What does it look like?

There are three types of cocaine: coke, crack and freebase.

• Coke looks like a fine white powder
• Crack looks like small lumps or rocks
• Freebase looks like a crystallised powder

What does it taste/smell like?

Cocaine powder has a bitter ‘chemical’ taste and smell, while crack cocaine can smell like burnt plastic or rubber.

How do people take it?

By snorting it as a powder

Most people snort cocaine – they crush it into a fine powder, divide it into lines and snort it through the nose. This is the most common way to take cocaine.

Snorting cocaine can damage your nose, especially if it’s not been chopped very finely. Some people find that switching between nostrils helps, and some people rinse out their nostrils with water or saline solution after taking it.

By smoking it as crack or freebase

Crack or freebase can be smoked through a glass pipe, tube, plastic bottle or in foil, but this is less common.

By injecting it

Powdered coke and crack can be prepared to make a solution for injecting, which is much more dangerous than snorting or smoking cocaine.

How it feels

How does it make you feel?

Taking cocaine can make you feel:

• happy
• excited
• wide awake
• confident
• on top of your game

It can also:

• make your heart beat faster
• raise your body temperature – so you feel hot
• stop you feeling hungry
• make you feel sick
• make you need to poo
• make you anxious and panicky
• make you paranoid
• make you so confident that you do things you wouldn’t normally do (which might be risky)

How does it make people behave?

Cocaine affects people differently, but most users become:

• chattier
• more animated
• more confident

Some people become:

• overconfident and arrogant
• agitated
• restless
• edgy

Cocaine can increase your *****ual desires too, and some people take it to have more intense *****, but taking lots of cocaine can actually reduce your ***** drive.

Generally speaking, a user’s ***** drive should go back to normal once they stop taking cocaine excessively.

Duration

How long the effects last and the drug stays in your system depends on how much you’ve taken, your size, whether you’ve eaten and what other drugs you may have also taken.

To kick in

When snorted, cocaine can take from around 5 to 30 minutes to kick in, whereas the effects of smoking crack are almost instant.

How long it lasts

The initial high from cocaine doesn’t last that long, around 20 to 30 minutes – although this depends on the purity of the cocaine and the person’s tolerance. You might still experience some physical effects after the high has gone, such as a faster heart beat.

The effects of smoking crack are even shorter lasting, around 10 minutes, with the peak lasting for about two minutes after smoking it.

After effects

Some people find that cocaine makes them feel down, anxious and paranoid the next day, or longer.

How long will it be detectable?

Cocaine can be detected in a urine test for up to 3 days after snorting it.

How long a drug can be detected for depends on how much is taken and which testing kit is used. This is only a general guide.

Mixing

Is it dangerous to mix with other drugs?

Mixing drugs is always risky but some mixtures are more dangerous than others.

Alcohol and cocaine together can be particularly dangerous, for example. Once they mix together in the body they produce a toxic chemical called cocaethylene.

Cocaethylene stays in the body much longer than cocaine or alcohol alone, and this increases the damage done to the heart and liver.