Another issue is the judgment surrounding drug addiction and treatment, the experts said at Wednesday’s forum. When someone is in crisis, desperate for help, they might instead find a nurse or police officer who sees addiction as being different than other health emergencies. “Relapse pays,” Johnson said, and that’s why local investigators have been working for years to crack down on suspect treatment facilities, especially with the introduction of fentanyl — an incredibly deadly substance — into many street drugs. Decades of new research have made it clear that drug addiction changes the physical makeup of the brain and affects people’s ability to make sound decisions, regulate emotions and fully understand the impact of their choices. Take our free, 5-minute substance abuse self-assessment below if you think you or someone you love might be struggling with substance abuse.
CUD frequently co-occurs with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and cocaine use may be reflective of attempts to self-medicate [93]. While there is an emphasis on finding new medications with novel mechanisms of action for treating CUD, currently available medications deserve further investigation based on the existing literature. Evaluating refined metrics of treatment success in well-defined subgroups of patients, and further exploring combination therapies and their synergy with behavioural/psychosocial cocaine addiction treatment interventions, are promising avenues to establishing effective therapies for CUD. With cocaine addictions, the risk of relapse can stay with a person for years into the recovery process. Medications used to prevent relapse help to reduce the level of drug cravings a person experiences from day-to-day. For these reasons, cocaine addiction programs offer medication therapies that help support damaged brain and body functions, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
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Moreover, agonist treatments alleviate the intensity of drug cravings and withdrawal symptoms that can contribute to relapse [77,78]. Other benefits of the agonist approach include familiarity with drug effects that may promote medication compliance [79–81]. Getting help at an inpatient treatment program for cocaine addiction will significantly help your chances of recovery. The relapse rate for cocaine addiction is between 18 and 24% for individuals who complete a treatment program, and approximately 90% for individuals attempting to recover on their own. These statistics emphasize the importance of getting professional treatment, not leaving treatment too soon, and staying in touch with peers and therapists who can support the ongoing recovery journey. Tolerance is one of the many symptoms of addiction that develop from the chronic use of cocaine.
Although potential pharmaceutical treatments for cocaine dependence are ongoing, there are currently no medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) available for either cocaine detoxification or longer-term treatment of cocaine use disorders. Thus, the primary treatment for cocaine misuse comes in the form of behavioral interventions. However, medications may be prescribed to help with cravings or withdrawal symptoms. Currently, there are no medications that are FDA approved for the treatment of cocaine dependence. However, recent advances in the understanding of the processes involved in cocaine addiction have allowed researchers to identify several promising new candidate medications.
Cocaine Addiction: Signs, Symptoms, and Treatment
If you seek an inpatient program, you would be in a supervised setting where you are not able to obtain or use the drug. When you stop taking cocaine, you can experience severe withdrawal symptoms that need to be managed. When a person is addicted to cocaine, they may begin to use it with methods that produce a more intense effect—such as smoking or injecting the drug instead of snorting it. Sometimes an intense effect is achieved by using more powerful forms of the drug, such as crack, or using other drugs in addition to cocaine. To diagnose a cocaine addiction, your doctor will discuss your current usage and health history.