True Stories About the Effects of Cocaine Addiction

By Jennifer Golson/The Star-Ledger

January 07, 2010, 1:34PM

HILLSBOROUGH — A township man was arrested Wednesday on drug charges after police learned he would be in the area with cocaine in his truck, authorities said today.

Florencio Pinelo, 33, of Capricorn Drive, was charged with third-degree cocaine possession and a disorderly persons charge for possession of drug paraphernalia, Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne Forrest said. Pinelo was released on his own recognizance.

Authorities were told the man would be driving a white pickup truck in the area of Amwell Road. Members of the prosecutor’s Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force, Hillsborough police and the department’s K-9 unit established surveillance and saw Pinelo get into a truck in the area of Capricorn Drive, Forrest said.

Officials followed him to Atkinson Circle where they approached him and found a bag of cocaine with an estimated street value of $300 in his jacket pocket, Forrest said.

NIDA study offers promise for medication development

Researchers have identified a key epigenetic mechanism in the brain that helps explain cocaine’s addictiveness, according to research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

The study, published in the January issue of the journal Science, shows how cocaine affects an epigenetic process (a process capable of influencing gene expression without changing a gene’s sequence) called histone methylation. These epigenetic changes in the brain’s pleasure circuits, which are also the first impacted by chronic cocaine exposure, likely contribute to an acquired preference for cocaine.

“This fundamental discovery advances our understanding of how cocaine addiction works,” said NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “Although more research will be required, these findings have identified a key new player in the molecular cascade triggered by repeated cocaine exposure, and thus a potential novel target for the development of addiction medications.”

Researchers gave one group of young mice repeated doses of cocaine and another group repeated doses of saline with a final dose of cocaine to determine how the effects of chronic cocaine exposure differed from one-time exposure. The study confirms that one of the mechanisms by which cocaine alters the reward pathway is by repressing G9A, a histone demethylating enzyme that plays a critical role in epigenetic control of gene expression.

As previously observed, animals exposed to chronic cocaine displayed dramatic alterations in gene expression as well as a strong preference for cocaine. For the first time, the authors were also able to show that by experimentally reversing the cocaine induced repression of G9a, they could block the changes in gene expression and inhibit the enhanced preference for cocaine.

“The more complete picture that we have today of the genetic and epigenetic processes triggered by chronic cocaine give us a better understanding of the broader principles governing biochemical regulation in the brain which will help us identify not only additional pathways involved but potentially new therapeutic approaches,” said Dr. Eric J. Nestler, study investigator and director of the Brain Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse is a component of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIDA supports most of the world’s research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction. The Institute carries out a large variety of programs to inform policy and improve practice. Fact sheets on the health effects of drugs of abuse and information on NIDA research and other activities can be found on the NIDA home page at www.drugabuse.gov. To order publications in English or Spanish, call NIDA’s new DrugPubs research dissemination center at 1-877-NIDA-NIH or 240-645-0228 (TDD) or fax or email requests to 240-645-0227 or drugpubs@nida.nih.gov. Online ordering is available at http://drugpubs.drugabuse.gov. NIDA’s new media guide can be found at http://drugabuse.gov/mediaguide.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) The Nation’s Medical Research Agency includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

LORAIN — A 39-year-old Lorain woman told police she was held against her will for more than three days, moved from house to house and had sex with at least 10 men while she was drugged, according to a police report.

The woman said she left her house around 7 a.m. Friday morning and drove to the area of West 17th Street and Lexington Avenue where she stopped a man and asked about getting some crack cocaine, police said.

The man, described as being in his late 30s, 6 feet tall with a thick build and wearing a beige parka with a fur-trimmed hood, had her drive about a block and a half on West 18th Street, reports said.

He then had her pull into the driveway of what looked like a vacant house, pulled out a handgun and ordered her inside, police said.

Inside the residence were two more men and a woman who took her money, ordered her into the bathroom and then took her to another house where she said she had sex with at least 10 men, police said.

The victim also said she believes she was drugged throughout the weekend because all she wanted to do was sleep, police said.

“(The victim) stated that during her ordeal she was constantly threatened that she better not call the police and that they would kill her if she did,” the report stated.

The victim said she believed her captors were using her car while she was being held and she also told police she was moved from house to house.

Sometime Monday, the victim talked one of the men into letting her go outside to smoke a cigarette and after spotting her car keys on a kitchen table, the woman escaped, police said in the report.

The woman drove to St. Joseph’s Community Center and then called her husband who had just reported her missing to police.

The woman’s car was taken for evidence collection and she was taken to the SANE unit at the Nord Center.

The case remains under investigation.

The word cocaine is seen as synonymous to the word addiction. Cocaine seems to connote a negative idea and even more, a negative emotion towards people. Indeed, it is a substance known to be easily abused and thus, users eventually become dependent to it and the cycle goes on and on. like any other substance addiction, cocaine addiction can harm lives. It changes anyone, his perspectives, his motives, perception, and behaviors.

Cocaine is a powerful and extremely addictive drug. It came from the coca bush leaves. There are two primary forms of cocaine. The first one is the. It is used for snorting up the nose. The second is freebase, which is better recognized as crack cocaine.This is used for smoking. Few cocaine addicts use it. When cocaine is snorted, the cocaine powder gets inhaled up into the nose where it is readily absorbed into the bloodstream. Dopamine gets released when cocaine reaches the brain which stimulates feelings of pleasure. Crack cocaine, known as crack, is the name for the smokable form of cocaine. Crack is the street name given to the type of cocaine that has been processed into a smokable drug. Smoking crack cocaine propels large quantities of the drug to the lungs, producing an instant and powerful euphoric feeling. The high is usually very strong, but does not last very long. The rocks of crack cocaine are ignited in a crack pipe and the following vapors get deeply inhaled.

Dosage for pleasure reasons crates an individual who will sooner or later turned into a cocaine addict. With repetitive use, the person becomes tolerant with the drug and then becomes dependent with it. The person seemed to be craving for the drug every now and then. Cocaine addiction is characterized as continuously craving for the drug despite the negative results of cocaine to the person’s body and mind. The physical signs of cocaine abuse can vary, depending on the person. For one, cocaine acts as an appetite suppressant so cocaine abusers often aren’t hungry and end up losing considerable amounts of weight.

With cocaine addiction, the person’s life becomes controlled by the drug. Cocaine addicts are normally not interested with ordinary activities because they only focus on obtaining and taking the drug. Thus, people around these addicts are affected because they intermingle every day. Cocaine dependence often involves not only compulsive cocaine use but also a wide range of dysfunctional behaviors. This can often impede with normal functioning in the family, workplace and community. Cocaine addiction also can place people at higher hazard for a wide variety of other illnesses. These illnesses can be brought on by the addiction type behaviors, such as poor living and health habits that often come with the lifestyle of an addict and the toxic effects of the cocaine itself.

Experts in the field of medicine is focusing their time on the certain drug that can cure cocaine addiction. The compound GBR 12909 was initially tested as a potential antidepressant. With GBR 12909, the patients’ cocaine-seeking attitudes were eliminated within a few hours without affecting food-seeking behavior. Studies have shown that both GBR 12909 and cocaine inhibit the action of a protein called the dopamine transporter. By slowing down the transporter, both GBR 12909 and cocaine promote the levels of the pleasure-inducing chemical messenger dopamine outside the nerve cells, a process that increases and prolongs dopamine’s pleasurable effects. However, GBR 12909 acts more gradually and elevates dopamine levels less than does cocaine. By attaching to the dopamine transporter, GBR 12909 also blocks cocaine from binding there. GBR 12909’s chemical attractiveness for the transporter is 500 times that of cocaine, so it binds to the transporter and stays there for a long time. While it’s sitting on the transporter, cocaine has no access to the transporter, so the cocaine can no longer act to bring on euphoria. The therapy using GBR 12909 should be prolonged in order for the medication to have time to transport the dopamine transporter levels back to where they were before the patient started taking cocaine. The breakthrough in the discovery of GBR 12909 could be a gateway to help cocaine addiction victims in dealing with the problem they are so afraid to face.

When you find yourself or anyone in the condition of cocaine dependency, get medical help fast.