Cocaine and Drug Abuse

Drug abuse—what is it? A drug is any chemical that is used as a medicine or in making medicine. Drug abuse is the overuse or improper use of drugs for nonmedical purposes. The World Drug Report, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, points out that in 2020, around 284 million people used drugs worldwide, up 26 percent from a decade earlier. In 2019 (the most recent year for which data was available), roughly 4.9 percent of high school students reported using cocaine at least once during their life, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Illegal drug use can be fatal: in 2019, around five hundred thousand people worldwide died of drug use. In the United States in 2022, the CDC reported that drug overdose deaths had doubled over the past six years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than one hundred thousand Americans dying of drug overdoses a year.

Supplying illegal drugs means big bucks for those who sell the drugs and enormous costs for everyone else. In the most recent year for which data exists the actual dollar amount of illicit drug sales worldwide was about 435 billion U.S. dollars. To put that estimate in perspective, global trade in all goods and services was a record high of 28.5 trillion dollars in 2021, according to the United Nations, meaning drug trafficking was about 1.5 percent of all global trade. Most of that trade is controlled by a handful of powerful organized crime syndicates, for whom drug trafficking makes up nearly half of their profits.

Cocaine goes by many street names, including coke, snow, flake, powder, and nose candy. It is derived from the coca plant and is credited with starting and perpetuating drug abuse in the United States. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) National Survey on Drug Use and Health noted that 59.3 million Americans (21.4 percent of the population aged twelve or older) used illicit drugs in 2020 (the last year for which data is available). Of those, 5.2 million used cocaine. The percentage was highest among young adults aged eighteen to twenty-five.

Cocaine remains the drug of choice for many people who abuse drugs. It is frequently mixed with alcohol or other drugs for maximum effect, and it is highly addictive. Since 2014, cocaine has been increasingly mixed with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, leading to a surge in overdose deaths. According to the latest data from the U.S Drug Enforcement Agency’s National Drug Threat Assessment, nearly fifteen thousand people died from drug overdoses involving cocaine in 2018, a 250 percent increase since 2010, largely attributable to mixing cocaine with fentanyl. Cocaine is the focus of many federal and state laws, several of which are presently being reviewed and revised. Cocaine is also being studied extensively by scientists seeking ways to curb cocaine addiction. Almost 150 years after it was first extracted from coca, cocaine remains a scourge on society.