Asklemmy

Put simply, I’ve done a whole lot of drugs and been around a whole lot of drug users. I’ve used just about every method of administration.

My personal experience and opinion is that powder cocaine is a medium level drug. The intoxication isn’t super extreme unless you are really digging in to a bag, and if you pace yourself, it is easily manageable and enjoyable. Crack and injected cocaine come on much stronger and shorten the duration of the high, so it is like compressing a powder high into a bigger “up and down”.

As with many drugs, the addictive potential lies partially in the users inability to tolerate discomfort and partially in the habit forming nature of dopamine stimulation.

The more you use in a session, the more awake you are, and the less you are receiving the euphoria. This leads some people to chase the high for days, slowly going a little nuts from sleep depravation and exhaustion. I believe you would see a similar effect in anybody who stayed up for an equal length of time, it can just look more erratic on cocaine because there is extra energy fueling the exhausted person due to the sped up metabolism.

That said, the discomfort of a comedown, especially from only a gram or two of powder, is not actually that extreme, especially when compared to other drugs like heroin or methamphetamine. It’s just a little anxious awake-ness that wears off in an hour or two and is totally gone after you sleep. You might wake up a little foggy, but probably better off than a night of drinking would leave you.

In my years of using hard drugs, the only people I saw display bipolar behavior on cocaine were people who were either already mentally ill to begin with or people who were doing large amounts of crack or intravenous cocaine.

This is all just my experience and my opinion though—nobody should read this as scientific proof of anything. That said, I think first hand accounts can also paint a clearer picture of behavior and risk sometimes too, so take it for what it’s worth.