Drugs

How dangerous is cocaine?

In my opinion, cocaine is extremely dangerous. In fact, it's probably one of the most dangerous drugs that are available. The dangers of the cocaine can be divided into two large groups. There are psychological dangers because cocaine is highly addictive, and there are physical dangers, affecting a number of organs in the system. The psychological dangers are that cocaine simply makes you feel very good; it puts you in high, it stops you from feeling sleepy or tired, and when that effect wears off, you feel very tired, you feel dreadful, you feel the opposite to what you felt when you were under the influence of cocaine. Therefore, cocaine leads you to want to quickly take it again. It has a positive reinforcing effect. The positive effect will make you want to take it again and quickly. Therefore cocaine becomes addictive, even if you don't use it everyday. It is a type of addiction that leads the patient into false sense security that they are not addicted because they don't use during the week. It is an easy trap to fall into. From a physical point of view, it is a stimulant; that's why it stops you from feeling sleepy. But at the same time, it stimulates your heart, makes your pulse rate go higher, increases your blood pressure and stimulates your brain. It stimulates neuronal activity in the brain. When you get an excessive stimulation of either of these two organs, the activity within these organs becomes chaotic. That happens in the heart, it goes into ventricular fibrillation. From a physical point of view, this is same as cardiac arrest. Your heart does not beat effectively and therefore no blood gets pumped out of the heart. It is cardiac arrest and requires a defibrillator, in order to control ventricular fibrillation. That could be cause by cocaine. When cocaine over stimulates the brain, it can lead to a convulsion. This is an epileptic type of fit. You have uncontrolled involuntary movements in arms, legs and other muscles. It often involves respiratory muscles, which means that when you are convulsing, you are unable to breathe. Logically, if the convulsion is to be prolonged, you develop poor oxygen levels in the blood and therefore you can develop brain damage as a result of a lack of oxygen supply to the brain.

How dangerous is heroin?

Heroin is one of the most dangerous drugs that are available. Heroin is what we call a depressant drug. That means that instead of stimulating you like other drugs might do, it depresses a lot of the systems. In simple terms, if you take too much heroin, you fall asleep or even fall into a coma, which is one of the main dangers of heroin. The dangers of heroin are divided into the psychological dangers and the physical dangers. The psychological dangers of heroin, or any other drug of abuse, are that it makes you feel good. It stimulates the pleasure centres and the reward pathways in the brain - specific areas of the brain that make you feel good. It's easy to avoid disagreeable emotions, feelings and circumstances simply by taking heroin. When the effects wear off, you feel dreadful, and therefore, you may want to take heroin again. The problem with heroin is that if you've used it on a number of occasions consecutively, when you stop using it, you go into physical withdrawal. That means that you develop aches and pains. You develop intense cravings. You develop nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. It's these negative symptoms which often lead patients to using heroin again because they don't want to feel so unwell. Heroin has what we call negative reinforcing effects, because it reinforces you to take it because of negative symptoms. In terms of the physical problems with heroin, heroin slows most of the systems down. Heroin can put you to sleep and, more dangerously so, it depresses your respiratory centre; it stops you from breathing. So, unfortunately, the way you die from heroin overdose is simply that you stop breathing, and it's that lack of oxygen that eventually kills you because it kills organs such as the brain and/or the heart.

How dangerous is marijuana?

Marijuana, or cannabis, the chemical compound, is considered to be one of the more minor drugs in comparison to heroin and cocaine. I believe, however, that it still has major dangers. Marijuana is not only a dried plant that you inhale, and hence you run similar risks to cigarette smoking, but it has a fairly immediate mood altering effect, so has similar dangers to when you drink alcohol. The immediate dangers of cannabis are the combination of having drunk alcohol and having smoked cigarettes. Driving under the influence of cannabis is potentially extremely dangerous. Then there are other dangers. Cannabis can have a hallucinatory effect; it can cause hallucinations and, as a result, psychosis.