Cocaine is sold under many names including Coke, Blow, Toot, Snow, Flake and Lady. Cocaine's psychoactive effects begin a few seconds after ingestion and diminish in ten to forty minutes. The drug creates euphoria, but can also overstimulate the brain's fright center, causing paranoia, hallucinations and memory lapses. It also raises blood pressure and causes rapid breathing and muscle tension. It also increases one's risk of stroke or heart attack.
Chronic users stop feeling the euphoric effects, and instead suffer from anxiety and paranoia.
Pregnant women dependent upon cocaine risk passing the addiction to the fetus. They also increase their chance of miscarriage. Cocaine overdose is usually not fatal. When it is, death occurs during either the initial phase of stimulation, with seizures, high blood pressure and rapid heart beat, or in the later, depressive phase, with respiratory depression and coma. Because of the intense and almost instant high from smokable cocaine, the potential for addiction is great.