Modern medicine is making miraculous strides almost daily. There are vaccines to inoculate the population from tuberculosis, polio, chicken pox and many others. But can you be inoculated from drug abuse? Maybe so.
Vaccination against an illegal drug works the same way as vaccination against something like the flu virus.
Dr. Thomas Kosten conducts the research at the Michael E. Debakey Medical Center Hospital and at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
“So we attach the drugs of abuse to large proteins. The large protein that we’ve typically been using is an inactivated cholera toxin. And when you inject this into people they make antibodies to cholera, not surprisingly, but they also make antibodies to the cocaine, or nicotine or morphine or whatever else we’ve attached to the outside of this proteins.”
In clinical trials, cocaine addicts got five shots over three months, building up their levels of antibodies to cocaine.
Even if they use cocaine, the antibodies grab onto the drug and keep it trapped in the bloodstream. The cocaine can’t migrate into the brain tissue and create a high.
“And so the drugs of abuse have no effect on you, you don’t feel anything.”
Kosten says 80 percent of the patients had a good antibody response.
Roy Young is a Navy veteran and a former crack cocaine addict. He now works as a counselor at Career and Recovery Resources in Houston.
“That’s good in a sense. But the other side has to be treated too. And that’s the behavior. Can they change their thinking pattern, can they change their behavior.”
While the antibodies may block the high, they don’t reduce the craving for the drug. Kosten says that could prompt some addicts to use excessive amounts of cocaine to try to overcome the blockage.
That strategy will work for some addicts but not for others, depending on their immune response to the vaccine. Young says that’s why the vaccine would only help people who really want to stop using.
Kosten’s grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse will allow him to develop a methamphetamine vaccine along similar lines. He got $2.5 million dollars over the next five years. It will be interesting to see where this leads.