How Long Does Cocaine Detox Take?

When a person begins to abuse cocaine, they will often to do so in a binge, meaning that they will continually need to take the drug to maintain the high they want. Cocaine produces an excess of dopamine to flood through a person’s brain when they take the drug, and increased dopamine causes a person to feel a euphoric rush and to feel highly pleasurable.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, when it is taken, cocaine prevents the dopamine from being recycled in a user’s brain, which causes excessive amounts of it to build up. This disrupts normal brain communication and amplifies the dopamine signal. It is the flood of dopamine that causes a person to feel cocaine’s characteristic high.

The amount of time it takes to detox from cocaine depends largely on your habits and yourself.

Due to the intense pleasure that cocaine produces in a user, many people continue to abuse the drug, and this often leads to addiction. Once a person is addicted to cocaine they will have uncontrollable urges to seek out and use cocaine. This will begin to take over their life, and it can lead to many problems with their physical and mental health. Once a person stops using cocaine after they have developed an addiction to the drug, they will go through cocaine withdrawals, and this process can be extremely difficult for a person to go through.

How Long Does Cocaine Detox Take?

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, repeated use of cocaine can cause long-term changes in the brain, especially the reward system part of the brain, which may lead to addiction. As a person continues to abuse cocaine, tolerance to cocaine also often develops, and many cocaine users report that they fail to achieve as much pleasure as they did from their first exposure.

Since cocaine addiction continues to negatively impact a user’s life, at some point most people want to stop taking the drug. However, the psychological withdrawals of cocaine can be unbearable for some people. This is why treatment programs should be used when a person decides to detox from cocaine.

The length of detox from cocaine will vary from person to person and will dependent on different factors. Physical withdrawals from cocaine are not commonly present, but when they are, they typically do not exceed a week’s time. On the other hand psychological withdrawals are almost always present, and they can take months to years to fully subside. However, they are the strongest within the first week of detox. Psychological withdrawals commonly include anxiety, depression, insomnia, strong drug cravings, and rapid mood swings.