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Cruel Cocaine
By Kate Oczypok
At first the men helped Sonia Joseph*, a single mother of six from Trinidad, by bringing her children to school and bringing food when she was between jobs. Then they “offered” her a job—being a drug mule (someone who carries drugs, often inside their bodies, to other countries).
Sonia refused, but the men threatened her family. She was forced to swallow 100 thumb-sized pellets of cocaine and was put on a flight to London. But Sonia was caught and confessed everything. She’s in jail now, separated from her children, waiting for her sentence to be up so she can go home to them. And when she does, she wants to warn other single mothers about her experience.
Cocaine users don’t often think about the suffering of the people who are used to carry the drugs they take for “fun.” It’s easy to see the “glamour” of a drug used by celebrities and other glittery people. Maybe if they could see the cost in human suffering, not just to people addicted to cocaine, but also to those forced like Sonia to carry it, cocaine wouldn’t be the second most commonly used illegal drug in the U.S.
Cocaine is a central nervous system stimulant. When users inject, snort, sniff, or smoke the drug, they feel happy, alert, energetic, and able to do anything. This is followed by depression, anxiety, paranoia (feeling like everyone is out to get you), and loss of appetite. Cocaine is powerfully addictive, and once someone tries it they can’t control its hold on them.
Some negative effects can be noticed immediately. These are called short-term effects and include insomnia (the inability to sleep), vomiting, high anxiety, irritability, nasal infections, nosebleeds, rapid breathing, violent behavior, hallucinations (seeing things that aren’t there), and chest pain. Over time these effects worsen, and users experience long-term effects like depression, violent mood swings, and high agitation. After a while, snorting cocaine causes sores inside the nose and eats away at the barrier that separates the nostrils. It’s not uncommon for cocaine and crack (a type of cocaine that is smoked) users to have heart and respiratory problems.
Cocaine is also becoming a problem at schools in Canada. Kids in Ontario took an anonymous drug survey in 2004. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the organization that conducted the survey, said cocaine is the only drug that increased.
Joey Longo, a Grade 11 student, has witnessed the trend. “Not in my grade but in Grade 12 more kids do cocaine. It’s pretty expensive, like around 60 or 70 dollars. That’s how much it costs. Most kids in my grade can’t afford to do it as much,” explained Longo, a student at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Secondary School in London. “There’s not a whole lot of people who do cocaine more than once a week.”
Even though the celebrity culture glamorizes cocaine, using it to help them cope with social situations, it won’t make you cooler. In fact, it drives people away. Erin,* a New York high school student I know, dated a boy who used. He never had the money to do anything and always wanted to sit around the house. Once she found out he did cocaine, you guessed it, she dumped him. In college, when Dave* saw cocaine at parties he promptly left the scene. Jamie,* from Pittsburgh, remembers kids from his high school who used blow (a popular street name for cocaine). “I never got into it and I don’t keep in touch with them now, as you can imagine,” he says.
Cocaine lowers your inhibitions, or those feelings that you sometimes have when you’re around new people and are a little nervous. If your inhibitions are lowered, you are more prone to sexual activity. You could end up pregnant or with an STD†.
Cocaine use is much like smoking a cigarette—it’s just not attractive. You can seriously damage the lining of your nose and some heavy users develop an intense itch which is commonly referred to as “cocaine bugs.” And users “chase the high” trying to get the same feeling they had when they first used cocaine. But it’s a high they’ll never catch again.
There is good news. Most teens know that cocaine is dangerous. Approximately 64 percent of eighth graders, 71.3 percent of tenth graders, and 61.9 percent of 12th graders surveyed in 2006 reported that taking powder cocaine occasionally was a “great risk.”
If you find yourself feeling sad or unhappy with how things in your life are going, it’s important to realize that cocaine will not solve your problems. It’s a temporary fix that just leads to more dangerously depressing feelings. Seek out help and remember that your friends and family are there for you.
*Names have been changed.
†STD—Sexually Transmitted Disease
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