The topic I haven chosen to talk about today is Cocaine. In today's society cocaine is now known to be one of the main "hard" drug, yet expensive people still enjoy doing it because it known to be extremely addictive, guarantee a good time and for people who sell it, they make a huge amount of money off of it. Cocaine has many side effects and is a huge risk to be dealing with, from a bad batch to make you overdose to the chemical inbalance in your body. Some may ask what exactly is cocaine? Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" and the alkaloid suffix "-ine", forming "cocaine".
In Ontario approximately 1 out of every 20 students from grades 7 through 12 have admitted to using cocaine at least once in the past year. This is estimated to be about 43 000 students that have done cocaine. Cocaine use varies by grade, 7 and 8 being the lowest about 2% have tried it at least once and grade 11 and 12 being the highest at about 7%. This just goes to show how cocaine shouldn't be around because kids at such young ages are experimenting with dangerous hard drugs that can potentially kill you in the long run. Believe it or not the usage between males and females is almost the exact same, males being 4.5% and females being 4.3%.
The two most common ways to use cocaine is either to snort it in the powder form which has a street name known as "blow" or "coke, it can also be cooked with chemicals into a hard rock that is known as "crack" which can be smoked. Cocaine is extremely bad for the heart, it can increase the heart rate and blood pressure while constricting the arteries that supply blood to the heart. Cocaine also constricts blood vessels that lead to your brain which most commonly will result in a stroke. When snorting cocaine it damages the inside of your nose creating scabs and also messes around with your sinuses. It constrics blood vessels that supply the gut, usually ending in starvation
