It’s America’s second-most popular illegal drug, rivaled only by cannabis.
But unlike marijuana, cocaine hits a person in seconds, hooking them almost instantly and commanding the brain’s reward pathway to want nothing else.
The seeds of obsession are planted immediately, as ‘feel-good’ dopamine builds and the brain can’t stop chasing the high.
Seemingly picture-perfect students and mothers, as well as kids from broken homes and teenagers left to their own devices, all fall prey to cocaine just the same.
Adam Gunton, an honor student and star athlete, first tried cocaine as a preteen out of boredom. His academic achievements, collegiate sports and a picture-perfect future quickly vanished as he became addicted.
Susan Nyamora was trying to start over with her two children after a divorce when cocaine gradually went from a weekly ‘treat’ to a daily need, eventually landing her to run with a notorious Miami gang.
For Marissa Mangano, growing up with absent parents left her craving carefree bliss, which an older boyfriend would supply in the form of cocaine. And for Michael Swerdloff, cocaine was a means of escape from divorced parents and a mobster brother.
While each had different reasons for their first hit, they all suffered the same fate – they got hooked in as little as one bump, morphing into unrecognizable addicts who would do anything for a fix.
Cocaine hits a person in seconds, hooking them almost instantly and commanding the brain’s reward pathway to want nothing else
Adam Gunton is pictured at left at age 11, about a year before he tried cocaine for the first time
Gunton was every parent’s dream: a star athlete, honor roll student whose friends called him the ‘golden boy.’ But even the valedictorian-in-the-making wasn’t immune to peer pressure and experimenting.
His first memory of cocaine wasn’t the high, Gunton told Daily Mail, it was actually the fear he remembers first as his mind raced with thoughts of what it would feel like to snort cocaine.
Gunton was just 12 years old but someone close to him in their early 20s pressured him into taking the drug. The Colorado preteen went for it – and after the fear, came clarity.
‘It was like, “Now my eyes are open. Now life is worth it,”‘ Gunton, now 37, told the Daily Mail.
From that moment, cocaine lurked behind his All-American persona. He started doing it weekly, then daily, then multiple times a day, throughout middle and high school. As he entered high school, he helped lead his football team at Columbine High School to the state championship as a defensive captain.
But in the background, his grades were slipping, and the urge to do cocaine was so strong that he would have a friend create a distraction so he could snort a line in the middle of class. Soon enough, he was doling the powder out to classmates.
‘I was a really good kid,’ he said. ‘I was just hiding this drug habit that was continuing to get worse. It just became part of life.
‘I wasn’t a liar, but I turned into one on drugs.’
Gunton is pictured above in middle school. He told the Daily Mail he got his first hit of cocaine from someone in their 20s who was close to him
Gunton is pictured above in a senior photo. He said that once cocaine became an obsession, school and sports no longer mattered
College suddenly didn’t matter, nor did getting a steady job. No one, as far as his memory serves, confronted him about the drug use, his parents included.
For Gunton, cocaine was a gateway drug. By 19, he had ‘graduated’ to oxycontin and heroin, and was doing drugs every free moment he had.
Also at 19, he hit his first ‘rock bottom.’
It was 4:30am and Gunton had just come off an alcohol and cocaine-fueled bender. His friend called him but Gunton hung up on him. Hours later, the friend shot and killed himself.
Regret set in and inspired the first of several failed attempts to get sober.
‘It got to the point very quickly after that, that I knew I had a problem, and within a year I made my first attempt to stop,’ Gunton said.
But it would be nearly a decade before Gunton finally got sober for good. ‘Just because you want to stop, or you’re trying to stop, doesn’t mean that’s when things start happening to stop,’ he told the Daily Mail.
It wasn’t until November 6, 2017 – about 16 years after he first tried cocaine – that Gunton had a religious experience where he ‘met Jesus face to face.’
He had been five days sober and received a text from his dealer when he suddenly ‘felt something overtake’ him.
Gunton quickly texted his dealer back to stop contacting him and when he looked up from his phone, he said Jesus was sitting across from him smiling.
‘It was less than a second. I just immediately knew who it was, knew it was happening,’ he explains. ‘I said, “Thank you, God. Thank you, God.” And I looked back up, and I was back in the restaurant. I haven’t used since.’
Gunton’s addiction spiraled throughout high school and eventually he became so obsessed he was doing lines in the middle of class. He is pictured above
Gunton is pictured above during his partying days. Cocaine was a gateway drug for him, and by his late teens, he had ‘graduated’ to other substances like heroin
When it comes to getting sober, Gunton told the Daily Mail: ‘Just because you want to stop, or you’re trying to stop, doesn’t mean that’s when things start happening to stop’
Susan Nyamora had dabbled with cocaine in her teens, but unlike Gunton, she hadn’t gotten hooked, focusing instead on raising her two young children and giving them a good childhood.
But as she fled California for Florida to escape an abusive ex-husband, Nyamora began using cocaine to accompany a drinking habit.
‘It was an exhilarating rush where I didn’t feel like I had the weight of the world sitting on my shoulders anymore. I felt a sense of freedom,’ Nyamora, now 57, told the Daily Mail. ‘I felt like I was able to conquer the world.’
For years, cocaine was just an occasional treat, but her use gradually increased until age 28, when she found herself using every weekend. ‘By the time I hit 32, I was becoming more obsessed with using,’ she said.
‘That meant the weekend couldn’t get there fast enough, and then it started on Thursday nights, and then it would come into Wednesday night, and it would just get progressively worse.’
Her drug habit eventually landed the mother, who had two more children as her addiction progressed, deep within a criminal ring.
Nyamora began running with the Latin Kings gang in Miami-Dade county.
She dropped to just 100lbs, as cocaine is an appetite suppressant, and a sickly green tint set into her skin as the drug constricted her blood vessels. Nyamora found herself so wired she would stay awake for days at a time, only falling asleep with the help of Xanax.
Being a present mother was the last thing on her mind.
‘I put myself into places that I would never [go]. I would never mouth off to certain people in the ways that I did. It’s almost like you have courage that’s running through your veins,’ she said.
After being arrested for a sixth time on drug-related charges, Nyamora learned in 2006 at age 38 that she was four weeks pregnant with her fifth child. Because of the pregnancy, judges recommended a 90-day rehab program instead of jail.
She stayed in rehab for her entire pregnancy, and another 18 months after. She has now been sober nearly 20 years and has reunited with all five of her children.
Susan Nyamora is pictured with her youngest daughter in 2009. It was her pregnancy in 2006 that kickstarted her road to recovery
Nyamora (second from left) is pictured with her husband Peter (far left), all five of her children and one of her grandchildren
Nyamora is pictured with her husband Peter. The two got married two years after her sobriety date
Marissa Mangano was just an impressionable teen when her older boyfriend introduced her to cocaine.
Mangano had started experimenting with Xanax and Adderall at 14 as way to escape her ’emotionally absent’ single father, and like many teens, she was vulnerable and curious.
So, at just 17, she welcomed the bag of cocaine from her boyfriend.
The euphoria lasted no more than 30 seconds, vanishing as quickly as it came on, but for that fleeting moment, she was ‘on top of the world’ and craved ‘more and more.’
Within months, waitressing money and friends supplied enough cocaine for her to do it every day. But after getting kicked out of her father’s house and losing her job, Mangano relied on prostitution and theft to get enough of the drug.
‘I was pretty on edge all the time,’ Mangano, now 28, told the Daily Mail. ‘I was very jittery. Physically, I was a big picker. I had scabs all over my face, my body.’
Mangano is pictured above in a mugshot from one of several arrests during her cocaine addiction. She would frequently pick at her skin while high
On her 19th birthday, she ended up in a jail cell after blacking out on Xanax and cocaine, which kicked off a three-year cycle of arrests and rehab stints.
By her early 20s, rock bottom was staring her in the face.
It took 25 trips to rehab before sobriety seemed possible. As she heard former addicts talk about the The Twelve Steps program used in alcohol and drug recovery, she realized it was the only thing she hadn’t tried.
‘It was almost like a last resort,’ she said. ‘This was my last attempt at doing anything, and if it didn’t work, I was just going to be one of those people that just doesn’t make it.’
The Twelve Steps can take months or years and involves a series of admissions, such as addicts admitting they became powerless over drugs or alcohol, asking God for help and apologizing to loved ones harmed by their actions.
Newcomers also work with a sponsor, a former addict with more experience in the program.
‘It gave me a little bit of hope,’ Mangano said.
She has remained sober since May 31, 2022.
Marissa Mangrano is pictured above left at 17, shortly before she tried cocaine for the first time. Mangrano is pictured above right at 19, in the early days of her cocaine addiction
Mangano is pictured above after recovering from cocaine addiction. She now works in the recovery space
Growing up in the 1970s near New York City, Swerdloff also turned to drugs as a means of escape.
His father had cheated on his mother multiple times before they ended up becoming the first divorced couple in town. Within about a year and a half, his father suffered a heart attack and his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
His older brother, David, joined the mob.
‘I was really susceptible to not wanting to feel,’ Swerdloff, now 65, told the Daily Mail.
David supplied his little brother’s first cocaine when he was no more than 13, along with countless others in the weeks and months to follow.
In that first high, Swerdloff remembers the burning most of all. A fiery sensation in his nose and bitterness lingering in the back of his throat. There was euphoria, alertness, along with peace.
‘It both made me hyper and calm at the same time,’ said Swerdloff, who now lives in Rhode Island.
‘It’s not even like you’re liking it or you feel good. You just want more.’
Along with selling marijuana, Swerdloff and his friends also would frequently babysit and steal from stashes of cocaine the parents had hidden in the house.
Cocaine is a stimulant, flooding the body with the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which triggers a ‘fight-or-flight’ response. Users become increasingly alert as their heart rate and blood pressure spike. For Swerdloff, ‘it felt like my eyes were going to pop out.’
‘My skin felt overstimulated. My breathing felt overstimulated,’ he said.
Snorting the powder also damages tissue inside the nasal passages, so his nose constantly bled.
Much of Swerdloff’s teen years and early adulthood is a blur, but he knows that by his early 20s, he was ‘a full-time criminal,’ following in his brother’s footsteps with the mob in New York and New Jersey.
Michael Swerdloff (right) is pictured with his older brother, David. Both brothers would end up joining the mob and Swerdlhoff would become addicted to cocaine
Swerdloff is pictured at left. After becoming sober, he learned reiki and became a counselor
Swerdloff, now 65 and living in Rhode Island, is pictured above. He told the Daily Mail that as a counselor, cocaine is the one drug he tells patients to never try even once
Like Nyamora, it was an arrest that kickstarted Swerdloff’s path to sobriety. He was one of 80 people subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in 1989 for using and distributing counterfeit credit cards. A total of 62, including his brother, were prosecuted and jailed.
After putting himself into outpatient rehab and achieving six weeks of sobriety, Swerdloff suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric facility for three months.
‘I came out and [thought] I never want to be locked up anywhere else ever again with people being able to tell me what to do, so I got really motivated to do recovery,’ he said.
Swerdloff got sober September 11, 1989, and immediately dove into outpatient therapy for six hours per day, five days a week, over the course of several months.
He also met with his individual therapist twice a week and attended Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meets each night.
‘I made recovery my full-time job,’ he said.
All four former addicts now work in the recovery space, and Nyamora and Gunton run their own rehabilitation networks. Swerdloff works as a social worker and counselor, while Mangano works in a facility coordinating events for people who graduate from treatment.
And in addition to advocacy and running a treatment program, Behavioral Health Partners, Gunton, now 37, welcomed his first child, a daughter, earlier this year. Long gone are his days of snorting cocaine in class and calling treatment centers across Denver begging for a spot, only to be denied.
The man who has police body cam footage of his own dead body after an overdose has a ‘why,’ as a recovering addict and a new father.
Nyamora, who has been sober since December 6, 2006, and is the President & Chief Executive Officer of South Florida Wellness Network, is in a similar position, watching her seven grandchildren grow up with security she never had.
‘I love that about recovery because those are the gifts and the promises that if we do everything that we need to do, that we get to show up in life today,’ she told the Daily Mail.
And while the euphoria and the rush of cocaine have stuck in his mind for decades, Swerdloff’s past obsession with the drug has turned to a stern warning: ‘It’s the only drug I tell people as a counselor, “Don’t try it once. Don’t try it at all.”‘