We at Knoxville Recovery Center, a drug rehab in Tennessee, want to speak with you today about the dangers of speedballing. If you haven’t heard the term before, a speedball is when you do cocaine and heroin at the same time. This can be done by either injecting or snorting the mixture. Either way is equally as dangerous. 

Perhaps you may have heard from others that it is worth doing because the high it produces is more intense or longer-lasting than when you do either drug on its own. Even if the high is more enjoyable as they say, the risk associated with speedballing may end up costing you your life. 

Side Effects of Combining Cocaine and Heroin

When you do cocaine, your heart beats quickly or irregularly, your blood pressure races, and you feel anxious. Heroin causes you to breathe slowly, have a cloudy mind and a slow heartbeat. Imagine combining these two drugs with seemingly opposite side effects. Here are some of the unpredictable symptoms that may occur:

• You become paranoid
• You are drowsy
• You are confused
• Your vision is blurry
• You can’t sleep, so you become mentally impaired
• You have uncontrollable movements
• You appear to be in a trance

The Dangers of Combining Cocaine and Heroin

Some people believe that when you mix cocaine and heroin, you cancel out the negative side effects of each drug. The opposite is true. Actually, each of the drugs’ negative side effects is multiplied instead when they are combined with one another. This often leads to an overdose. 

This is because heroin and cocaine have opposite effects on your body. This causes confusion within your system, as your body struggles to process both of them. 

The main problem that happens when you mix cocaine and heroin is that the cocaine wears off faster than the heroin does. When this happens, the full effects of heroin kick in, and respiratory failure often happens as a result. 

Let’s say you are lucky enough to survive a speedball and you continue to regularly combine cocaine and heroin. If you speedball on a regular basis, you will have problems with your lungs, heart, and liver. Every time you do a speedball, you risk a stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, and respiratory failure. 

Dangers of Fentanyl Contamination

There is an additional dangerous aspect to combining cocaine and heroin, or doing them on their own for that matter. Most of us are aware that either one can be cut with other substances such as baking soda or other fillers. However, some people never even think about the possibility of other dangerous substances such as fentanyl being present. 

A synthetic opioid, fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine. Since it only takes a tiny amount of it to produce a high, some dealers add it to heroin or cocaine to save money. Even the tiniest possibility of having fentanyl in your mixture makes doing a speedball an even deadlier decision. 

Knoxville Recovery Center – Drug Rehab in Tennessee

If you are experimenting with speedballing, please understand that you are playing with fire. We at Knoxville Recovery Center have seen firsthand the harmful effects that both cocaine and heroin have on people’s lives. Combining the two definitely does not improve your chances of living a healthy and sane life. Whether you are addicted to cocaine, heroin, or both, we are here to help you bring back a sense of normalcy to your life. Don’t wait another day. Call our team of friendly and experienced therapists today.