If you were seriously addicted but not high at the time, I expect you might feel agitated, but also kind of sorry for yourself / miserable and not so much in a murdering frame of mind.
Large amounts of money (which large amounts of cocaine can be exchanged for), on the other hand...
The DARE program told me that definitely 100% of illegal drug users eventually turn to murder to acquire more, but that might have been an exaggeration.
Someone rips you off in the drug industry you and your buddies go beat them up and take their stuff of value. Someone rips you off in above the table business you sue them.
Heroin withdrawals are quite painful (literally), and many users are also simply suffering from endogenous depression that responds to almost nothing, and in fact used to be treated by morphine.
Same goes for alcohol and benzo withdrawals that WILL give you seizures and quite possibly death.
Psychostimulants (cocaine, amphetamines, cathionines, other assorted alkaloids, including caffeine) withdrawals means being very tired, lethargic and sleeping a lot, they are not life threatening.
If people could buy cocaine at Starbucks (or get cheap stuff at a dollar store), would supply be such a problem for users that they resort to crime?
If caffeine were banned tomorrow and prices rose a thousand-fold, to what lengths would millions of addicts go to postpone the dreaded headache, constipation and lethargy for another day?
I would expect society would have a bad weekend, and then people would get over it quickly.
Honestly: easily accessible opiates are known (history) to do a lot of damage.
Sugar can't be as addictive as heroin! People give blowjobs to get more heroin, no one gives a blowjob for a chocolate bar.
But that has nothing to do with addictiveness.
I don't need to murder someone for coffee or provide oral sex for a snickers, because I can easily get those things anywhere, anyway
I just mean that it's a bad argument.
Allow me to introduce you to a bit of unpleasantness called the Opium Wars.
Which could also be called the "Give us the Tea, or Else" wars.
I don't know, when's the last time Starbucks was selling pure caffeine injectable via IV?
on edit: another day, another downvote, but that doesn't change the fact that the whole discussed comparison is between IV versions of the drug, and as such it's ridiculous to compare cocaine against Starbucks coffee as if that disproves the assertion.
I am quite certain the study exists, because I recall her talking about the findings, and then reading the abstract.
But I’d love to be wrong. That would be a very interesting result.
>Intravenous caffeine also resembles cocaine, she points out.
but, like it or not, caffeine is a psychostimulant, and psychostimulant substitution is fairly well established, idk whats the controversy.
if you want to find it, you might have to crawl thru every reference of volkow's 100+ papers on cocaine.
If you want to use the reference, I suggest you find it and validate it exists before trying to make some claim.
I also don’t think anything malicious but think it’s more likely that you misunderstand something than the paper exists and you can’t find it.
As a reader trying to determine if your claim is bullshit it’s not worth the risk that you’re wrong for me to exhaustively review all 100+ papers to make sure it doesn’t exist.
As the saying goes, “If you hear hoofbeats outside your door, it’s probably a horse not a zebra.”
here is a very old one, but oral not i.v.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4900434/
5mg/10mg amphetamine sulphate vs 300mg and 600mg of caffeine (all oral). The study scales ended up being skewed because one subject had paradoxical response and felt relaxed instead on amphetamines, lol.
If you have access to the full text, check out page 89: fig5 and fig6.
Volkow's lecture may have referenced multiple studies, I've heard that in the context of her lecture on various findings on psychostimulants. amphetamines and cocaine have been fairly repeatedly shown fairly consistent substitutes, so it may have been a study on amp vs caffeine.
She just loves to study and talk about cocaine for some reason, has literally a hundred+ papers on it.
That happens to me and I want to research what it means but your link doesnt seem to work
Being calm and relaxed on amphetamines can potentially mean there is some arousal disorder: sleep apnea, narcolepsy, delayed sleep syndrome, or just chronic sleep deficit. Maybe concussions (mild TBI), amphetamines work for that too.
ADHD is most likely because it’s so common, with sleep apnea being close second. I would rule out ADHD and sleep disorders first.
Potentially also, UARS, which is also form of sleep disordered breathing but not commonly detected with current technology (and also not easy to treat), some physicians do a full nasopharyngeal endoscopy under propofol anesthesia. I believe it’s incredibly undiagnosed and probably accounts for more than 10% of apnea cases, but most patients are thin instead of obese and so nobody suspects apnea-like disorder. If you needed braces or needed corrective jaw surgery UARS should be ruled out.
ADHD can be somewhat objectively measured with some tests like CPT, but that would also show abnormalities in sleep disorders.
If your measures of attention, and sleep study, along with wakefulness maintenance test, if warranted, are all normal, and your blood pressure is normal - maybe you are just a mutant.
See a good neuropsych that specializes in sleep disorders. Stanford is one of the better centres for that.
The idea that caffeine is comparable to cocaine is pretty nuts. People murder to get cocaine. When’s the last time anyone murdered for Starbucks?
I can totally believe that if you give someone who’s never done drugs a high dose of caffeine and tell them it’s cocaine, they might believe you. But that’s not at all the same as the two actually being indistinguishable.
“I feel like my heart’s going to explode and I can’t stop moving!” “That’s the cocaine.” “Not what I would have expected, but okay!”