Cocaine

COCAINE

Although many people believe that it's only important to focus on drugs in the modern day and how they are messing with the community,  it is also important to look into the history of drugs. It is not always the same drug that comes in a causes problems in communities around the world, but drugs come and go in popularity. Every drug has its heyday, whether it be PCP in the 60’s or Marijuana in the current day.  The main focus of this paper is the topic of popular of cocaine in the 1980’s.

Cocaine, just like most if the other drugs in the world, is extremely addictive, which is obviously one of the reasons that it was so popular in the 80’s. According to drugfreeamerica.org  “Cocaine creates the greatest psychological dependence of any drug.  It stimulates key pleasure centers within the brain and causes extremely heightened euphoria.”  This is basically what causes the addiction. People enjoy the feel of the heightened euphoria which makes them want more when the so called high is up. The with this is that Cocaine is a drug in which you can build a tolerance to quite quickly. This tolerance causes drug users to use more and more of the cocaine each time, to stimulate the high that they reached the last time they used the drug. Addiction is clearly an obvious draw into any drug, including cocaine, which still makes it a factor into popularity.

Another reason cocaine was such a popular recreational drug is because it was very idolized. It was shown off in the media a lot in the 80s. Many big celebrities, like Tim Allen and Steven Tyler, were using cocaine and making it know that they were doing so, which lead to the use by others. For the longest time in the world, average everyday people in the world believe that they can better themselves by copying things in which they see celebrities do, for some reason it is thought that doing things that they do, will make you become more like them, so people tend to copy things, whether they harm the body or not, which is the main problem and is another reason cocaine was so popular. According to project know (projectknow.com) some of the celebrities in which did cocaine in the early and or late 80’s include ike turner, whitney houston, tim allen, steven tyler (as said above) and many others, who were at the time, looked up too by the general public.  

Cocaine was in abundance high abundance in the 80’s, or in other words, it was not very difficult to get a hold of  it at the time. According to Andrew Fenrich, who is a representative for the  New York for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said in  his article “marijuana of the 80’s” He says that cocaine was basically “falling from the sky” and that it was the “marijuana of the 80’s”. When he says that it was basically falling from the sky, he is basically just saying that it was everywhere and it was so easy to get, like rain because a lot of it falls, and he said it was like the marijuana of the 80’s because in the current world marijuana is extremely easy to get. The reason it was high in abundance is because the form of cocaine in which was being heavily used was crack cocaine crystals, which  was relatively new drug to the world, and since it was relatively new, it was easier to move around the U.S to get more where it needed to be. It was easier to move the drug “under the radar” so to say. They brought a lot more into the U.S. then could really be handled, which caused a huge price drop of almost 80%.