Feds: A popular drug from the disco era is making a deadly return

[Eugene]

Source: NBC News

Feds: A popular drug from the disco era is making a deadly return

Today’s narcotics abusers may be turning to cocaine in part "because there’s been a lot of bad press about other drugs."

May 5, 2019, 7:11 AM EDT
By Corky Siemaszko

The bitter lessons about the dangers of cocaine from the disco era in the 1970s may be lost on a new generation of drug abusers.

A phenomenon known as “generational forgetting” may be one of the reasons for the deadly uptick in cocaine deaths that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week, experts said.

“Certain drugs seem to go in and out of style,” Daniel Raymond, deputy director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, said. “Right now we’re seeing an uptick in cocaine use, and we’re hitting that point in the cycle where we’re starting to see more fatal overdoses.”

“Absolutely, there is a generational piece to this,” said Hans Breiter, a Northwestern University psychiatry professor and one of the world’s leading experts on how cocaine stimulates the human brain.

Today’s narcotics abusers may be turning to cocaine in part “because there’s been a lot of bad press about other drugs,” Breiter said.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-popular-drug-disco-era-making-deadly-return-n1001856

[mr_lebowski]

1. The number of fatal overdoses from Coke are always going to be relatively low ...

It's mostly people with pre-existing heart troubles, or people who've damaged their hearts with long-term abuse of the drug. It's not easy to OD and die from Cocaine in a casual use scenario, basically. An 'uptick' probably means it's jumped from 500/year to 600/year or the like. Compared to opioids or alcohol (esp if you count drunk driving deaths) it's still likely quite a low count.

[Sinistrous]

2. Remember Len Bias?

[mr_lebowski]

3. I do ... and he was discovered to have a congenital heart problem that made him susceptible ...

Granted, a fair number of people probably have them and don't know, as was teh case with him, so it's not inherently a 100% safe drug, but it's relatively safe in terms of chances of an OD death from it.

Probably a very high % of what are called Coke OD's involved a ton of alcohol as well ... coke makes you not perceive alcohol's effects nearly as strongly ... but it's still doing what it does whether you feel it as much or not.