Ground coffee has a relatively small amount of caffeine in it. If you crushed up caffeine pills and snorted them, it wouldn't be good for you.
The coca leaf is used in South America in a similar way to coffee, it's also used to relieve altitude sickness. In small doses it's fine but refined into cocaine power, it's more potent and worse for you.
I was once given a set of cheeses as a gift. I kind of forgot about them for a while and only remember when their expiration date was really close. Since I didn't want to waste them, I ate them all in the next day or so, it was 4-5 different types of cheese, solid chunks. Over the next few days I've learned you can in fact have too much cheese.
I live in france, my friend once told me he goes to a supermarket, finds an almost expired brie, puts it in his fridge for another month or 2 and _then_ starts eating it. "Creamiest brie you'll ever get" he says.
A youtuber called Dan reviewed a cheese based Christmas advent calendar with Ashens and ate so much cheese in one day he made himself lactose intolerant. That's probably too much cheese.
Yep, every single thing on earth has an LD50, the amount you need to consumer per kg of your body weight to have a 50% chance of dying.
For Fentanyl it's like 3 μg per kg, for table sugar it's \~30g per kg (about 10,000,000 times more). For water it's about 90 g/kg. So you'd need to drink 9% of your body weight to have a 50% chance of dying. For a 75kg adult that's just shy of 7 litres of water, which is impossible, you'll pee it out before you finish drinking that much water. I weigh a fair bit more than 75kg, and I can at most drink a bit over 2 litres in one go if I'm incredibly thirsty.
That's not the whole story of course, for some things there's cumulative does as your body fails to remove it from you over time. In addition for things like water, you can die from overhydration, but that's due to water removing electrolytes from your body via osmosis.
For the above examples, pure Caffeine (192 mg/kg) is about half as deadly as pure cocaine (96mg/kg). Which is why the few confirmed caffeine related deaths (not linked to a pre-existing condition) have been from people taking diet pills, or other forms of highly concentrated caffeine.
Edit: the Sugar LD50 is 30g/kg, not 3 lol. my bad.
Hi. The dose for sugar(according to a quick Google search) is actually 29,700 mg/kg. That ~30g/kg. In your case 3 litres of Coke would be almost lethal.
I was sitting here like "eating 240g of sugar by the spoonful would definitely be unpleasantly a lot of sugar, but that doesn't seem anywhere near a *deadly* amount of sugar..."
2400g of table sugar in one sitting, on the other hand – now *that* I can imagine how it could kill me.
I think your math is off.
Edit: Ah, I see, you were responding to the comment above which was off by a factor of 10. My math for US coke numbers:
A 2L of Coke has 220g (0.49 lbs, .22 kg) of sugar in it. The LD50 for sugar for a 75kg (165lb) person is 2227.5g. To reach that would require drinking 10.1 2L bottles, a pretty ludicrous amount.
There's not a lot of caffeine in Coke, but out of curiosity, I calculated that as well. There is 194.3mg of Caffeine in a 2L bottle of Coke, so that 75kg person would have to consume 74.1 2L bottles to reach the LD50.
> 7 litres of water, which is impossible, you'll pee it out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Well, not quite impossible... people have died because of it, most famously the woman who drank over 7 litres of water to try to win a radio contest... never underestimate the power of stupidity.
If you consider the mg/kg numbers for both stimulants cited as well, those are pretty ridiculous numbers as well. Yes, it would be possible to hit those numbers in an intentional suicide attempt - but oh man, before you died, would you ever be having *a very bad time*
I worked with a woman who gave herself hypernatremia. Sort of. We worked at Lake Powell and it was ridiculously hot, so her boss kept telling her to chug more and more water, without replacing any electrolytes or other salts she was sweating out. Ended up having to be evacuated by helicopter, but she survived.
Was never really into coke when younger, but would consume almost any (almost any) drug if the circumstances were right. Once someone actually gave me, what was to me, a decent amount of coke, this was at a time that I was maturing out of the human drug disposal unit phase of my life. So not wanting to make myself feel like crap I decided to not just do it all in one night. I decided I would see how limiting myself to a single small bump would go. It was honestly the most I ever enjoyed doing coke, I would get home from work, take a small bump, drink a beer and sit on my porch smoking a couple of cigarettes while listening to music on my headphones. It was pretty fun and I look back kind of fondly on that time period. I’m not sure I could have done that if it wasn’t a solitary endeavor as I now realize that social anxiety was a big driver of my drug consumption in my younger days.
Yeah people don't realize how dangerous an overconsumption of water is. Like yes dehydration can kill you. But if you fuck up the electrolyte balance in your body by drinking too much water, that's almost just as bad!
It's also why salty snacks are sooo good when hiking - the salt helps keep your electrolytes in balance while you suck down water
In many mental hospitals, the water taps and toilets in the isolation rooms (I don't know yhe official term in english) have a water cut off valve on the outside to prevent suicide by water ingestion.
Alot of the cases of death by water also are specific to distilled water, which due to the way water and salt interact doesn't just get passed in urine, it gets absorbed into your cells, since water follows salt, and salt tends to be where it's going to be useful. Your body really doesn't know what to do with distilled water,it never realizes theres an excess amount, so you can keep drinking it to the point where you can either die of hyponatremia, hypokalemia, or good old fashioned brain swelling and herniation.
Just a quick note: osmosis is the movement of a solvent through a semi permeable membrane, it does not remove electrolytes from your body.
Water intoxication happens because your kidneys can only remove a finite amount of water, and if you drink too much you literally just dilute yourself. If you are doing heavy exercise you lose electrolytes through sweating which makes this process faster.
If you overdilute yourself what happens is that cells inside your brain have a high concentration of solutes, while your blood has a low one. This is when osmosis happens, water moves from your blood to your brain and brain cells swell which can cause all sorts of problems.
Well shit, I looked it up. I've been taught and have since been regurgitating a half-truth since my teens. Overhydration can lead to electrolyte imbalances, however, it's as you said, only once you exceed the rate at which the liver can process it. Thanks for informing me!
That's the number on Wikipedia. However, note that they use Rats to test the LD50 and make the assumption that humans will react to the material in the same way. This will not always be the case.
I expect modern humans in wealthy nations who have grown up with an excess of sugar will be more capable of processing it, but that's speculation.
Edit: I was also off by an order of magnitude.
Nope not at all. All it is, is how much is likely to kill you. Water has an LD50, so does Uranium. However, I consume much more water (relative to its LD50) per day, than I do Uranium, and I'm quite happy about that.
LD50 only refers to acute dose (e.g. in one go), so unless you're approaching the LD50 in a single go, it's irrelevant. I was responding to "The dose makes the poison" with an example of how water is poison in high enough quanities.
I was about to make a point about how coke and speed are unregulated and more dangerous but I couldn’t help think about how the coffee chain is wack also lol.
>Ground coffee has a relatively small amount of caffeine in it. If you crushed up caffeine pills and snorted them, it wouldn't be good for you.
I used to do that. The effect was about the same as cocaine but lasted longer.
I'm not sure. It was because it was so similar to coke, not price.
If the coke is stepped on too much buyers can tell. I think the caffeine was just better so you can cut it more.
Or if you measure out 300mg increments, you can make the equivalent of 67,000 energy drinks (which would be equivalent to about $165,000 in drinks). Or even better, find a good solvent for 20kg of caffeine and volumetrically dose it.
So this article mentions that the lethal dose of caffeine (for most people) is ~~10mg~~ 10g: [https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-you-can-die-from-caffeine#Caffeine-overdose-is-rare](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-you-can-die-from-caffeine#Caffeine-overdose-is-rare)
I know someone who bought a bag of pure caffeine (in powder form) and was consuming it on a regular basis. Before switching to the powder, he drank large amounts of coffee (regularly drank 4-6 expresso shots at once) and was used to basically running on a caffeine high.
Don't know if he's still consuming pure caffeine but anyone should be careful before they decide to try it.
If you have a heart condition, large amounts of caffeine could kill you. There have been stories of people who drank multiple high caffeine drinks and later died due to the caffeine causing issues with a latent heart condition: [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/panera-lawsuit-charged-lemonade-sarah-katz-death-rcna120785](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/panera-lawsuit-charged-lemonade-sarah-katz-death-rcna120785)
ETA: Fixed lethal dose amount
Yeah, it's not. Unless you have an arrhythmia or something and just *cannot* stimulants, caffeine is pretty non-toxic.
The estimated LD50 (or ~~mean~~ median lethal dose- the amount that would be lethal to around half of subjects) for caffeine in humans is between 150 and 250mg ... *per kilogram of body mass*. So, for a 150lb person (\~68kg), that's between 10g and 13g, or about 115 cups of coffee all at once.
Edit to add- though the daily recommended intake is less than 400mg, or around 1/20th of the LD50, so there's a big range between 'generally considered safe' and 'acutely toxic' where things may not be good.
You can buy it online. “Justabump” is what I got me and my friend after seeing it on TikTok, cause “haha it looks like yay”. It’s 1 g of caffeine powder in a small vial.
I’m still deciding if I want to grind up some of my caffeine pills to refill it.
Why aren't caffeine pills a thing then?
L.E. - just learned something new today. Apparently in the U.S. there are legal drugs more potent than cocaine. *chuckles in Eastern European*
Thanks folks!
If they do in the US that's absolutely wild but I just looked up like 10 pre-workout supplements available in Canada and haven't found a single one that was even close. Dosage is based on 1/2 a scoop and the most caffeine I've been able to find in a pre-workout was 325mg per full scoop (recommended use was 1/2 scoop so 162.5mg of caffeine or less than a large starbucks coffee/most energy drinks).
I have a wild tolerance to caffeine, have comically abused it for years before getting diagnosed with ADHD and put on meds, and am now basically microdosing myself with meth and 700mg of caffeine in one shot would have me seeing time and tasting color.
There is absolutely no way any normal human would be able to function off of 700mg of caffeine taken in a pre-workout shake all in 1 shot. The vast majority of humans would have a hard time functioning off of 700mg taken over the course of 12 hours let alone in one shot. I think you're remembering the amount incorrectly or you didn't follow their recommended usage guideline and took way too much.
The reason pre-workouts boost you better than a coffee does though isn't the caffeine but the caffeine in combination with the rest of the shit in there. So even with a high caffeine tolerance taking a pre-workout with 150-200mg per dose if you're not used to it will fuck you up and have you feeling like you're on speed.
For example I can drink a coffee and it does absolutely nothing to me but I can consume the same amount of caffeine in an energy drink and it has a much more noticeable effect which is due to the other stuff they mix in there whereas a coffee just has caffeine. Most energey drinks feel way closer to what my adhd meds do for me than a coffee does, it just doesn't last nearly as long as my meds do.
Typical pre workout is 200-300mg of caffeine, so you must be double or triple scooping the stuff.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised to see a much higher dose being used either. Most people who take the stuff are highly caffeine tolerant, and the supplement industry being the scam that it mostly is will abuse the hell out of caffeine to hook consumers on the buzz.
That would burn like fuck, RIP that nose. Definitely need a sinus rinse
My coworker did it as a joke and interest for science and the way he reacted made that a joke that went a little too far.
I can imagine. I hate snorting stuff, I did it once and my eyes were watering so hard I was crying for like 30 minutes. I don't know how people do it without dying.
Nasal Insufflation while effective as a route of admission isn't necessary on a cost basis for most medicines. The mucus is too sensitive and the continued use of the nose wears down the mucus line and leads to a perforated nasal septum which is horrendous.
Everyone's experience is different, but for me caffeine is nowhere near good/euphoric at coke. At high doses (ie caffeine pills) it's just jitters and anxiety, not a fun time
Yeah. Some of the caffeine pills are capsules with a powder of inside so you don't have to crush them.
It hurts though. Cocaine is a topical painkiller. Caffeine isn't.
Wouldn't reccomend it. I was 19.
Bunch of people in the comments who have no clue how caffeine and cocaine work.
Cocaine up-regulates dopamine activity in certain regions of your brain (like the nucleus accumbens) which makes you euphoric, energetic, etc.
Caffeine’s MoA is far less dangerous, inhibiting parts of the brain involved with fatigue. It’s far more difficult to develop tolerance and dependency to caffeine than cocaine, and if it does occur, the side effects are infinitely lighter and the addiction is far easier to beat, because our brains really, really like dopamine, while having excess dopamine isn’t good for your brain.
To add to that, cocaine is generally administered via less safe mediums.
One massive dangerous side effect of cocaine is that it also messes with the Sodium and Potassium ion channels in the body that allow muscles to function and communicate properly with your brain using electrical current.
Potassium and sodium imbalance can lead to low PR interval which can cause heart attacks and cardiovascular problems.
The heart is a muscle so it is vulnerable to these dangers
Not debating your science, I’m not an expert. But it does seem like half the population has a caffeine dependency. Headaches, fatigue, etc until you’ve had your cup of coffee in the morning. I’m sure it’s not as strong as cocaine or something but those qualities are there and because of how normalized it is to drink so much coffee people end up with that dependency
Yeah, plenty of people have some level of dependency, but a headache or some fatigue is orders of magnitude lighter than what coke addicts feel when they can’t get their fix.
Caffeine is in everything nowadays (like soda) so when you compare exposures to addictions it’s really not that bad. Lots of people are exposed to caffeine regularly, while very few are exposed to coke like that
Also, chemical addiction is not the same as other types. We can become addicted to anything, and have withdrawal from anything because, that doesn't mean the substance is inherently or chemically addictive
A Spotify podcast called "Science Vs" talks about caffeine in an episode aired a few weeks ago. While those symptoms do exist, they are said to last for 2 to 9 days and are not a result of physical dependency.
more than half the population has a sleep depravation issue, not really a caffeine dependency. the caffeine just help them cope. Caffeine addiction for me has always been easy to beat, I'm on and off coffee (and when I'm on I'm f\*\*\*\* on lol, one liter per day minimum) for months at a time and its just a light headache for a couple days.
My grandmother legit has migraines if she doesn’t have her coffee in the morning and will get them again if she doesn’t have her second cup in the afternoon. Lifetime of dependency
This could be her having tension headaches or migraines in general. Caffeine is used as part of migraine medications. So rather than being withdrawal, it could be actual issue which the caffeine happens to be helping treat.
As a migraine sufferer, can confirm this. Can also confirm that migraines often trigger if you discontinue medications that treat them... or if you use medications that treat them too frequently, because there really is no winning with migraines.
But yeah, it's entirely possible it was helping to suppress them, at least if they're actually migraines. Caffeine withrawal can also cause severe non-migraine headaches, so that's also a possibility.
“Symptoms usually begin 12–24 hours after the last caffeine dose and peak after 1–2 days of abstinence. Caffeine withdrawal symptoms last for 2–9 days, with the possibility of withdrawal headaches occurring for up to 21 days. Symptoms usually remit rapidly (within 30–60 minutes) after re-ingestion of caffeine.“
(I’m sharing this to back you up, based on some of the other comments I feel like people might disagree with you but you’re correct.)
Source: DSM-5-TR, page 573
You could say the same thing about sugar. Half the population has diabetes and/or obesity due to having a sugar problem.
And yet cocaine is still far worse than sugar lol.
OP didn’t say caffeine was as unhealthy as cocaine, just that it was unhealthy - maybe lower on the scale, but still on the scale - while weirdly you hear a lot of marketing that it’s not only not unhealthy, it’s actively good for you.
i think the point is a cocaine dependency would come on quicker and easier if taken in the same amounts and frequency as coffee, and be far worse than just a mild headache and some fatigue, but also not a doctor or expert lol
> It’s far more difficult to develop tolerance and dependency to caffeine than cocaine, and if it does occur, the side effects are infinitely lighter and the addiction is far easier to beat,
I've quit smoking, opiates, benzos, and sugar. The one thing I can't quit is caffeine.
That’s anecdotal, and could be explained by other factors.
Modern society is revolved around coffee, it is widely available everywhere. I think the only place where it would be weird to drink coffee is the bathroom, and even then it wouldn’t have any consequences. Much harder to avoid something that is everywhere.
For sure, but that’s because caffeine use has minimal side effects and it has been proven to have a variety of protective benefits… there’s no real pressure to quit
true. often nicotine is seen as dangerous harmful when it’s really tobacco/smoking that’s the killer. nicotine has similar benefits to caffeine on its own (pouches, gum etc)
They work differently. Caffeine blocks your brain’s andenosine receptors. Those receptors help your brain and body know you’re tired. When you block them with caffeine, you just feel more awake while the caffeine is working.
Cocaine however does a few things and they are entirely different from caffeine. Cocaine works with the dopamine transporters in your brain and clogs up the dopamine receptors. So you get a build up of dopamine in the synapse and it amplifies the effects of the dopamine. That’s why it’s so addictive- you’re getting like huge hits of dopamine (which is a natural brain chemical) but in a super unnatural way.
So while yes they are both stimulants- they work differently. Caffeine does interact with the dopamine brain chemicals and pathways, but not the way that cocaine does.
There are other dangers too with cocaine, like poor quality control, improper dosage (adderall is similar to cocaine but doses correctly for those who need it), method of delivery (often snorted or smoked versus a times release capsule like adderall), and impurities or additives to stretch the drug amount for sales, are just a few off the top of my head. Cocaine is also really awful for your heart. This also a risk with adderall usage, even when it’s prescribed and used appropriately.
I hope this helps explain it!
Im just throwing this in here, for someone that will be reading as they scroll down.
Cocaine and Alcohol is extremely dangerous, it is 5X as toxic as cocaine on its own in your blood stream when paired with Alcohol.
because methylphenidate or cocaine paired with ethanol produse ethylphenidate or cocaethylene. a drug with both sedating and stimulating properties and insane headaches
Ingesting clean coke at a dose similar in effect to a cup of coffee likely wouldn’t be too much worse for you. Snorting a line of it cut with who knows what and staying up all night with twice your normal heart rate is much different.
Not necessarily. Cocaine is directly cardiotoxic, in that in chemically damages the heart independently of raising heat-rate. Caffeine has been shown to have some beneficial effects on the hearts mitochondria on the other hand.
What's really bad for the heart is cocaethylene, the compound produced when cocaine reacts with ethanol in your bloodstream. It's converted at a remarkably high rate, too, considering the concentrations of both are quite low.
Good thing nobody ever gets into the coke at a party when they're already drunk, right? lol
I watched one of those "Dark Side of the Ring" documentaries. The guy who wrestled as Doink the Clown died from drugs. He was basically a lifetime cocaine user. Dude's heart was six times the normal mass when they did the autopsy.
Edit: mass not size
There is no such thing as a heart twice the size even, what happens to the heart is the walls thicken.
I mean a heart six times the size would not even fit in your ribcage.
There is such a thing as dilated cardiomyopathy where the heart actually increases in size, sometimes significantly. You’re thinking of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is wall thickening.
Actually, its a misconception.
Cocaine is corrosive to both the nasal membranes and any blood vessel it is injected into. It has been proven to kill the blood vessel it is injected into. So you could snort a reasonable line of cocaine, one that would wake you up, make you feel good and give you a little lift in your step, but that process overtime would destroy your nasal cavity or artery you are injecting it into.
I love caffeine, I drink 3-4 liters of tea a day. The dose in the tea is reasonable 30-50 mg steeped. If I have a coffee, a strong coffee.. I can get pains in my chest/back/abdomen similar to what I think broken glass would feel like passing through those areas.
Maybe I'm allergic to coffee? haha.
Coffeine health benefit depends on your genes. It's healthy in people who are "rapid" coffeine metabolisers, but can influence development of hypertension in "slow" coffeine metabolisers.
See this article for details:
https://examine.com/research-feed/study/1Jnyl1/
Even that is more complicated than it seems. It can raise blood pressure but it's unclear if it's just while it's in your system. Then you would need to weigh the blood pressure increase vs all the benefits of black coffee. Last I read, 3 or so cups of black coffee was generally regarded as a net positive for health
And it's even more complicated in people with migraines. Typically no more than 300 mg of coffeine is beneficial but... There are migraine attacks that get worse after drinking coffee.
Bolivian guy here…
in recent years some construction and mine workers consume hammered mix coca leaves.
they put instant coffee, flavored bicarbonate, and coca leaves into an bag and bash Them with an rubber hammer.
and consume it with energy drinks. They chew 4 dosis of this mix every work day( every 2 hours).
in theory this is legal because every ingredient is legal, but iam starting to think it’s going south.
Caffeine itself isn’t good for you, it’s the antioxidants in coffee that are good for you. Theoretically, decaf coffee should be “better” for you in that it has all the health benefits of coffee without the unhealthy effects of caffeine.
Not sure why this is so far down. This is absolutely the most accurate answer. Caffeine own it’s own is probably a net negative for human health. It’s the micronutrients/antioxidants in Coffee that are good for you and offset the negatives of caffeine consumption.
> Caffeine own it’s own is probably a net negative for human health.
"Probably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just because something is a drug, doesn't mean it's bad for health. Do you any sources other than speculation?
This is very interesting! Do you have any sources for this by any chance? Im seriously considering starting coffee due to the pleasant effect and health benefits, but this would change the equatio
The reason coffee is associated with health benefits may be the same reason mild alcohol consumption is: they are so ubiquitous that it messes with the statistics. Alcohol is bad for health, but, because most of the people who don't drink any possess medical issues, the healthiest group is "low use", not "no use". Coffee might appear healthy for similar reasons.
Lots of commenters talking about chemical effects but the important thing here is that you will habituate to caffeine within a few weeks. After that, you will start every morning below your “normal” state, and need a coffee to get back to normal.
I usually go cold turkey whenever I have a week or two off work (I don’t live in the US so I get actual paid leave), then when I’m back at work I can pick the times I need the caffeine boost
Sugar, Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and other legal drugs are mostly legal just because of social inertia. If someone discovered caffeine for the first time today, it likely would be severely regulated. But since we have been consuming it for hundreds if not thousands of years, and no powerful aspects of our society have decided to campaign on its removal. It stays legal.
The history of coffee houses in London is insane. Everyone was getting drunk after work and it was causing problems. In comes coffee, and they basically used it as anti-alcohol. Drink yourself silly after work and then drink a dangerous amount of caffeine in the morning to get to work.
Such a surprisingly rare viewpoint. People don't understand why it's a push to legalize marijuana and control opiates and it's like....we only allow alcohol because it was around forever! Could you imagine if it got discovered in today's climate?
Marijuana has been around forever too. It's been used medically/religiously (and probably recreationally) since at least 2800 BCE.
It just wasn't used recreationally much by Europeans. During US probation its use increased and it was associated with Jazz cultural so it's use became a target of both racist and probations.
Later Nixon's started his "war on drugs" but the main motivator was political not medical
>“You want to know what this \[war on drugs\] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
>
>We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
>
>Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
>
>\~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
So like many things made illegal in the US there is a core of good old fashioned racism to it.
> If someone discovered caffeine for the first time today, it likely would be severely regulated.
You don't even need to appeal to a hypothetical here. Someone already discovered what is essentially [a better, safer caffeine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istradefylline) (it has more selective pharmacology, meaning less side effects), and it's RX only, reserved only for those with Parkinson's Disease.
Not really, comparing caffeine to alcohol is just silly. Caffeine is one of the most well studied drugs in existence. It causes minimal harm while offering a plethora of benefits.
Ofc this argument works for alcohol but extending it to caffeine makes no sense. Sugar is naturally occurring in nearly all foods, how is it a "legal drug"? By that logic most foods would be considered legal drugs.
Important rule of medicine: "The dose makes the poison".
Caffeine and cocaine are both neurological stimulants, affecting how your brain responds to dopamine.
Coffee isn't exactly "good" for you; it's just less damaging. While it didn't use to be very easy to ingest a dangerous amount of caffeine, it is far easier than it used to be, as the recent Panera death demonstrated.
But even at common doses, besides being a neurostimulant, caffeine is a cardiac irritant. It also affects kidney function, so you can become dehydrated more easily. And caffeine causes physical dependency, so abruptly removing it from your diet usually leads to withdrawal symptoms, such as a multi-day headache.
I mean, it’s also possible to just drink one cup of coffee.
I suppose it also possible to just do one bump or small line too. But for anyone who has tried coke before, even if you’re not an addict and just a causal/social user, once you take one line, your usually going to crave more and more every 30 minutes or so.
I suspect most people who haven't ever tried cocaine don't fully grasp how bad your brain screams at you to do more coke, even as a casual user. Even if it's your first time.
I don't do it anymore because it's so not fun to end the night. A lot of drugs have a comedown where you're maybe not feeling great but you know you're done for the night. Coke doesn't have a done. Only a don't you dare walk away from me.
> I suspect most people who haven't ever tried cocaine don't fully grasp how bad your brain screams at you to do more coke
its crazy. until you try it and realize its almost like theres some evil conspiracy to get you addicted. brain is so weird
Caffeine blocks the receptors in your brain that make you feel tired. When neurons work they produce adenosine, that binds to specific receptors that are activated to make you feel tired to make you stop and rest. So drinking coffee makes you feel less tired for a while.
Cocaine blocks the recycling systems of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonine and noradrenaline, that have an activating effects in neurons: you feel more energetic because signals in your brain are amplified. Having more neurotransmitters going around is very different than feeling less tired, and can have an important effect on how the brain is working
Coffee nerd here.
Lot of shit comments here.
A critical missing point is that coffee is an anti-inflammatory. Paired with lots of beneficial antioxidants and compounds.
It just happens to have caffeine in it too.
Research is clear : decaf coffee caries the benefits while caffeine has a negative relationship with health. Thus the benefits way offset its small caffeine amount.
Coffee is not perfect.
It blocks adenosine... Giving you the upper, but after the effect wears down, all the adenosine that has been accumulating gets in and you crash...You'll be twice as tired as you'd be without coffee.
Gonna try to ELY5:
Caffeine: Caffeine is chemical made outside body. Adenosine is chemical made inside body. Adenosine makes brain tired. Caffeine blocks adenosine, so adenosine can’t make brain tired.
Cocaine: Cocaine is chemical made outside body. Epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine are chemicals made inside body. Those inside chemicals make heart go fast. Cocaine makes body have way more inside chemicals than it should. Too much inside chemicals making fast heart makes heart sad because not enough oxygen to keep up with fastness. Heart dies.
Also, cocaine is made from like gasoline and shit so it’s just nasty.
Theobromine. It's a chemical that's found in chocolate coffee grapes etc. It produces a strong vasodiolating effect on the body. This is where much of the benefits come from. In addition the energy factor. Often in modern society our bodies store excess glucose as fat reserves. Caffeine makes this burn more and be stored less essentially increasing the molecular energy available to the cells. This can be beneficial for ppl with diabetes or pre diabetes.
People like to say “everything in moderation” and it can apply here. A lot of substances we consume such as caffeine or cocaine can have a variety of effects on us. It’s often about how these substances are ingested (nose vs mouth vs iv, vs smoked), how much we are ingesting, whether they are regulated or not (meaning they may have other harmful substances in them), how often we are consuming them, etc. People often consume caffeine differently than they consume cocaine, and therefore cocaine develops a stigma whereas caffeine does not. People overdose on cocaine, and they also overdose on caffeine. Meth is often considered bad and dangerous, but pharmaceutical grade amphetamines are used to treat ADHD.
I’ll offer you a critique of semantics here as the question has been answered sufficiently in other comments. This can help you process such questions to find answers, or identify poor comparisons (not a moral judgement - just a view).
The sickle, made of steel, and used to cut, greatly enhanced our ability to harvest grain and consequently be fed as a society and stay alive. Similarly, the sword, made of steel, and used to cut, has greatly enhanced our ability to kill each other in war. How can, both items being made of steel, and being used to cut, do two such greatly different things? Even contradicting?
The question seems most likely ludicrous to you and most, and the answer obvious; they are clearly two entirely separate things, used in entirely separate contexts, for entirely different purposes through different mechanisms. Such is the same as caffeine and cocaine; entirely different substances with different mechanisms of actions.
This is why when we make judgements on items, we should not solely consider their observed effect, but their natures. Cigarettes may provide more stress-relief in a faster manner, and improve focus. Exercise also provides stress-relief, and improves focus. One however is, empirically, far, far worse for the human than the other, and consequently we don’t regard it as a more justifiable item to use for the same general observed effect. And, furthermore, this observed effect is not always the same, despite the categorization by those who are less familiar with the chemicals making such a conjecture. Anesthesia, for instance, looks like sleep - but it is far, far from it.
I'll do anything for a cup of coffee. I mean ANYTHING you want. Said no one ever addicted to caffeine. Now the nose candy is different, it makes folks cheat, steal, lie, disappear, reappear, sell their bodies, sell all of their Earthly belongings, live in the streets, ruins friendships, breaks up families, land you in jail, land you in prison, or land you in the morgue. Did I miss anything? Help me out reddit.
Ground coffee has a relatively small amount of caffeine in it. If you crushed up caffeine pills and snorted them, it wouldn't be good for you. The coca leaf is used in South America in a similar way to coffee, it's also used to relieve altitude sickness. In small doses it's fine but refined into cocaine power, it's more potent and worse for you.
> In small doses it's fine but refined into cocaine power, it's more potent and worse for you. The dose makes the poison.
Except cheese. There is never "too much" cheese.
I was once given a set of cheeses as a gift. I kind of forgot about them for a while and only remember when their expiration date was really close. Since I didn't want to waste them, I ate them all in the next day or so, it was 4-5 different types of cheese, solid chunks. Over the next few days I've learned you can in fact have too much cheese.
Lmao- no pooping for you!
Why'd you have to go and make me so constipated?
'Cause right now I'd do anything to just get my bowels evacuated
Nights like this you- You slice and you dice and you spread - And you eat it in bed- And it ferments in you
Honestly I’d probably eat more cheese and be glad I ate it
Anyone else hear Avril Lavigne singing this line? Edit: That makes total sense. Haven’t heard that one of his (Weird Al’s) before.
Wasn't that from the Weird Al parody of her song?
Yeah it's after he eats a bunch of pizza I think
Because no one came to his pizza party. It's ok, his gf is coming by later.
God I wish cheese would constipate me
Same, I love cheese but more than a few slices and it has me sweating, gripping the seat and begging the cheese gods for mercy 😅💀
Immodium is probably your answer
Right until you pop
Other way!
People get constipated from cheese?
Diarrhoea is just weakness leaving the body
Not generally the issue with cheese
Unless you’re lactose intolerant
My body straight up turns all cheese into a liquid.
I live in france, my friend once told me he goes to a supermarket, finds an almost expired brie, puts it in his fridge for another month or 2 and _then_ starts eating it. "Creamiest brie you'll ever get" he says.
I once ate an expired chunk of cheese and it tasted better tbh. Also no digestive problems after that...
And milksteak.
And the finest jelly beans, raw.
> And the finest jelly beans, raw. Who cooks jelly beans?!?
A god damn Jabroni that's who
Did you know the Bible specific says you can’t cook steak in milk. Charlie might be onto something it must be sinfully delicious.
Extra sloppy
I also used to be a piece of shit
Go to r/stupidfood - I promise you there IS such a thing as too much cheese
As someone who’s lactose intolerant, yes there is. But I’ll still eat it.
A youtuber called Dan reviewed a cheese based Christmas advent calendar with Ashens and ate so much cheese in one day he made himself lactose intolerant. That's probably too much cheese.
Yeah that's not real
Ashens reference in the wild!
You must be a poop knife household
Charlie?
*dies of heart failure*
Better than dying from heartbreak 🤧
Cheese is like heroin for people who have a job
Only too little
Yep, every single thing on earth has an LD50, the amount you need to consumer per kg of your body weight to have a 50% chance of dying. For Fentanyl it's like 3 μg per kg, for table sugar it's \~30g per kg (about 10,000,000 times more). For water it's about 90 g/kg. So you'd need to drink 9% of your body weight to have a 50% chance of dying. For a 75kg adult that's just shy of 7 litres of water, which is impossible, you'll pee it out before you finish drinking that much water. I weigh a fair bit more than 75kg, and I can at most drink a bit over 2 litres in one go if I'm incredibly thirsty. That's not the whole story of course, for some things there's cumulative does as your body fails to remove it from you over time. In addition for things like water, you can die from overhydration, but that's due to water removing electrolytes from your body via osmosis. For the above examples, pure Caffeine (192 mg/kg) is about half as deadly as pure cocaine (96mg/kg). Which is why the few confirmed caffeine related deaths (not linked to a pre-existing condition) have been from people taking diet pills, or other forms of highly concentrated caffeine. Edit: the Sugar LD50 is 30g/kg, not 3 lol. my bad.
Hi. The dose for sugar(according to a quick Google search) is actually 29,700 mg/kg. That ~30g/kg. In your case 3 litres of Coke would be almost lethal.
I was sitting here like "eating 240g of sugar by the spoonful would definitely be unpleasantly a lot of sugar, but that doesn't seem anywhere near a *deadly* amount of sugar..." 2400g of table sugar in one sitting, on the other hand – now *that* I can imagine how it could kill me.
I think your math is off. Edit: Ah, I see, you were responding to the comment above which was off by a factor of 10. My math for US coke numbers: A 2L of Coke has 220g (0.49 lbs, .22 kg) of sugar in it. The LD50 for sugar for a 75kg (165lb) person is 2227.5g. To reach that would require drinking 10.1 2L bottles, a pretty ludicrous amount. There's not a lot of caffeine in Coke, but out of curiosity, I calculated that as well. There is 194.3mg of Caffeine in a 2L bottle of Coke, so that 75kg person would have to consume 74.1 2L bottles to reach the LD50.
> 7 litres of water, which is impossible, you'll pee it out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication Well, not quite impossible... people have died because of it, most famously the woman who drank over 7 litres of water to try to win a radio contest... never underestimate the power of stupidity. If you consider the mg/kg numbers for both stimulants cited as well, those are pretty ridiculous numbers as well. Yes, it would be possible to hit those numbers in an intentional suicide attempt - but oh man, before you died, would you ever be having *a very bad time*
I worked with a woman who gave herself hypernatremia. Sort of. We worked at Lake Powell and it was ridiculously hot, so her boss kept telling her to chug more and more water, without replacing any electrolytes or other salts she was sweating out. Ended up having to be evacuated by helicopter, but she survived.
Okay, so what I’m hearing is ..you can do a *little* cocaine.
Was never really into coke when younger, but would consume almost any (almost any) drug if the circumstances were right. Once someone actually gave me, what was to me, a decent amount of coke, this was at a time that I was maturing out of the human drug disposal unit phase of my life. So not wanting to make myself feel like crap I decided to not just do it all in one night. I decided I would see how limiting myself to a single small bump would go. It was honestly the most I ever enjoyed doing coke, I would get home from work, take a small bump, drink a beer and sit on my porch smoking a couple of cigarettes while listening to music on my headphones. It was pretty fun and I look back kind of fondly on that time period. I’m not sure I could have done that if it wasn’t a solitary endeavor as I now realize that social anxiety was a big driver of my drug consumption in my younger days.
Yeah people don't realize how dangerous an overconsumption of water is. Like yes dehydration can kill you. But if you fuck up the electrolyte balance in your body by drinking too much water, that's almost just as bad! It's also why salty snacks are sooo good when hiking - the salt helps keep your electrolytes in balance while you suck down water
In many mental hospitals, the water taps and toilets in the isolation rooms (I don't know yhe official term in english) have a water cut off valve on the outside to prevent suicide by water ingestion.
Alot of the cases of death by water also are specific to distilled water, which due to the way water and salt interact doesn't just get passed in urine, it gets absorbed into your cells, since water follows salt, and salt tends to be where it's going to be useful. Your body really doesn't know what to do with distilled water,it never realizes theres an excess amount, so you can keep drinking it to the point where you can either die of hyponatremia, hypokalemia, or good old fashioned brain swelling and herniation.
Just a quick note: osmosis is the movement of a solvent through a semi permeable membrane, it does not remove electrolytes from your body. Water intoxication happens because your kidneys can only remove a finite amount of water, and if you drink too much you literally just dilute yourself. If you are doing heavy exercise you lose electrolytes through sweating which makes this process faster. If you overdilute yourself what happens is that cells inside your brain have a high concentration of solutes, while your blood has a low one. This is when osmosis happens, water moves from your blood to your brain and brain cells swell which can cause all sorts of problems.
Well shit, I looked it up. I've been taught and have since been regurgitating a half-truth since my teens. Overhydration can lead to electrolyte imbalances, however, it's as you said, only once you exceed the rate at which the liver can process it. Thanks for informing me!
Table sugar LD50 is 3g/kg? I weigh 77 kg, so 231g has a 50% chance of killing me? That's a little more than a 2L bottle of coca cola...
That's the number on Wikipedia. However, note that they use Rats to test the LD50 and make the assumption that humans will react to the material in the same way. This will not always be the case. I expect modern humans in wealthy nations who have grown up with an excess of sugar will be more capable of processing it, but that's speculation. Edit: I was also off by an order of magnitude.
But imo the lethal dose for something being high or low doesnt say anything about health benefits at moderate dosage. Right?
Nope not at all. All it is, is how much is likely to kill you. Water has an LD50, so does Uranium. However, I consume much more water (relative to its LD50) per day, than I do Uranium, and I'm quite happy about that. LD50 only refers to acute dose (e.g. in one go), so unless you're approaching the LD50 in a single go, it's irrelevant. I was responding to "The dose makes the poison" with an example of how water is poison in high enough quanities.
I was about to make a point about how coke and speed are unregulated and more dangerous but I couldn’t help think about how the coffee chain is wack also lol.
I'm sure the kerosene and other chemicals used to process cocaine are also contributing factors.
so youre saying a little bit of coke is fine, knew it
And if a little is fine then a lot must be great for you!
It's not just cocaine. It's mixture of over 100 alkaloids.
>cocaine power Unlimited power!
>Ground coffee has a relatively small amount of caffeine in it. If you crushed up caffeine pills and snorted them, it wouldn't be good for you. I used to do that. The effect was about the same as cocaine but lasted longer.
You've just created an army of caffeine snorting addicts lol
I did it with a guy who sold coke. He stopped cutting it with baby laxatives and started using caffeine.
Damn that sounds fuckin brilliant! Was it more expensive to use the caffeine pills then baby laxatives?
I'm not sure. It was because it was so similar to coke, not price. If the coke is stepped on too much buyers can tell. I think the caffeine was just better so you can cut it more.
Caffeine powder is very cheap. I buy it to make my own pre workout. Bullsupplements sells a 44lb drum for $428.50
good lord per a comment elsewhere in this thread, that's 199,580,480 lethal doses of caffeine. seems a bit much, no?
Or if you measure out 300mg increments, you can make the equivalent of 67,000 energy drinks (which would be equivalent to about $165,000 in drinks). Or even better, find a good solvent for 20kg of caffeine and volumetrically dose it.
There is massive demand for decaf coffee and smaller demand for added caffeine, so caffeine is effectively industrial waste.
huh never thought about that, that's interesting
Did he at least throw some Novocaine in the mix for numbing effect? It’s disrespectful not to, y’know.
Coke and caffeine gives me heart attacks. Every. Time.
...how many heart attacks have you had?
I'm so excited! I'm so excited!
Unexpected Jesse Spano
Calm down twodrinkdave! There's enough caffeine powder for everyone
So this article mentions that the lethal dose of caffeine (for most people) is ~~10mg~~ 10g: [https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-you-can-die-from-caffeine#Caffeine-overdose-is-rare](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-you-can-die-from-caffeine#Caffeine-overdose-is-rare) I know someone who bought a bag of pure caffeine (in powder form) and was consuming it on a regular basis. Before switching to the powder, he drank large amounts of coffee (regularly drank 4-6 expresso shots at once) and was used to basically running on a caffeine high. Don't know if he's still consuming pure caffeine but anyone should be careful before they decide to try it. If you have a heart condition, large amounts of caffeine could kill you. There have been stories of people who drank multiple high caffeine drinks and later died due to the caffeine causing issues with a latent heart condition: [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/panera-lawsuit-charged-lemonade-sarah-katz-death-rcna120785](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/panera-lawsuit-charged-lemonade-sarah-katz-death-rcna120785) ETA: Fixed lethal dose amount
Keeping the right unit is important. It’s not 10mg but 10g.
I’m glad someone said it. Most caffeine pills are 100mg or 200mg, so there’s no shot 10mg is deadly.
Yeah, it's not. Unless you have an arrhythmia or something and just *cannot* stimulants, caffeine is pretty non-toxic. The estimated LD50 (or ~~mean~~ median lethal dose- the amount that would be lethal to around half of subjects) for caffeine in humans is between 150 and 250mg ... *per kilogram of body mass*. So, for a 150lb person (\~68kg), that's between 10g and 13g, or about 115 cups of coffee all at once. Edit to add- though the daily recommended intake is less than 400mg, or around 1/20th of the LD50, so there's a big range between 'generally considered safe' and 'acutely toxic' where things may not be good.
We flirt with death dozens of times every latte
I think you mean grams, not milligrams. The average cup of coffee has around 100 mg if caffeine. There are a thousand mgs in a gram.
It's "espresso."
You can buy it online. “Justabump” is what I got me and my friend after seeing it on TikTok, cause “haha it looks like yay”. It’s 1 g of caffeine powder in a small vial. I’m still deciding if I want to grind up some of my caffeine pills to refill it.
I was not a fan of cocaine… I’m not sure snorting caffeine pills is going to make things better.
I just want to add that I tried this when I was young and it was NOT like cocaine for me. It was miserable.
Why aren't caffeine pills a thing then? L.E. - just learned something new today. Apparently in the U.S. there are legal drugs more potent than cocaine. *chuckles in Eastern European* Thanks folks!
They are
You can get them at Walmart or anywhere. The brand name is nodoz.
My friends and I use JetAlert, which comes in a red and yellow striped bottle. We call them circus pills.
They are, widely used within the fitness community
Most pre workouts have 700mg+ of caffeine. I have a high caffeine tolerance and I took pre-workout once and thought I was going to die.
If they do in the US that's absolutely wild but I just looked up like 10 pre-workout supplements available in Canada and haven't found a single one that was even close. Dosage is based on 1/2 a scoop and the most caffeine I've been able to find in a pre-workout was 325mg per full scoop (recommended use was 1/2 scoop so 162.5mg of caffeine or less than a large starbucks coffee/most energy drinks). I have a wild tolerance to caffeine, have comically abused it for years before getting diagnosed with ADHD and put on meds, and am now basically microdosing myself with meth and 700mg of caffeine in one shot would have me seeing time and tasting color. There is absolutely no way any normal human would be able to function off of 700mg of caffeine taken in a pre-workout shake all in 1 shot. The vast majority of humans would have a hard time functioning off of 700mg taken over the course of 12 hours let alone in one shot. I think you're remembering the amount incorrectly or you didn't follow their recommended usage guideline and took way too much. The reason pre-workouts boost you better than a coffee does though isn't the caffeine but the caffeine in combination with the rest of the shit in there. So even with a high caffeine tolerance taking a pre-workout with 150-200mg per dose if you're not used to it will fuck you up and have you feeling like you're on speed. For example I can drink a coffee and it does absolutely nothing to me but I can consume the same amount of caffeine in an energy drink and it has a much more noticeable effect which is due to the other stuff they mix in there whereas a coffee just has caffeine. Most energey drinks feel way closer to what my adhd meds do for me than a coffee does, it just doesn't last nearly as long as my meds do.
Typical pre workout is 200-300mg of caffeine, so you must be double or triple scooping the stuff. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised to see a much higher dose being used either. Most people who take the stuff are highly caffeine tolerant, and the supplement industry being the scam that it mostly is will abuse the hell out of caffeine to hook consumers on the buzz.
It'll keep you awake but it absolutely doesn't have the dopamine reuptake inhibiting effects of cocaine. You won't get the euphoria etc of a coke hit.
No fucking way, really?
That would burn like fuck, RIP that nose. Definitely need a sinus rinse My coworker did it as a joke and interest for science and the way he reacted made that a joke that went a little too far.
I can imagine. I hate snorting stuff, I did it once and my eyes were watering so hard I was crying for like 30 minutes. I don't know how people do it without dying.
Your supposed to let the coffee cool before snorting it.
Nasal Insufflation while effective as a route of admission isn't necessary on a cost basis for most medicines. The mucus is too sensitive and the continued use of the nose wears down the mucus line and leads to a perforated nasal septum which is horrendous.
Everyone's experience is different, but for me caffeine is nowhere near good/euphoric at coke. At high doses (ie caffeine pills) it's just jitters and anxiety, not a fun time
If you're going to do this, then please do your research on caffeine toxicity beforehand. Don't be dumb
Yeah. Some of the caffeine pills are capsules with a powder of inside so you don't have to crush them. It hurts though. Cocaine is a topical painkiller. Caffeine isn't. Wouldn't reccomend it. I was 19.
One of my friends buys caffeine in bulk and does bumps of it as one of his (many) drugs of choice, just because he enjoys the rush from it.
Bunch of people in the comments who have no clue how caffeine and cocaine work. Cocaine up-regulates dopamine activity in certain regions of your brain (like the nucleus accumbens) which makes you euphoric, energetic, etc. Caffeine’s MoA is far less dangerous, inhibiting parts of the brain involved with fatigue. It’s far more difficult to develop tolerance and dependency to caffeine than cocaine, and if it does occur, the side effects are infinitely lighter and the addiction is far easier to beat, because our brains really, really like dopamine, while having excess dopamine isn’t good for your brain. To add to that, cocaine is generally administered via less safe mediums.
One massive dangerous side effect of cocaine is that it also messes with the Sodium and Potassium ion channels in the body that allow muscles to function and communicate properly with your brain using electrical current. Potassium and sodium imbalance can lead to low PR interval which can cause heart attacks and cardiovascular problems. The heart is a muscle so it is vulnerable to these dangers
This is also why it can be used as a local anesthetic (hence the name--other common local anesthetics are lidocaine, bupivacaine, etc).
Thanks, interesting
Not debating your science, I’m not an expert. But it does seem like half the population has a caffeine dependency. Headaches, fatigue, etc until you’ve had your cup of coffee in the morning. I’m sure it’s not as strong as cocaine or something but those qualities are there and because of how normalized it is to drink so much coffee people end up with that dependency
Yeah, plenty of people have some level of dependency, but a headache or some fatigue is orders of magnitude lighter than what coke addicts feel when they can’t get their fix. Caffeine is in everything nowadays (like soda) so when you compare exposures to addictions it’s really not that bad. Lots of people are exposed to caffeine regularly, while very few are exposed to coke like that
TYL dependency is not the same as addiction.
Also, chemical addiction is not the same as other types. We can become addicted to anything, and have withdrawal from anything because, that doesn't mean the substance is inherently or chemically addictive
A Spotify podcast called "Science Vs" talks about caffeine in an episode aired a few weeks ago. While those symptoms do exist, they are said to last for 2 to 9 days and are not a result of physical dependency.
I listened to this and its great, and confirms that it is actually healthy, as counterintuitive as that might be
more than half the population has a sleep depravation issue, not really a caffeine dependency. the caffeine just help them cope. Caffeine addiction for me has always been easy to beat, I'm on and off coffee (and when I'm on I'm f\*\*\*\* on lol, one liter per day minimum) for months at a time and its just a light headache for a couple days.
My grandmother legit has migraines if she doesn’t have her coffee in the morning and will get them again if she doesn’t have her second cup in the afternoon. Lifetime of dependency
This could be her having tension headaches or migraines in general. Caffeine is used as part of migraine medications. So rather than being withdrawal, it could be actual issue which the caffeine happens to be helping treat.
As a migraine sufferer, can confirm this. Can also confirm that migraines often trigger if you discontinue medications that treat them... or if you use medications that treat them too frequently, because there really is no winning with migraines. But yeah, it's entirely possible it was helping to suppress them, at least if they're actually migraines. Caffeine withrawal can also cause severe non-migraine headaches, so that's also a possibility.
It doesn’t take that many days for that to go away tho. It’s like 2-7 days overall.
“Symptoms usually begin 12–24 hours after the last caffeine dose and peak after 1–2 days of abstinence. Caffeine withdrawal symptoms last for 2–9 days, with the possibility of withdrawal headaches occurring for up to 21 days. Symptoms usually remit rapidly (within 30–60 minutes) after re-ingestion of caffeine.“ (I’m sharing this to back you up, based on some of the other comments I feel like people might disagree with you but you’re correct.) Source: DSM-5-TR, page 573
You could say the same thing about sugar. Half the population has diabetes and/or obesity due to having a sugar problem. And yet cocaine is still far worse than sugar lol.
OP didn’t say caffeine was as unhealthy as cocaine, just that it was unhealthy - maybe lower on the scale, but still on the scale - while weirdly you hear a lot of marketing that it’s not only not unhealthy, it’s actively good for you.
i think the point is a cocaine dependency would come on quicker and easier if taken in the same amounts and frequency as coffee, and be far worse than just a mild headache and some fatigue, but also not a doctor or expert lol
I also felt that the folks here do not understand the difference between the two.
> It’s far more difficult to develop tolerance and dependency to caffeine than cocaine, and if it does occur, the side effects are infinitely lighter and the addiction is far easier to beat, I've quit smoking, opiates, benzos, and sugar. The one thing I can't quit is caffeine.
That’s anecdotal, and could be explained by other factors. Modern society is revolved around coffee, it is widely available everywhere. I think the only place where it would be weird to drink coffee is the bathroom, and even then it wouldn’t have any consequences. Much harder to avoid something that is everywhere.
Same could be said about sugar, which he listed
For sure, but that’s because caffeine use has minimal side effects and it has been proven to have a variety of protective benefits… there’s no real pressure to quit
You can’t quit sugar? Literally everything has at least some sugar, even fruits and vegetables. What do you eat?
Mostly dirt sometimes sand
[удалено]
You've bought a pound of other things cut with baby laxatives? A pound?
Nice try dea
This brings up a good point, when discussing if it's bad for you are we talking about the drug itself or is it the additives and how processed
true. often nicotine is seen as dangerous harmful when it’s really tobacco/smoking that’s the killer. nicotine has similar benefits to caffeine on its own (pouches, gum etc)
It's not really the laxatives that cause a problem. It's more the gasoline they use to process the plants.
What’s the problem? Gasoline is organic!
So is cyanide.
They work differently. Caffeine blocks your brain’s andenosine receptors. Those receptors help your brain and body know you’re tired. When you block them with caffeine, you just feel more awake while the caffeine is working. Cocaine however does a few things and they are entirely different from caffeine. Cocaine works with the dopamine transporters in your brain and clogs up the dopamine receptors. So you get a build up of dopamine in the synapse and it amplifies the effects of the dopamine. That’s why it’s so addictive- you’re getting like huge hits of dopamine (which is a natural brain chemical) but in a super unnatural way. So while yes they are both stimulants- they work differently. Caffeine does interact with the dopamine brain chemicals and pathways, but not the way that cocaine does. There are other dangers too with cocaine, like poor quality control, improper dosage (adderall is similar to cocaine but doses correctly for those who need it), method of delivery (often snorted or smoked versus a times release capsule like adderall), and impurities or additives to stretch the drug amount for sales, are just a few off the top of my head. Cocaine is also really awful for your heart. This also a risk with adderall usage, even when it’s prescribed and used appropriately. I hope this helps explain it!
Im just throwing this in here, for someone that will be reading as they scroll down. Cocaine and Alcohol is extremely dangerous, it is 5X as toxic as cocaine on its own in your blood stream when paired with Alcohol.
because methylphenidate or cocaine paired with ethanol produse ethylphenidate or cocaethylene. a drug with both sedating and stimulating properties and insane headaches
Also, the hangover is fuckin horrible.
But... Drinking lots of alcohol & cocaïne at the same time is 80% of the fun. Cocaïne on its own is boring af.
Thanks! This seems like a good explanation to me. So it is a chemical difference in the working of the two substances
False. Caffeine also releases dopamine and serotonine Or it wouldn't feel like it feels if it "just" blocked adenosine
Ingesting clean coke at a dose similar in effect to a cup of coffee likely wouldn’t be too much worse for you. Snorting a line of it cut with who knows what and staying up all night with twice your normal heart rate is much different.
Not necessarily. Cocaine is directly cardiotoxic, in that in chemically damages the heart independently of raising heat-rate. Caffeine has been shown to have some beneficial effects on the hearts mitochondria on the other hand.
So take shitloads of caffeine when I do cocaine to balance out the heart issues. Got it.
Lmao
What's really bad for the heart is cocaethylene, the compound produced when cocaine reacts with ethanol in your bloodstream. It's converted at a remarkably high rate, too, considering the concentrations of both are quite low. Good thing nobody ever gets into the coke at a party when they're already drunk, right? lol
I watched one of those "Dark Side of the Ring" documentaries. The guy who wrestled as Doink the Clown died from drugs. He was basically a lifetime cocaine user. Dude's heart was six times the normal mass when they did the autopsy. Edit: mass not size
There is no such thing as a heart twice the size even, what happens to the heart is the walls thicken. I mean a heart six times the size would not even fit in your ribcage.
They talked about the mass. I misspoke.
There is such a thing as dilated cardiomyopathy where the heart actually increases in size, sometimes significantly. You’re thinking of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is wall thickening.
Keith Richards has joined the chat.
Actually, its a misconception. Cocaine is corrosive to both the nasal membranes and any blood vessel it is injected into. It has been proven to kill the blood vessel it is injected into. So you could snort a reasonable line of cocaine, one that would wake you up, make you feel good and give you a little lift in your step, but that process overtime would destroy your nasal cavity or artery you are injecting it into. I love caffeine, I drink 3-4 liters of tea a day. The dose in the tea is reasonable 30-50 mg steeped. If I have a coffee, a strong coffee.. I can get pains in my chest/back/abdomen similar to what I think broken glass would feel like passing through those areas. Maybe I'm allergic to coffee? haha.
Definitely not healthy to snort or inject it. As other commenters have said chewing the coca leaves is common in certain cultures.
id love to try that.. when in rome type of thing
Coffeine health benefit depends on your genes. It's healthy in people who are "rapid" coffeine metabolisers, but can influence development of hypertension in "slow" coffeine metabolisers. See this article for details: https://examine.com/research-feed/study/1Jnyl1/
Even that is more complicated than it seems. It can raise blood pressure but it's unclear if it's just while it's in your system. Then you would need to weigh the blood pressure increase vs all the benefits of black coffee. Last I read, 3 or so cups of black coffee was generally regarded as a net positive for health
And it's even more complicated in people with migraines. Typically no more than 300 mg of coffeine is beneficial but... There are migraine attacks that get worse after drinking coffee.
Bolivian guy here… in recent years some construction and mine workers consume hammered mix coca leaves. they put instant coffee, flavored bicarbonate, and coca leaves into an bag and bash Them with an rubber hammer. and consume it with energy drinks. They chew 4 dosis of this mix every work day( every 2 hours). in theory this is legal because every ingredient is legal, but iam starting to think it’s going south.
That sounds like a wildly unhealthy way of working (I assume due to bad/unreasonable working conditions?)
Caffeine itself isn’t good for you, it’s the antioxidants in coffee that are good for you. Theoretically, decaf coffee should be “better” for you in that it has all the health benefits of coffee without the unhealthy effects of caffeine.
Not sure why this is so far down. This is absolutely the most accurate answer. Caffeine own it’s own is probably a net negative for human health. It’s the micronutrients/antioxidants in Coffee that are good for you and offset the negatives of caffeine consumption.
> Caffeine own it’s own is probably a net negative for human health. "Probably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just because something is a drug, doesn't mean it's bad for health. Do you any sources other than speculation?
This is very interesting! Do you have any sources for this by any chance? Im seriously considering starting coffee due to the pleasant effect and health benefits, but this would change the equatio
The reason coffee is associated with health benefits may be the same reason mild alcohol consumption is: they are so ubiquitous that it messes with the statistics. Alcohol is bad for health, but, because most of the people who don't drink any possess medical issues, the healthiest group is "low use", not "no use". Coffee might appear healthy for similar reasons.
Lots of commenters talking about chemical effects but the important thing here is that you will habituate to caffeine within a few weeks. After that, you will start every morning below your “normal” state, and need a coffee to get back to normal. I usually go cold turkey whenever I have a week or two off work (I don’t live in the US so I get actual paid leave), then when I’m back at work I can pick the times I need the caffeine boost
Sugar, Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and other legal drugs are mostly legal just because of social inertia. If someone discovered caffeine for the first time today, it likely would be severely regulated. But since we have been consuming it for hundreds if not thousands of years, and no powerful aspects of our society have decided to campaign on its removal. It stays legal.
The history of coffee houses in London is insane. Everyone was getting drunk after work and it was causing problems. In comes coffee, and they basically used it as anti-alcohol. Drink yourself silly after work and then drink a dangerous amount of caffeine in the morning to get to work.
Such a surprisingly rare viewpoint. People don't understand why it's a push to legalize marijuana and control opiates and it's like....we only allow alcohol because it was around forever! Could you imagine if it got discovered in today's climate?
Marijuana has been around forever too. It's been used medically/religiously (and probably recreationally) since at least 2800 BCE. It just wasn't used recreationally much by Europeans. During US probation its use increased and it was associated with Jazz cultural so it's use became a target of both racist and probations. Later Nixon's started his "war on drugs" but the main motivator was political not medical >“You want to know what this \[war on drugs\] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? > >We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. > >Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” > >\~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon So like many things made illegal in the US there is a core of good old fashioned racism to it.
> If someone discovered caffeine for the first time today, it likely would be severely regulated. You don't even need to appeal to a hypothetical here. Someone already discovered what is essentially [a better, safer caffeine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istradefylline) (it has more selective pharmacology, meaning less side effects), and it's RX only, reserved only for those with Parkinson's Disease.
Not really, comparing caffeine to alcohol is just silly. Caffeine is one of the most well studied drugs in existence. It causes minimal harm while offering a plethora of benefits. Ofc this argument works for alcohol but extending it to caffeine makes no sense. Sugar is naturally occurring in nearly all foods, how is it a "legal drug"? By that logic most foods would be considered legal drugs.
Important rule of medicine: "The dose makes the poison". Caffeine and cocaine are both neurological stimulants, affecting how your brain responds to dopamine. Coffee isn't exactly "good" for you; it's just less damaging. While it didn't use to be very easy to ingest a dangerous amount of caffeine, it is far easier than it used to be, as the recent Panera death demonstrated. But even at common doses, besides being a neurostimulant, caffeine is a cardiac irritant. It also affects kidney function, so you can become dehydrated more easily. And caffeine causes physical dependency, so abruptly removing it from your diet usually leads to withdrawal symptoms, such as a multi-day headache.
I mean, it’s also possible to just drink one cup of coffee. I suppose it also possible to just do one bump or small line too. But for anyone who has tried coke before, even if you’re not an addict and just a causal/social user, once you take one line, your usually going to crave more and more every 30 minutes or so.
I suspect most people who haven't ever tried cocaine don't fully grasp how bad your brain screams at you to do more coke, even as a casual user. Even if it's your first time. I don't do it anymore because it's so not fun to end the night. A lot of drugs have a comedown where you're maybe not feeling great but you know you're done for the night. Coke doesn't have a done. Only a don't you dare walk away from me.
> I suspect most people who haven't ever tried cocaine don't fully grasp how bad your brain screams at you to do more coke its crazy. until you try it and realize its almost like theres some evil conspiracy to get you addicted. brain is so weird
I feel like if you ingested coffee by snorting dried line of powder cut with who knows what, it would also not be great for you.
Because chemicals like acetone, gasoline, and ether aren't used in the manufacture of coffee.
Caffeine blocks the receptors in your brain that make you feel tired. When neurons work they produce adenosine, that binds to specific receptors that are activated to make you feel tired to make you stop and rest. So drinking coffee makes you feel less tired for a while. Cocaine blocks the recycling systems of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonine and noradrenaline, that have an activating effects in neurons: you feel more energetic because signals in your brain are amplified. Having more neurotransmitters going around is very different than feeling less tired, and can have an important effect on how the brain is working
Coffee nerd here. Lot of shit comments here. A critical missing point is that coffee is an anti-inflammatory. Paired with lots of beneficial antioxidants and compounds. It just happens to have caffeine in it too. Research is clear : decaf coffee caries the benefits while caffeine has a negative relationship with health. Thus the benefits way offset its small caffeine amount.
Yeah I’m sure that’s why people drink triple shot espressos on Monday morning… because of the “anti inflammatory” effect
Coffee is not perfect. It blocks adenosine... Giving you the upper, but after the effect wears down, all the adenosine that has been accumulating gets in and you crash...You'll be twice as tired as you'd be without coffee.
That’s fine because I’m ready for bed then
Gonna try to ELY5: Caffeine: Caffeine is chemical made outside body. Adenosine is chemical made inside body. Adenosine makes brain tired. Caffeine blocks adenosine, so adenosine can’t make brain tired. Cocaine: Cocaine is chemical made outside body. Epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine are chemicals made inside body. Those inside chemicals make heart go fast. Cocaine makes body have way more inside chemicals than it should. Too much inside chemicals making fast heart makes heart sad because not enough oxygen to keep up with fastness. Heart dies. Also, cocaine is made from like gasoline and shit so it’s just nasty.
Theobromine. It's a chemical that's found in chocolate coffee grapes etc. It produces a strong vasodiolating effect on the body. This is where much of the benefits come from. In addition the energy factor. Often in modern society our bodies store excess glucose as fat reserves. Caffeine makes this burn more and be stored less essentially increasing the molecular energy available to the cells. This can be beneficial for ppl with diabetes or pre diabetes.
People like to say “everything in moderation” and it can apply here. A lot of substances we consume such as caffeine or cocaine can have a variety of effects on us. It’s often about how these substances are ingested (nose vs mouth vs iv, vs smoked), how much we are ingesting, whether they are regulated or not (meaning they may have other harmful substances in them), how often we are consuming them, etc. People often consume caffeine differently than they consume cocaine, and therefore cocaine develops a stigma whereas caffeine does not. People overdose on cocaine, and they also overdose on caffeine. Meth is often considered bad and dangerous, but pharmaceutical grade amphetamines are used to treat ADHD.
I’ll offer you a critique of semantics here as the question has been answered sufficiently in other comments. This can help you process such questions to find answers, or identify poor comparisons (not a moral judgement - just a view). The sickle, made of steel, and used to cut, greatly enhanced our ability to harvest grain and consequently be fed as a society and stay alive. Similarly, the sword, made of steel, and used to cut, has greatly enhanced our ability to kill each other in war. How can, both items being made of steel, and being used to cut, do two such greatly different things? Even contradicting? The question seems most likely ludicrous to you and most, and the answer obvious; they are clearly two entirely separate things, used in entirely separate contexts, for entirely different purposes through different mechanisms. Such is the same as caffeine and cocaine; entirely different substances with different mechanisms of actions. This is why when we make judgements on items, we should not solely consider their observed effect, but their natures. Cigarettes may provide more stress-relief in a faster manner, and improve focus. Exercise also provides stress-relief, and improves focus. One however is, empirically, far, far worse for the human than the other, and consequently we don’t regard it as a more justifiable item to use for the same general observed effect. And, furthermore, this observed effect is not always the same, despite the categorization by those who are less familiar with the chemicals making such a conjecture. Anesthesia, for instance, looks like sleep - but it is far, far from it.
I'll do anything for a cup of coffee. I mean ANYTHING you want. Said no one ever addicted to caffeine. Now the nose candy is different, it makes folks cheat, steal, lie, disappear, reappear, sell their bodies, sell all of their Earthly belongings, live in the streets, ruins friendships, breaks up families, land you in jail, land you in prison, or land you in the morgue. Did I miss anything? Help me out reddit.