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Cocaine, as a stimulant, mimics the action of chemicals your brain produces to send messages of pleasure to your brain's reward center. Like adrenaline, cocaine increases your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate. Cocaine also constricts blood vessels, dilates pupils, releases sugar and fat into your blood stream, and energizes the brain to increased alertness. Stimulants increase feelings of anger, fear or agitation (fight or flight) and feelings of well-being, riding high, exhilaration or euphoria. When the stimulation goes too high, it produces feelings of panic, paranoia, hallucinations and rage that can progress to potentially fatal seizures and strokes. Ultimately, the brain becomes depressed by the local anesthetic effects, and coma and death can occur.

Cocaine produces an artificial feeling of pleasure by chemically mimicking certain normal brain messenger chemicals that produce positive feelings in response to signals from the brain.

As a result, the brain depends on the immediate, fast, predictable drug that at the same time is short-circuiting interest in making life's normal rewards work. More and more confidence is placed in the drug while other survival feelings are ignored and bypassed, resulting in a lack of concern for and confidence in other areas of life.

This first happens on a physical level. Then, it has a psychological effect. People, places and activities involved with using cocaine become more important. People, places and activities or lifestyles that worked through the normal reward system before using cocaine become less important. In fact, after a time, a heavy cocaine user will actually resent people, places and activities not able to fit in with cocaine use.

In certain studies, animals would press levers to release cocaine into their blood stream, no longer concerned about eating, mating or other natural drives. They would, in fact, die in the process of giving themselves cocaine.

Usually, a person using cocaine never gets as big a "high" as she/he did on the first dose because of the drug's ability to suppress and deplete the brain's production of the normal chemical messenger for positive feelings. The brain adapts to the presence of the cocaine by decreasing production of the normal chemical messenger, requiring the user to use more to get less and less pleasurable effect, ultimately crashing. The more cocaine used, the greater risk from toxic effects.

Yes. The severity and length of the symptoms vary with the amount of damage done to your normal reward system through cocaine use and the rate of recovery. The most common symptoms are drug craving, irritability, loss of energy, depression, fearfulness, wanting to sleep a lot or difficulty in sleeping, shaking, nausea and palpitations, sweating, hyperventilation, and increased appetite. These symptoms can commonly last several weeks after you stop using cocaine.

Cocaine craving is the result of the drug imprinting in the memory a pleasant association of euphoria with the drug. The subconscious memory motivates the individual to seek this drug because of the false imprint. The brain, in effect, has been trained that using the white powder is the fastest way to feel good. This learning process produces a new appetite or drive to seek the drug, called craving. This craving is most often activated by a memory of pleasure, a habit of using cocaine to rapidly feel good when feeling bad, and in situations with people, places and activities where a previous habit pattern of cocaine use has been established.