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- What is Cocaine Addiction?
- Cocaine Effects on the Body & Brain
- How Cocaine is Addictive?
- What is Craving?
- Counter Conditioning Treatment
- Schick Shadel Cocaine Treatment
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What is Cocaine?
Cocaine, as a stimulant, mimics the action of chemicals your brain produces, thus sending messages of pleasure to your brain’s reward center. Like adrenaline, cocaine increases your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate. Cocaine also constricts blood vessels, dilates pupils, releases sugar and fat into your blood stream, and energizes the brain to increased alertness. Stimulants like cocaine increase feelings of anger, fear or agitation (fight or flight) and feelings of well-being, riding high, exhilaration or euphoria. When cocaine stimulation goes too high, it produces feelings of panic, paranoia, hallucinations and rage that can progress to potentially fatal seizures and strokes. Ultimately, the brain becomes depressed by the local anesthetic effects of cocaine, and coma and death can occur.
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Cocaine Effects on the Body
Cocaine produces an artificial feeling of pleasure by chemically mimicking certain normal brain messenger chemicals. These chemicals in cocaine produce positive feelings in response to signals from the brain.
With cocaine addiction, the brain depends on the immediate, fast, predictable drug that at the same time, is short-circuiting interest in making life’s normal rewards work. More and more confidence is placed in the cocaine, while other survival feelings are ignored and bypassed. Cocaine addiction ultimately results in a lack of concern for and confidence in other areas of life.
Effects on the Brain
Usually, a person using cocaine never gets as big a “high”, as she/he did on the first dose. This is due to the drug’s ability to suppress and deplete the brain’s production of the normal chemical messenger for positive feelings. The brain adapts to the presence of the cocaine by decreasing production of the normal chemical messenger. The user then continually requires more of the drug, trying to overcome the less pleasurable effect, ultimately crashing. The more cocaine used, the greater risk from toxic effects.
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How is it Addictive?
The first stages of cocaine addiction happen on a physical level. Then, there’s a psychological effect. People, places and activities involved with using cocaine become more important. People, places and activities or lifestyles that worked through the normal reward system, before using cocaine, become less important. In fact with time, a heavy cocaine user will actually resent people, places and activities not able to fit in with cocaine use.
In certain studies, animals would press levers to release cocaine into their blood stream, no longer concerned about eating, mating or other natural drives. They would, in fact, die in the process of giving themselves cocaine.
Is There Withdrawal from Cocaine?
Yes, however severity and length of the symptoms vary. This variance depends on the amount of damage done to your normal reward system through cocaine use and the rate of recovery. The most common symptoms are drug craving, irritability, loss of energy, depression, fearfulness, wanting to sleep a lot or difficulty in sleeping, shaking, nausea and palpitations, sweating, hyperventilation, and increased appetite. These symptoms can commonly last several weeks after you stop using cocaine.
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What is Cocaine Craving?
Cocaine craving is the result of the drug imprinting in the memory a pleasant association of euphoria with the drug. The subconscious memory motivates the individual to seek this drug because of the false imprint. The brain, in effect, has been trained that using the white powder is the fastest way to feel good. This learning process produces a new appetite or drive to seek the drug, called craving. This craving is most often activated by a memory of pleasure associated with the drug. Such memories could be a habit of using cocaine to rapidly feel good when feeling bad, or in situations with people, places and activities where a previous habit pattern of drug use has been established.
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Fast and Effective Therapy
Counter Conditioning works fast and it works effectively. Our patients can begin recovery without that immediate craving to drink or use. The doctors and nurses providing the aversion treatment, monitor the level of aversion continuously through treatment and in the follow-up sessions.
About 20 percent of addicts have at least two problems: the biochemical problem of addiction, and a psychiatric problem. This is about the same percentage of psychiatric problems seen in non-users. Both problems need to be treated to achieve success, but all too often only the psychiatric problem receives attention. Many have died of their addictions while futilely trying to find out “why they drink” or “why they use.“
A thorough detoxification followed by a comprehensive bio-psycho-social assessment and ‘differential diagnosis’ can ascertain what issues exist so that all the issues can be addressed. Mental illness and chemical dependency are both illnesses of the brain.
Counter conditioning treatment at Schick Shadel is provided to individuals addicted to alcohol, marijuana, opiates (oxy, oxycodone, OxyContin, including other prescription pain killers), Vicodin and crystal methamphetamine (crystal meth or other amphetamines).
Read more about Schick Shadel's Counter Conditioning Program »
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Cocaine Treatment Programs
Schick Shadel Hospital cocaine treatment program is a highly effective program for cocaine addiction. Using Counter Conditioning, the Schick Shadel cocaine treatment program eliminates, neutralizes or attenuates cue-induced cocaine cravings in program participants. Banished or weakened cocaine cravings may even be replaced with abstinence-promoting cocaine revulsions in some persons. For over 75 years, Schick Shadel Hospital treatment programs have offered successful non-12-step treatment primarily for alcoholism. The Schick Shadel cocaine treatment program can be completed with an initial ten day inpatient stay and two, two day follow-up inpatient stays at 30 and 90 days post-discharge. In general, cocaine dependency per se does not require medical detoxification.
Unlike other programs, Schick Shadel Hospital recognizes that cocaine addiction is actually a physical need for the drug. Drug addiction is an illness that requires medical treatment. Our cocaine treatment program helps people lose the craving for cocaine by addressing the root medical causes of cocaine addiction. Aversion treatment, extinction and covert sensitization therapies, as well as cognitive-behavioral restructuring are the means by which cocaine cue induced craving and free-floating intrusive cocaine hunger are eliminated, neutralized or attenuated.
Physicians at Schick Shadel are American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and/or American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) certified in Addiction Medicine.
Read more about Schick Shadel's Cocaine Treatment Program »
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