Cocaine Comeback?

An interesting article from Medical News Today about a resurgence of cocaine use in Florida caught my attention. The article points to a study conducted by the University of Florida and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement which shows that the number of times cocaine has been cited as the cause of death in coroner’s reports has almost doubled between 2000 and 2005. The article surmises that this is likely indicative of a nationwide trend of increased cocaine use.

Unfortunately, I can't say this surprises us. In fact, a recent analysis of around 2000 DrugWipe surface assessments conducted over the past few years showed that cocaine showed up in 38% of the tests conducted. Now, first let me say that this does NOT indicate that 38% of the population is using cocaine. A DrugWipe can be used to test multiple surfaces so if you are testing 20 lockers in a school with one DrugWipe, just one of those lockers would have to have cocaine residue on it for the test to come back positive. Though on the flip side, you could test one forklift in a company that is shared by 5 or more employees who could all be using cocaine. The actual percentage of users is impossible to determine with surface assessments.

What is interesting from that analysis, however, is that there are more positive results for cocaine than any other drug, including marijuana. Why? I’m not really sure but here are a couple of theories that have been kicked around:

1. Traditional drug tests are biased toward marijuana users because
marijuana can be detected in the system for weeks after use as opposed to just
a day or two with “hard” drugs like cocaine. With the short detection
window for the “hard” drugs in urine tests, these tests may be missing a number
of cocaine users.

2. Cocaine is an “ideal” drug to use in a school or workplace setting. It’s easily transported, has no smell and can be easily snorted off the back of a toilet seat or other surface in a discreet location. Also the signs of someone that has been using cocaine are similar to someone who’s had a lot of caffeine so it may not be obvious if a student or employee is actively impaired on the drug.

One other point the article makes is that the prevalence of cocaine seems to be higher is wealthy neighborhoods and near college towns. That may be so, but I can tell you from personal experience, cocaine and crack (which is an inexpensive variation of cocaine) are everywhere. From inner-city neighborhoods to wealthy suburbs to places in-between, we’ve found contamination from cocaine residue during surface assessments. The most heart-breaking was finding it (in fairly high levles) on the lockers of 6th and 7th grade students in a school whose population would not be considered wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. But that's a story for another post.