The brain's pleasure centers go wild, but supercharged neurons also zap the heart into overdrive and blast blood pressure through the roof. Cocaine is best known for its mental effects, but blood vessels take the hardest beating. Normally, nerves fine-tune arteries to relax or constrict in response to organ demand. Eat a big meal and your intestinal arteries open up. Start jogging and the flow gets diverted to your calves and thighs.
Cocaine preempts all that.
Strokes, heart attacks, muscle necrosis, kidney failure, intestinal perforations, and lung malfunction can all result. Fill your system with cocaine and you might as well be dripping acid in your arteries. Vascular disease is the greatest killer in industrialized societies. But it's supposed to afflict the old, not the young. Cocaine blurs that distinction, so whenever a young person comes in with a stroke or a heart attack, we always ask.