Unlike the heroin-specific vaccine we covered last year, an international team of scientists from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Colorado Boulder has now found a way to block addiction to various opioid drugs, including heroin and morphine. Importantly, the new approach doesn’t negatively affect the pain-relieving properties of these drugs.
The central nervous system and the immune system both play important roles in the development of an addiction, with opioid drugs such as heroin and morphine binding to an immune receptor known as Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) in a similar way to the normal immune response to bacteria. Dr. Mark Hutchinson, ARC Research Fellow in the University of Adelaide’s School of Medical Sciences says, “The problem is that TLR4 then acts as an amplifier for addiction.”
In studies on rats using (+)-naloxone, a drug that automatically shuts down the opioid addiction by altering brain chemistry to stop production of the feel-good chemical dopamine, the researchers found that blocking the immune response is all that is required to prevent cravings for opioid drugs.
“Our studies have shown conclusively that we can block addiction via the immune system of the brain, without targeting the brain’s wiring,” said Hutchinson, who was lead author of the study.
“This work fundamentally changes what we understand about opioids, reward and addiction,” adds senior author Professor Linda Watkins, from the Center for Neuroscience at CU-Boulder. “We’ve suspected for some years that TLR4 may be the key to blocking opioid addiction, but now we have the proof.
“The drug that we’ve used to block addiction, (+)-naloxone, is a non-opioid mirror-image drug that was created by Dr. Kenner Rice in the 1970s,” Watkins said. “We believe this will prove extremely useful as a co-formulated drug with morphine, so that patients who require relief for severe pain will not become addicted but still receive pain relief. This has the potential to lead to major advances in patient and palliative care.”
The researchers say clinical trials may be possible within the next 18 months.
The results of their study are being published in the August 15 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Source: University of Adelaide
You can still feel everything, it's just kind of "over there somewhere" because you're so disoriented by the drug. Purple haze, indeed!
In my experience, Ibuprofin (Advil Liqui-Gels) was way better than morphine.
Napsylate was added to make it insoluble in water and nearly impossible to convert into an injectable form as can be done with Propoxyphene Hydrochloride.
There's two reasons it got pulled. For one it was long off-patent and cheap. The second was because it's an opioid and practically since it was first developed some nuts have been hollering that some people might get addicted to it. Some of those nuts want all opioids banned simply because they are partially chemically similar to opium. (The pharmacology version of the anti-nuclear, anything "nuke" is bad sort of person.)
If a person does manage to get addicted to Darvon, quitting it "cold turkey" works quickly, with the drug being flushed from the body within hours.
Don't confuse it with Darvocet (Dextropropoxyphene Paracetamol). If you can't take Tylenol (paracetamol AKA acetaminophen) you can't take Darvocet.
It's possible to overdose and have bad effects from just about any drug, even aspirin. It's not the pills' fault if someone does that.
The VA prescribed Darvon N100 to my father for many years. One or two pills a day worked great on his back pain. In recent years the VA kept trying to switch his prescription to Darvocet and he kept having to get them to not do that because he cannot take Tylenol. He can't take codeine either. Once one of the VA docs told Dad he had to be careful with Darvon because he could get addicted to it. Dad replied "Are you addicted if you forget to take it?"
Since 2007 most formulations of Darvon and Darvocet have been off the market. The people determined to keep an affordable and very effective medication for severe pain off the market have won. :P
This also isnt the first time drugs like this have been used in this manner, that is combining them with the opiate of choice to mediate the physical dependancy, if indeed that is what its doing. They've used another drug, naltrexone in very small dosages combined with oxycodone, aswell as a morphine/naltrexone by the name of Embeda. Naltrexone and naloxone are both similar although different enough to have different classifications, but are both used in the same manner.
I am glad to see research is being done in this area as current treatments for addictions is woefully inadequate and we need to learn and understand all the underlying mechanisms that cause addiction so that they can be circumvented without stopping the pain-killing and other effects(including euphoria). Addiction isnt simple the fact that you feel good or it provides something good so thats its only normal that you will at some point have to "pay" for that through negative effects, all of the good things can be kept while eliminated the negative effects as they are related indirectly but can be seperated with proper scientific understanding. Its not a matter of if, but how long it takes to get to that point in my humble opinion.
Because the suffering of addiction must be nearly as bad as the suffering due to chronic pain.