I practiced in Florida when cocaine was worth 10 or more thousand dollars a kilo (2.2 pounds) back in the 80s.
Big business supplying idle Americans, and very violent dealings. In that time anybody with a cell phone was assumed to be a cocaine player, how times have changed.
I will admit I don’t keep track much anymore. Don’t see much cocaine abuse because it is hidden and doesn’t end up in EDs like alcohol and sedatives.
However that doesn’t mean it has lost it’s cache’ with the middle class and upper class–it is still the drug du jour for fancy pants Americans and a serious part of the drug trade.
There is a big medical literature on cocaine related acute heart conditions that I think is mostly driven by emergency physicians who are dilettantes and like to look stylish. I am still waiting for my first cocaine heart disease case after practicing for 40 plus years in the ED.
Mostly cocaine is under the radar for emergency medicine, but certainly not for law enforcement. I have a 20 year career as a jail doc, so I am somewhat familiar.
AND
I have a friend and colleague, Chief Deputy Duvall, Brown County Sheriff, who was formerly no. 2 in charge of the narcotics division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. He helps me understand things like drugs, which are a mystery and have a big tail and impact, no doubt, on society and law enforcement, in numerous ways.
He tells me that although the cocaine abuse problem was a middle class thing for a couple of decades, and promoted by the Hollywood fancy set, when crack cocaine for a less exorbitant price came on the scene in the late 80s early 90s the game changed and criminality and violence became an increasing part of the cocaine scene.
Cocaine was always stylish, a favorite of the Hollywood and ladeedaa set, but when crack rocks sold for a small price, times changed and cocaine use migrated into the lower and street criminal class, as a market item as well as preferred drug of abuse–makes you strong, quick, smart, invincible. What else could you ask for?
Medically cocaine is a mind altering stimulant that improves one’s sense of power, accomplishment and even superiority.
I need some of that.
But it ain’t real.
Cocaine was popular with even professionals and middle class people. Recreational stimulant. Make you feel very good about yourself, and then the abuse makes you very habitual. Some spent their money on cocaine and went into a spin. Too bad, but isn’t that the story of bad habits?
The exhilaration, release and the excitement is the wrecker and some couldn’t let go, but most realized that they had to avoid heavy use or they were goners.
I saw a lot of heroin dabblers in Harlem in the early 70s, and surely the same is true of cocaine dabblers in the middle class and even lower classes in the past 20 plus years, particularly since the advent of crack cocaine.
Still very attractive to the air heads.
We ask people if they use cocaine but don’t see cocaine complications much. It’s become something of an inner city thing since smoking crack became the way for losers to think they were Richard Pryor, or somebody with a mythical life. What a bunch of BS, a drug is goin’ to make you a rich celebrity?
Abuse of cocaine never was much a big health thing–but I can’t even imagine how using cocaine would be anything but bad news for a person, a career or a family. And, a big and, it’s expensive.
Cocaine effects on babies are nothing like fetal alcohol syndrome that produces brain damage and dysmorphic features that are indicia of major problems. I only had one patient with fetal alcohol syndrome, but that was enough.
John Dale Dunn MD JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency Carl R. Darnall Army Med Center Fort Hood, Texas Medical Officer, Sheriff Bobby Grubbs Brown County, Texas 325 784 6697 (h) 642 5073 (c)
Hard to tell the difference between fetal alcohol and crack baby with my personal experience of an adopted niece with both who, at the age of 2, stood in place and jumped up and down for hours at a time. Being born high on crack gives you a different start in life. Don’t do it to your child, even if their heart isn’t affected. Period.
And yes, at the age of 18, she’s gone to the self-destruct cycle she was born to.
Do a quick search for “crack baby myth”. The term came from anti-drug organizations trying to reduce usage through public service announcement. I support their goal, but their research was, at best, flawed.
crack was just a cheap way to get a cocaine high.
chrystalized cocaine was sold cheap not as granular and smoked.
available to the poor and down and out.
crack cocaine was a new thing because it made expensive granular cocaine available to the streets.
crack babies had some effects from stimulants, but it was overrated and didn’t kill any babies.
made a very dramatic story, didn’t it–babies jittery because their mommas did crack.
which brings me to another panicmongering thing that was much more pervasive, fetal alcohol syndrome, which was real.
However it was nonsense as presented by the panicmongers in the press, and yet, it resulted in the warnings on all bottles of alkeehal–don’t drink when you’re pregnant.
BS. fetal alcohol syndrome was the result of drunken pregnant women, not women who took alcohol in moderation.
I will tell you I had a baby I delivered in the 70s and then took care of when he was old enough to identify that he was a funny looking kid. That was the time of the inaugural of the fetal alcohol syndrome, it had just been discovered and I learned about it as a new and troubling problem. If it existed, and I’m sure it did, before that, it was probably just called retarded baby.
Funny looking kid–the fetal alcohol thing is real. Mother was a real drunk however, not a person who drank in moderation. Wide set eyes, flat nose, slow development. A real deal.
John Dale Dunn MD JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency Carl R. Darnall Army Med Center Fort Hood, Texas Medical Officer, Sheriff Bobby Grubbs Brown County, Texas 325 784 6697 (h) 642 5073 (c)
Too right it did. Especially in the mind of certain drill sergeants, once upon a time….
the second statement covers it–crack babies did have a certain cache’ didn’t it?
John Dale Dunn MD JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency Carl R. Darnall Army Med Center Fort Hood, Texas Medical Officer, Sheriff Bobby Grubbs Brown County, Texas 325 784 6697 (h) 642 5073 (c)
Abuse of cocaine never was much a big health thing–…
The term “crack babies” came from somewhere. Are you drawing a distiction between the two forms of the drug, or was that never as big a problem as it was made out to be?