The immediate psychological effect of cocaine ingestion is euphoria. The intensity of this effect depends on how fast the drug reaches the brain; that is, the faster cocaine reaches the brain, the more intense the euphoria. For the first few minutes after inhaling powdered cocaine, or the first few seconds after injecting it, the user experiences the onset of the euphoria, known as a rush. Users describe such feelings as a heightened state of pleasure, a profound sense of mastery over their personal affairs, a sense of cleverness, and an unquestioned confidence in their ability to achieve their goals. Many users claim that the drug helps them perform many physical and intellectual tasks more quickly. As one youth describes it, cocaine made him feel “as if I was going up in a flying machine” or “as if I was a millionaire and could do anything I pleased.” In addition to the sense of euphoria, many users describe being more energetic, talkative, and more acutely aware of the sensations of sound, taste, color, and touch. Officer Gordon James Knowles of the Pearl Harbor Police Narcotics Division questioned a cocaine user and dealer named Carl, whose description of the initial rush also explains its value as an escape from reality:

I feel high like you wouldn’t believe… It’s hard to explain how you feel… I feel like I’m floating on air… On one hand … I feel like an idiot for doing what I’m doing and that is absolutely nothing except getting high, but on the other hand, I love it because I’m getting high as much as I want, when I want … and that makes up for everything else. You see people who live on the streets, 99 percent of them snort coke because it’s a way for them to forget about life … forget about the things you wanted in life … this is like a replacement.

New pharmacological research supports a widely held theory that cocaine-induced euphoria is tied to a chemical messenger in the brain called dopamine.

Dopamine is a special chemical, called a neurotransmitter, that has the job of transmitting electrical messages from one nerve cell, or neuron, to the next. Researchers, who have identified more than fifty different neurotransmitters, believe that dopamine is the one responsible for interacting, or binding, with the psychoactive chemicals found in cocaine. Dopamine is called the “pleasure neurotransmitter” because the impulses it transmits impart a pleasurable sensation.

Dopamine flows from neurons into the synapses, the tiny spaces between neurons, to form a temporary bridge that carries the signal across the synapse. Normally, after a neuron has transmitted its signal to the next neuron, the dopamine leaves these spaces, returning to the same neuron that released it in a recycling process called re-uptake.

If cocaine is present in the brain while an electrical signal is taking place, scientists believe it blocks the re-uptake process, resulting in a buildup of dopamine in the synapses which creates an abnormally acute sense of pleasure. As the buildup of the dopamine neurotransmitter continues, it causes the euphoria commonly reported as the pleasurable rush.

Exactly why this pleasurable sensation occurs is still largely a mystery. However, Dr. Donald W. Landry, associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, speculates that the answer lies in the limbocortical region deep in the center of the brain. Cocaine, he suspects,

stimulates a neural “reward pathway” that evolved in the ancestors of mammals more than 100 million years ago. This pathway activates the so-called limbocortical region of the brain, which controls the most basic emotions and behaviors … [that] undoubtedly conferred a survival advantage. The same structures persist today and provide a physiological basis for our subjective perception of pleasure. When natural brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters stimulate these circuits, a person feels “good.”

When all the cocaine has reacted however, the re-uptake process begins and the dopamine levels drop, causing the euphoria to disappear as fast as it first appeared. The absence of euphoria is experienced as depression. The user also experiences irritability, fatigue, and an intense craving for more of the drug to escape the depression.

It is worth noting that this view of how dopamine causes its pleasurable effects is still theoretical, as Dr. Solomon Snyder of Johns Hopkins University indicates: “Again, we do not know for certain exactly how the brain regulates specific behaviors, but we can formulate some educated guesses and … we can use these guesses as the basis for the next important advances in understanding.”

For those who have experienced the cocaine cycle of “rush-to-crash” many times, the psychological effects have long-term consequences that become a constant part of the habitual user’s life.

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