It’s impossible to know what quantity a safe dose of cocaine is for SWIY primarily because the intensity of cocaine effects varies widely between individuals and cocaine is a highly unpredictable substance due its unique multiple actions on the body. The primary cause is the chaotic electrical activity cocaine induces in critical places like the heart and brain since cocaine is also a sodium channel blocker (local anesthetic) and it blocks electrical activity in the myocardium which may cause all kinds of arrhythmias because although voltage gated sodium (Na+) channels blockers are actually class 1B antiarrhythmics when used in high doses and especially in an hyper-adrenergic state, which is the case with recreational use of cocaine, they actually increase the risk of having severe and potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias.

This happen because the combination of effects causes a cascade of secondary messenger systems that attempt to regulate calcium channels and in turn induces increases in cytosolic calcium and elevated cytosolic calcium can provoke oscillatory depolarizations of the cardiac membrane and trigger sustained action potential generation and extra systoles.

The same local anesthetic effects in certain parts of the brain can cause seizures, coma, respiratory and circulatory depression of medullar origin due the systemic local anesthetic effects of cocaine. These effects are responsible for making cocaine far more dangerous than other stimulants and it means that there is no truly safe dose.

SWIM read a report of a person dying of cocaine toxicity due medical use of 20mg as a local anesthetic but there are many chronic users who take cocaine by grams; SWIM knows plenty but a quite a few are no longer among the living and SWIM has been incredibly lucky not to join them.

SWIM read a paper about cocaine toxicity that had some interesting data based on prediction and measured plasma levels of cocaine in hospital admissions, the results are that for a “normal” (without heart/vascular issues) 80kg male individual; 750mg IV/Smoked would be fatal with the margin at 450mg to 950mg, for intranasal/oral about 1500mg with up to 500mg (+/-) margin of error. These doses are the LD100; the LD50 is much lower and cocaine has a very narrow therapeutic index which means the optimal dose for recreational proposes is very close to the overdose threshold.

The fatal overdose SWIM is talking about results in seizures followed by respiratory and circulatory depression of medullar origin and this may lead to death from respiratory failure, stroke, cerebral hemorrhage, or heart failure and symptoms appear extremely quickly; in a matter of seconds to 1-2 minutes for IV/Crack.

Tolerance to overall cocaine toxicity varies considerably between individuals but every individual has a fixed (Na+) channels blocker toxicity threshold and above that upper limit the local anesthetic toxicity becomes deadly. Tolerance does not develop to the local anesthetic effects of cocaine or any other local anesthetic; tolerance does develop to the psychological effects and even the systemic adrenergic stimulation and this is what leads many users to reach the (Na+) channels blocker toxicity threshold increasing the doses to feel the same effects.

Cocaine can cause deadly side-effects and has killed persons in pretty much every dosage range due its unique mix of powerful coronary and systemic vasoconstriction, strong adrenergic stimulation and (Na+) channels blocker toxicity. The available dosage information for medically used cocaine hydrochloride as a local anesthetic sets a maximum dose of 2-3mg/kg (2mg in females, 3mg in males) but it is administered by applying cotton soaked in a cocaine solution directly over the area where the medical procedure is going to be done. This administration system allows only an average of 30% of the cocaine to be absorbed but it can be as low as 20% or as high as 50% depending where it’s applied, for how long it’s left in place, the tissue condition and the type of cotton and solution used.

For an average human male weighting 80kg the dose would be 240mg of which only 72mg would actually be absorbed; this is the maximum dose medically used since above these ratios side-effects become too prominent and dangerous for medical use.

Interestingly between 75mg to 125mg of cocaine is considered the normal/typical/average dose of cocaine for insufflation with an 80% absorption rate for high quality product and around 60% for heavily cut product but it can be as low as 40% or as high as 90%. Cocaine has a half-life of around 60 minutes and psychological effects last 45 to 60 minutes however toxic effects such as vasoconstriction, myocardial electrical instability and lowered seizure threshold linger on for 2-3 hours. SWIM thinks only SWIY can determine what is a “safe dose” for him, SWIM advices to carefully consider the info in this post and use it to calculate “safer” doses but always remember that is no such thing as a 100% safe dose of cocaine and that dangers increase dramatically with larger doses and too frequent re-dosing.

It is important to avoid smoking and drinking at least when using coke as over 70% of non-iv overdose fatalities are smokers that where chain-smoking on top of the cocaine and were drinking alcohol.

Read more: http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showth ... z2ztvUNpua

Prescription of Narcotics for Heroin Addicts: Main Results of the Swiss National Cohort Study
Volume One. Uchtenhagen, A;Dobler-Mikola, A.; Steffen, T; Gutzwiller, F.; Blattler, R; Pfeifer, S. Karger; Basel; 1999

Page 20 states that the mean daily dose of heroin IV ( when used alone, without methadone on the side) was 491.7 mg.

Page 22 states "A stable dose was achieved after 6 months at most; beyond this point, almost no further increases in dose were required."

Later in the volume, the authors state that most users tend to gradually reduce their dosages after achieving a peak.
This Swiss data is the best currently available about maximum daily heroin dosages when humans are given nearly unlimited access to the chemical. Using their data, it appears the actual ratio between initial doses of heroin, a low of 5 mg per dose, and highly-tolerant maximum daily doses of heroin of about 500 mg, this is a 1 to 100 ratio. But it also ignores the difference between single-dose use and repeated dose use. In the same way that its easy to finish off several bottles of wine over the course of several hours, while few ever drink several bottles of wine in just a few minutes, heroin users who are using throughout the day will go through a lot more heroin. So its inappropriate to compare single-dose initial values to daily-ingestion amounts. The increase between no-tolerance dosages and high-tolerance dosages is thus much less than 1 to 100.