Psychological symptoms are characterized by intense anxiety, depression, confusion, hallucinations and paranoid delusions. These latter symptoms often require hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. Physiological effects are associated with an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, and an increase in breathing rate and a decreased appetite. Rapid and marked tolerance develops to cocaine use. The effects of cocaine overdose are severe, resulting in agitation, increase in body temperature, hallucinations, convulsions, and frequently, death.
Death can occur when the drug is injected, smoked or even snorted.
It occurs as a result of multiple seizures followed by respiratory and cardiac arrest. All of these damaging effects of cocaine, and their resulting destructive influences in Western society were first observed 100 years ago. They led to the establishment of strict legal, national and international controls to limit the use of this drug to medical applications only. For fifty years, from 1910 to 1960, such regulations, coupled with social disapproval, were sufficient to curtail cocaine use to a very small group of high class society. Now, cocaine is used by all levels of society.