Lady Gaga (whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) has spoken out about her former addiction to cocaine in her new biography, LADY GAGA: Just Dance, written by Helia Phoenix. The 23-year-old pop star said, “I wanted to be the artists I loved, like Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol…And I thought the only way to do it was to live the lifestyle.”
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Forensic pathologists have shown that over three percent of all sudden deaths in southwest Spain are related to the use of cocaine. They believe their findings can be extrapolated to much of the rest of Europe, indicating that cocaine use is a growing public health problem in Europe and that there is no such thing as “safe” recreational use of small amounts of the drug.
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Drug dependency is a recurrent but treatable kind of addiction. However, not all people who are drug dependent progress in the same way once they stop taking drugs. A new study shows that, in the case of cocaine, a high score on the so-called “scale of craving,” an antisocial personality type, and previous heroin abuse are the factors most commonly involved in relapse.
New animal studies suggest that cocaine abuse, in addition to pre-existing traits or lifestyle factors, can lead to memory and other cognitive problems.
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Vaccine-like shots to keep cocaine abusers from getting high also helped them fight their addiction in the first study of this approach to treating cocaine addiction. The shots didn’t work perfectly, but the researchers say their limited success is promising enough to suggest the intriguing vaccine approach could be widely used to treat addiction within several years.
When Mackenzie Phillips was 10 years old, her father, John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, taught her how to roll a joint. She first tried cocaine when she was 11. One week after her 18th birthday, she was arrested for the first time. Now, at 49, Phillips is revealing the most shocking part of her past for the first time: she was raped by her father and then began consensually sleeping with him.
It may have started innocently enough. Someone handed you a crack pipe and urged you to take a hit. “It’s so cool. You’ve gotta try this!” But the smoked, as opposed to the snorted, version of cocaine comes with a whole lot of its own troubles, the worst of which may be that you become addicted from the first time the crack pipe hits your lips.
In his new autobiography, rap star Bobby Brown says he was first introduced to cocaine by his ex-wife, Whitney Houston. The former drug addict, who was married to Houston from 1992 to 2006, has revealed shocking details of the couple’s relationship in Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Noting But, due in September 2009.
“I never used cocaine until after I met Whitney. Before then, I had experimented with other drugs, but marijuana was my drug of choice. At one point in my life, I used drugs uncontrollably,” he writes. “I was using everything I could get my hands on, from cocaine to heroin, weed and cooked cocaine.”
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Although there is no proven pharmacological drug yet to treat addiction to cocaine, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is working to develop medications that are suitable for use in the treatment of cocaine addiction. There’s even research into the development of a vaccine for cocaine that would eliminate the drug’s effects.
Cocaine is a dangerous and powerful drug that wreaks havoc on the lives of the user and those around them. Usage of the drug declined during 2007 and early 2008 due to a reduction in availability, which was caused largely by the successful eradication of coca production in Colombia and numerous cocaine seizures. But despite the fact that sporadic shortages are expected to continue through 2009, and usage is down, demand is likely to remain high, according to the National Drug Threat Assessment 2009, released by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC). Drug trafficking of cocaine is the leading drug threat to our society.