• It is risky for anyone with high blood pressure or a heart condition, but even healthy young people can have a fit, heart attack, or stroke after using the drug.
• The risk of overdose increases if you mix it with other drugs or alcohol.
• Over time, snorting cocaine damages the cartilage in your nose that separates your nostrils. Heavy users can lose this cartilage and end up with one large nostril and a misshapen nose.
• Taking it when pregnant can damage your baby, and cause miscarriage, premature labor, and low birth weight.
• Regularly smoking crack can cause breathing problems and pains in the chest.
• Injecting it can damage veins and cause ulcers and gangrene. Sharing needles or other injecting equipment can spread HIV and hepatitis infections too. It’s also easier to overdose from injecting cocaine.
• Speedballing (injecting a mixture of cocaine and heroin) can have fatal results. A form of heroin called white heroin is easily mistaken for cocaine and people have died or been hospitalized after snorting it thinking it was cocaine.

Regular use of cocaine can make people feel:

• depressed
• run-down
• anxious
• paranoid

Cocaine can bring previous mental health problems to the surface too, and if a relative has had mental health problems, there might be an increased risk for you.

Social risks

Frequent users find they begin to crave more of the drug – so it can become an expensive habit to keep up with.

Environmental risks

It doesn’t just damage the people who take it. It wrecks the communities that it’s grown in and leads to deforestation. Find out more about how cocaine wrecks communities.

The purity of cocaine goes up and down depending on the market.

A wrap of cocaine powder can be cut with many things, such as sugar or starch, but benzocaine is the most common.

Benzocaine is a local anesthetic that produces a numbing effect similar to it but without the cocaine high.