Caffeine gives cocaine an addictive boost

Pure cocaine is hard to come by in South America. Instead, coca paste is often adulterated with caffeine, making a combo that packs a powerful punch.

stevepb/pixabayve cocaine as one of the most intense stimulant drugs available: It’s illegal, highly addictive and dangerous. Caffeine, in contrast, is the kinder, cuddlier stimulant. It’s legal, has mild effects and in forms such as coffee, it might even be good for your health.

But caffeine in combination with cocaine is another story. In South America, drug distributors have started “cutting” their cocaine with caffeine. This cheaper substitute might, at first glance, seem to make the cocaine less potent. After all, there’s less of the drug there. But new data shows that when combined, cocaine and caffeine make a heck of a drug.

Coca paste is a popular form of cocaine in South American countries. A smoked form of cocaine, coca paste is the intermediate product in the extraction process used to get pure cocaine out of coca leaves. Because it is smoked, the cocaine in the coca paste hits the brain very quickly, making the drug highly addictive, explains Jose Prieto, a neurochemist at the Biological Research Institute Clemente Stable in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Much of the time, Coca paste isn’t acting alone, however. In a 2011 study published in Behavioral Brain Research, Prieto and his colleagues examined the contents of coca paste from police seizures. “Nearly 80 percent of the coca paste samples” were adulterated, Prieto says, “most with caffeine.” Caffeine adulteration ranged from 1 to 15 percent of the drug volume.

Prieto and his group began to wonder just what the caffeine might be adding to the already addictive effects of cocaine. They administered some of the seized drugs to rats. When given cocaine, rats will generally race around as the drug increases their motor activity. But when given coca paste contaminated with 10 percent caffeine, the rats ran around much more than with cocaine alone.
This increase has implications for its addictive potential as well. When animals receive cocaine repeatedly over a period of days, their initial running response will intensify. This early sensitization process can contribute to future addiction. When rats got cocaine and caffeine together, they ran more, and this effect sensitized, meaning that over several days, they ran farther and farther, much more than with cocaine alone. The effect also happened faster. Cocaine sensitization usually takes five days, but with caffeine added in, it took only three. The scientists published their findings May 14 in The American Journal on Addictions.