How Drugs Work

Cocaine (1x3)

Air date: Jan 20, 2011

Documentary combining compelling real-life stories and stunning computer graphics to explore how cocaine creates its highs and its lows. Cocaine, once a drug exclusively for the rich and famous, is now the most popular class A drug in Britain, with more than 1.2 million people taking it in the UK in 2009. The film follows three users on nights out on coke and uses cutting-edge computer graphics to journey inside their bodies and brains to find out how the drug creates its highs and its lows. For some cocaine is the ideal addition to a night out, but for others taking it became a life-changing event, including the young man that needed a pacemaker fitted at just 17 after cocaine gave him a heart attack and a patient undergoing surgery to repair a nose torn apart by too many lines of coke. Britain's leading experts help explain the truth behind cocaine's controversial reputation - the perfect pick-me-up or a killer class A?