ll never forget the guy I worked with when I was in college who told the story many times about when he tried it. There was some at a party, so he snorted some, and didn’t like it. He felt like he’d drunk about 2 pots of coffee all at once, and was relieved that it wore off after about 20 minutes - at which time he had an overwhelming desire to take some more. :eek: 
That he had this urge to once again use something that unpleasant meant to him that he needed to AVOID it.
I have, however, handled it many times as a pharmacist. It is very safe when used in this context.
I move in Dutch intellectual granola circles, and almost no-one I know has ever used coke.
The one guy who tried it was a drinker and daily pot-smoker. He said he sometimes treated himself to a bit of cocaine at New Years Eve, but that it felt “too good” so he limited use to once a year. As far as I know, he did.
I have never done coke, even though the afore mentioned guy once offered me to go out and get some. I had heard that coke just made you feel “fast and self assured”. And I am “fast and self-assured” pretty often, so I figured coke couldn’t offer me anything I hadn’t experienced before.
Besides, and this may seem like a made-up reason but it is the honest truth: I thought coke should be boycotted as long as it fuels crime and exploited poor Columbians.
I might try it if it was grown on sustainable legal farms. 
I don’t know. My understanding is that this might’ve been true 25 years ago, but that cocaine usage went down after that. Because of its cost, it was fashionable in moneyed circles, and not many people realized how addicting it could be. It ruined a lot of lives in those circles, and and then people–especially employers in the corporate world–started to take it more seriously, and stopped turning a blind eye to its use among employees. Meanwhile, cheap, domestic meth production started to grow tremendously. The stereotype of the low-income meth user makes us think that the well-to-do don’t use it, but I don’t think that’s true. I gather that both drugs have similar effects (though I haven’t tried either), and the market for cocaine went down, with meth filling in that place, but on a wider social spectrum, because of its lower cost. I think a lot a people start using either not just for the effect of the drug itself, but also because both drugs allow you to stay up longer drinking without passing out. Then a certain percentage of those people end up addicted to the drug itself.
Coke is still pretty prevalent in restaurant kitchens (IME), maybe notsomuch in the corporate world.
But my point was that I think Urbanredneck is wrong when he says “Their must be literally millions of US coke addicts. Yet I’ve never known but one.”.
Actually, re-reading that, maybe he’s never known an actual addict, but I promise he’s known a user. Like I said earlier, since, for the casual user, it doesn’t get you high/drunk/inebriated, doesn’t rot your teeth or wreck your life etc, it’s pretty impossible to know a coke user from someone that doesn’t use.
It was all over my social group in the 80’s (my best friend was a rock musician, which no doubt skewed things quite a bit). I never tried it, too afraid I’d like it too much. In the old days there was a bumper sticker that read “My other car went up my nose”.
I have the rather unfortunate problem of nasal herpes, contracted while sharing a rolled up note with my dealer, who only told me post-snort that he had the problem.
While my cocaine use was never particularly regular, and is now non-existent, the cold-sore in my right nostril makes its appearance every 3 to 4 months.
Remember kids, drugs are bad, m’kay?
Richard Pryor may have liked it a bit, also…
Apparently coke is back. I shudder to think how kids pay for it, but it’s in the high schools in my town and surrounding towns. I live in a semi-rural area about an hour north of Toronto. I don’t know if Meth is an issue, not having teenagers to keep me apprised. I learned of the coke from my hairdresser, who has a teenager.
I did my share of coke as a young adult, but then it was an “adult indulgence” of the eighties. I knew some people who moved on to free-basing, then crack. It didn’t turn out well for them.
That’s something I haven’t heard. I always thought that it’s still used more recreationally in Europe than the States, and I don’t know about Canada. But then I looked around and found that this UN Office on Drugs and Crime report from last year says:
[QUOTE=UN Office on Drugs and Crime]
The most problematic use of cocaine is in the Americas. In North America, cocaine use has been declining since 2006, partly due to a sustained shortage. However, more recently, a slight increase in prevalence has been observed in the United States, as has an increase in maritime seizures.
[/quote]
I guess there are significant differences between abuse and recreational use in various areas. In the L.A. area, it’s still relatively low on the list for admissions to treatment centers (6.8%, in L.A. County, compared to 23% for opioids, and nearly 19% for meth), according to this report from last year:
[QUOTE=National Institute on Drug Abuse]
Primary cocaine treatment admissions accounted for 6.8 percent of total Los Angeles County alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment admissions in the first half of 2013, continuing a downward trend (from 13 percent of total admissions in CY 2009 to 7.5 percent in CY 2012). Among drug reports from items analyzed by NFLIS laboratories in the first half of 2013, 18.5 percent were identified as cocaine; this represented a decrease from CY 2012 levels, when cocaine reports constituted 20.2 percent of the total drug reports.
[/quote]
That last number is interesting, but it involves actual crime investigation testing, and I believe the number is as high as it is because it includes crack with cocaine, which I suppose in some ways is not quite the same drug. In any case, routine crack dealings are more likely to get caught up in law enforcement than cocaine, I think it’s safe to say.
The problem now is that something like 90% of cocaine is laced with a chemical called Levamisole, which is used on cows. It basically destroys white blood cells and cripples your immune system for a short while.
I made the mistake of using coke on back-to-back evenings when I was dealing with a cold. I thought I was going to die the next week, but I couldn’t very well go to the doctor and say “Hey I did some cocaine and I’m worried my immune system is crippled and it’s causing this cold to be so severe.”
Even a minor admission like that will follow you for the rest of your life. I would forever be branded as a “drug user” on my medical records.
A really stupid, fucked-up flaw in our (otherwise very-good) medical system.
I’ve been around it, used by highly educated people casually. It isn’t as casual as marijuana, but people use it when out etc. and it isn’t weird in the sense that pulling out a meth pipe might be. I am not aware of any daily users. No 80s-style coke parties, just people doing key bumps in a bathroom or something. If at a party, nobody whips it out as the main attraction.
It’s somewhat fun but doesn’t do much for me. Never had to pay for it.
So, what is it about cocaine?
Well, it intensifies your personality.
But, what if you’re an asshole?
Bill Cosby-Himself. Probably the funniest stand up comedy routine I’ve ever seen.
The same way they pay for heroin here in the Midwest. I’ll put it this way: People tend to blame crime on the people who live in the gang-infested neighborhoods (i.e. mostly black and/or Hispanic, at least in my city) but if the people who lived in the wealthy, mostly-white neighborhoods would stop giving their kids so much money, that gang problem would largely dry up and blow away overnight because they would lose their funding. :dubious:
On a related note, a few years ago I saw a TV show about heroin addiction in suburbia (and let’s face it, that’s when it finally becomes important) and they were at a parents’ support group. It was all women, and the commentator said that fathers could attend but they had never seen one. :eek: I thought that spoke volumes right there.
Where do you live, that someone like this would be flagged so heavily on your medical records?
Levamisole is an anti-parasitic agent that was used for colon cancer for some time, until less toxic agents came along. Where did you hear that cocaine is cut with this? Around here, we’ve had issues with people stealing powdered baby formula, to cut coke or meth.
Too bad he wasn’t a heavy user. That stuff is better than alcohol at keeping your dick limp.
This question, OP, is something that has bugged me for years. Everyone, and by that I mean every one of my friends who is roughly my age, has stories to tell about all the coke they did and the huge coke-fueled parties they went to, and how it was everywhere and everyone did it… and yet I only saw it a few times, and the few times I used it, it did nothing for me and seemed awfully expensive for a drug that didn’t seem to have any effect on me. I finally had to sit down and think about my own history and why all my friends had this coke history that seemed strangely absent from my life. It’s not like I had been a hermit in the 80s, or that I had any objection to using it, so how did I miss it?
In the early 80s, after bouncing around and living it up doing youthful stupid things (and spending a lot of money on drugs – none of it cocaine) I decided to get serious and quit neglecting my intellect and future. Go to college, in other words. By then, I was older than the average college student, so didn’t make a lot of friends at school, and I was also dead serious about my studies and making the most of the opportunities for intellectual improvement that university life offered. I studied hard, lived overseas on study abroad programs, and met the egg-headed gal I eventually married. Right after college we worked overseas and then moved back to the states and bought a house, started a family, I found a new, rewarding career, and basically joined adult life. So I was busy at university and studying/working abroad. That’s what I was doing instead of cocaine. Huh.
I had it offered to me at a couple of parties in college (early 90s). I declined because even though I did some stupid stuff in college, I knew how fast I’d gotten hooked on cigarettes in high school, and I knew I couldn’t afford an addiction to coke.
I’ve not run across it since then.
I was always a bit wary of it too, knowing that I had a sort of weakness for any drug with an abuse/addiction potential and especially those feel good amphetamine-type drugs. Anyone remember cross-tops? I know I did those as fast as I could get my hands on them all through the late 70s. Then I moved out of state and lost my main drug connections and decided I was really better off without it.