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by chatmasta 240 days ago
> cocethelyne is uniquely cardiotoxic, and is somehow even worse than cocaine

Cocethelyne is the result of mixing cocaine with alcohol… should I be surprised that cocaine plus another substance is worse than cocaine?

2 comments

It can appear a bit counter intuitive because broadly alcohol is a depressant and cocaine's a stimulant.

The primary "risk" with polydrug abuse (especially uppers + downers) is that you end up taking much more than you would normally, and once the upper wears off, the downer depressed your breathing, pote being fatal.

But with coke + alcohol, even a "normal" quantity of both when combined is far worse. It's a bunch of heart signalling stuff that affects blood pressure and a few other things, in ways that really aren't good. Which is honestly pretty impressive because coke alone is an excellent way to fuck up your heart (credits, Rohin Francis/Medlife crisis, a cardiac surgeon on YouTube who posts way too less because presumably the stress of working for NHS isn't good for a doctor's health either.)

(Iirc alcohol and Tramadol are 2 things to typically never mix with other drugs; there's a matrix chart about drug interactions and these 2 are counter indicated with most other drugs. Weed, funnily and unsurprisingly, has one of the least interactions with other drugs.)

Cocaethylene is a metabolite produced in the liver when both substances are present and it is itself psychoactive.

And no you shouldn't be surprised, mixing two harmful things is often worse than the sum of doing each alone and that should be the base assumption.