A Dangerous Dance with the Devil’s Powder

A Dangerous Dance With The Devil’s Powder

Close your eyes, imagine a perfectly flawless girl. Straight A’s for grades, contastly involved in community service, happy family life, sweet significant other and knows how to manage her life in a balanced way. Tell me, do you see her throwing all of that away the perfect life that every girl could wish for because of a little white powder laid out in several lines? Logically any sane person would say no, replying “she would never do any sort of thing like that, why would she ruin her life in an unfixable way?” Sadly, we all live in a fantasy world where this reality does not happen; we believe that we left the cocaine problem in the 80’s, on the contrary the problem just moved to a different age group.

Instead of people who were 21 and older, now you can find 15 year olds who would do anything for that harmful devil’s powder. What is that making it worse is that, a lot of the teenagers nowadays have very compulsive tendencies which leads to a lot more cocaine addictions then the 80’s. What has lead to this psychotic epidemic? How did these teenagers who are not even ready to make important life choices get their hands on something that looks like pure snow? There are many reasons; social pressure, environment they are in and also a shocker social and economic status making young teens drawn to hard drugs like cocaine.

Before going more about the problem, what is cocaine and how does it have this effect on people? Cocaine is made from a plant called coca plant and is highly addictive stimulant. It comes in two different forms powder and rock crystals; the crystal rock version is smoked while the powder version is used through the nose. It affects the dopamine receptors in the brain which gives a five stage high which does not last very long, making you come back for more again and again turning into an addiction.

Cocaine messes with the way your neurotransmitters communicate through your brain, it attacks the dopamine receptor which leads to a feeling of euphoriary that is spread throught your body. Especially when you are a teenager, your nuerotransmitters are just recently developing which makes it dangerous to try out drugs like cocaine because adolescent brains are already delicate enough. Having these euphoric dopamine highs can actually mess with your brain to the point where you can be left with long term damage.

After seeing how harmful this drug is, why would people be so fond of it and make it incredibly popular? Cocaine used to be only for wealthy people or even celebrities however after a point It spread to the middle class and also the lower class. So when it became accessible for everyone, it spread quicker then gossip ever could. Being the stimulate it is and the rush it gives people, it makes sense when its price dropped everyone went after it.

People believe that without a pick me up no one can do anything, some people use coffee other people use energy drinks. However now that people have access to cocaine as well, people switched to it making a dangerous world for everyone. This is nothing but an excuse to use a hard narcotics to get through the day. This correlates with use amongst teenagers because our new generation of teens who go out to all night long parties and raves; to be able to get through these they believe that they need some kind of pick me up, just like any normal person who constantly drinks coffee because of its power to energizer.

The best way to see into the lives of teenage cocaine addicts is to interview someone who lived through it and got out of the insane of world cocaine. For the sake of protecting this person’s identity i will call her Jane. Jane grew up in California a little bit outside of san jose, she had a very rocky family life and also not the best friends around her. Her friends at the time were people who kinda tried everything without any regret, Jane herself was a huge stoner at the time which kinda make her think “I will just try it once, just to see how it is. I will not try it again” however it did not turn out the way she though it would.

She spent a whole year being a slave to this stimulate, it ended up affecting her performance in school. Her grades started slipping and then so did her attendance leading to her almost being expelled from her high school. When she realised that she had actually hit rock bottom and she did something people consider very hard. She went cold turkey, which means she cut herself off interally. In her words the next four days went “It was like I was in hell. It started off with headaches, I felt like I was in some kind of spinning rollercoaster ride and also i felt chills in my body constantly. Then I got hit with a large feeling of exhaustion, I did not leave my bed for almost four days.”

However she got through it very well, and until this day she has not even released once. She found other ways to cover her craving for cocaine. She was on the track and field team so she spent all of her time to grow on that and become the best female thrower and she did. Her story is amazing and it is incredibly hard to do what she did. Jane is one of the strongest person I have ever met and I applaud her everyday about it.

Jane’s story is one that is told to motivate other people to get clean and fix their lives, however not everyone is as lucky as Jane. Some people spend all of their whole lives a slave to this narcotic and this can affect the people around them to the point where it could destroy them as well. In an arcticle done by a Vice writer named Lisa Ludwig, she helps a girl named Anna to open up about life as a cocaine addict girlfriend.

According to Anna her boyfriend was always using something, either smoking daily or snorting lines daily: “In the beginning, I hated the drugs. To me they seemed like another woman, a competitor he loved