A lot of people do recreational drugs while at college and go on just fine. George W. Bush, for example, is alleged to have taken cocaine.
He was one of those people who are able to contain their hedonism and self-abuse to their frat-boy era. Now, he’s a grey-ish beard tech dude with an awesome wife and family.
Snorting will also shoot your tolerance through the roof, so taking it orally will no longer be as effective. Definitely not a road I recommend going down
Typical cocaine use also does not result in meaningful harm.
The financial industry chugs along just fine despite approximately everybody using these drugs.
I’ve used cocaine regularly at social events since I was a teenager. The vast majority of people I know, whether they’re 25 or 65, will not say no when offered. In my whole life I’ve known two people from my circles to have developed an actual coke problem, and I know a lot of people.
At this point coke is just the cigarettes of the upper classes, but likely less harmful.
And basically any big name in the financial industry has almost certainly used loads of cocaine. They’re mostly not suffering any horrible consequences.
But of course there’s a world of difference between cocaine use and addiction. An addict might start their day with a line, every day, but that’s far from typical use.
"Brain damage" isn't a binary yes-or-no thing that happens to you.
It's not even clear that regular as-prescribed usage of amphetamine is without some harm potential. With regular doses and route of administration it's obviously limited or negligible, but someone insufflating (snorting) it routinely is exposing their brains to much higher concentrations and much faster onset.
Note that dopamine itself is toxic when metabolized normally, but your body is equipped to mostly handle that. Using drugs that disrupt dopamine flows in high doses can overwhelm the systems designed to keep dopamine metabolism from doing damage.
> Typical cocaine use also does not result in meaningful harm.
The works "typical" and "meaningful" are doing a lot of work here. One of my friend groups has a lot of ER nurses. They see a non-trivial number of people coming to the hospital from casual cocaine use. These cases are generally waved away as other conditions by drug users (e.g. heart attacks, etc) and therefore they don't "count" in some people's minds. Yet it's a common finding for them on blood workups for people, including young people, arriving with cardiovascular problems.
> The vast majority of people I know, whether they’re 25 or 65, will not say no when offered.
Significant drug users often don't realize how much of a bubble they're in. Also, the goalposts for having a drug problem tend to be moved around a lot when everyone you know is using drugs regularly. Typically, being unable to say no when offered a drug is a sign of having a problem.
When a pill is swallowed it is gradually released into the bloodstream. Some drugs are also partially degraded by the digestive system, meaning you don't get 100% into the bloodstream. For some drugs, as much as 90% or more can be destroyed in the stomach, but this is accounted for in the dosing. Your stomach contents also go through your liver, which does first-pass metabolism depending on the drug and can reduce overall concentrations.
When someone snorts a drug, it bypasses all of that. It has easy access to the brain. It spikes the concentration the brain sees far in excess of what you would get from taking the drug orally.
This spike is where the damage is amplified. A sudden spike to very high values can overwhelm the brain's protection systems, for example.
Dopamine degradation produces neurotoxic metabolites. The brain is normally decent at cleaning these up, but when you consume drugs that spill that dopamine out at excess rates and disrupt its storage in vesicles then you can also overwhelm the brain's ability to clean up safely.
The sudden spike also causes rapid downregulation of the affected receptors, leading to deeper withdrawal effects that can last for a long time.
The sudden spike is also more euphoric. Combine that with the deeper withdrawal and it's why taking a pill through the nose is far more addictive than taking it orally.
The biggest danger to cocaine? Using cocaine to stave off the over-dose effects of other longer-lasting drugs, and then running out of cocaine before you run out of the other drugs and then dieing from alcohol poisoning or opiate over-dose. Cops and politicians will pretend cocaine killed those people, but anyone who knows jack shit about drugs or gets to see the actual toxicology report knows better.
Similarly, I don’t think you could reasonably suggest that someone who has a couple of glasses of wine during such events has a drinking problem.
> Significant drug users often don't realize how much of a bubble they're in. Also, the goalposts for having a drug problem tend to be moved around a lot when everyone you know is using drugs regularly. Typically, being unable to say no when offered a drug is a sign of having a problem
Personally, I’d consider someone who uses cocaine on a daily basis to have a problem. I’d also like to suggest that it’s pretty hard to have a cocaine problem and not use cocaine on a daily basis.
OTOH, someone who infrequently shoots up cocaine probably isn’t addicted but would be engaging in some seriously risky behaviour unless they’re able to very precisely measure their dosage. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that though, it’s certainly not a common activity among the upper socioeconomic classes.
> The works "typical" and "meaningful" are doing a lot of work here. One of my friend groups has a lot of ER nurses. They see a non-trivial number of people coming to the hospital from casual cocaine use. These cases are generally waved away as other conditions by drug users (e.g. heart attacks, etc) and therefore they don't "count" in some people's minds. Yet it's a common finding for them on blood workups for people, including young people, arriving with cardiovascular problems
To my knowledge there exists no evidence that anything less than massive cocaine use could result in new cardiovascular issues. Of course it may trigger an existing condition, but someone who has a heart attack during normal casual use of cocaine would probably be prone to have one during exercise also. The stress on the heart from cocaine usage is not particularly different from fairly normal day-to-day activities of people who do not use cocaine.