editorial comment Gastric bypass anyone?

Young women are under a lot of pressure to look good, and that means being thin. But at what cost?

There is a new troubling and dangerous trend of college women using cocaine to control their weight, reported WBAL-TV in Baltimore.


"Kathy" is a college student in Maryland. She started using cocaine recreationally.

"We would split what's called an 8-ball on the street, 3 grams of cocaine split between 3 or 4 people, and we would binge on Friday night," Kathy said. "It seems really glamorous and really Hollywood."

Those Friday night coke binges led to what she considered an unexpected benefit -- she not only felt glamorous, but she was losing weight.

"The next morning, I didn't feel like eating. I didn't feel like doing anything," Kathy said. "I was lethargic. I wasn't hungry at all."

She found after the Friday night binge, she didn't feel like eating again until Sunday night.

"It's kind of hard feeling to describe physically," she said. "I don't want to say nauseous, but you just don't have the desire to ingest anything."

Dr. Harry Brandt is the director of the center for eating disorders at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore. He said cocaine is a potent stimulant compound that releases neurochemicals in the brain and it also increases the metabolism in the body, including an increase in the heart rate, and it does suppress the appetite.

"They feel a powerful sense of euphoria, but then there's this secondary effect for some, which is weight loss. That becomes a reinforcer of the use of cocaine," Brandt said.


Brandt said he's not surprised that some young women would use a dangerous drug to lose weight, because they live in a thin-obsessed world.

"Our culture, with its emphasis on thinness, recruits people to do things they shouldn't do -- excessive dieting, excessive exercise, and now, in the case of cocaine, excessive drug use," he said.

Kathy continued her Friday night binges for 3 months and was down to 95 pounds when she stopped cold turkey after what she called a really bad comedown that scared her. She was sick for hours, the television station reported.

"I no longer felt glamorous," Kathy said. "Once you're laying on the bathroom floor, throwing up or something else, you don't feel beautiful or glamorous anymore -- you feel ugly."

During a visit home, Kathy's father asked why she was wrapped in a blanket in June.

"He looked me in the face and said, 'This is Father's Day. Tell me the truth. Are you using drugs?' Wow," she said.

Since that time, Kathy said she doesn't run with the same crowd and has come to grips with her body image.

"Rather than a physical thing, it's more of a mental thing," Kathy said. "I came to the reality that I don't have to be 95 pounds to be happy."

There are warning signs of cocaine abuse -- weight loss, of course, dilated pupils, increased talkativeness, sniffling or signs of having a cold, and anxiety or paranoia.

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