Cocaine gives the brain a big shot of “happy chemicals” from the brain, or “neurotransmitters”, but once that big boost is gone, the brain is left like a dry desert with the neurotransmitters all used up. This causes the down and lots of withdrawals like:
Physical:
- Restlessness
- Tremors, aches and pains
- Sleep problems
- Exhaustion
- Sexual problems
Mental:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Loss of enjoyment
- Difficulty concentrating
- No desire to do anything
- Low sex drive
- Nightmares
- Feeling suicidal
Detox
At The BONDS Clinic, we try hard to control this long list of withdrawal symptoms from cocaine. We specialise in detox usually over 1 week using non-addictive medication to make it as comfortable as possible. Published evidence shows that even an early version of the BONDS protocols was very well tolerated in opioid detox, for example, and opioid detox is notoriously unpleasant: 97% of patients did not report pain during a BONDS 7-Day Detox from opioids.
(reference again as before: Beaini AY et al (2000, October). A compressed opiate detoxification regime with naltrexone maintenance: patient tolerance, risk assessment and abstinence rates. Addiction Biology, 1;5(4):451-62 ). Higher doses of methadone can take an extra week.
Once the drugs are out of your system, you can then have oral naltrexone which can reduce cravings for cocaine and a wide range of other misuse, both prescription and non-prescription drug or alcohol misuse, and therefore may be useful to support abstinence.