A cocaine vaccine has been being tested, and shows some promise. Addiction Radio looks at this and other cocaine related news.
Transcript of podcast:
CNS: Hi and welcome once again to the addiction radio pod cast from CNS Productions. Im Howard LaMere here with Dr. Darryl Inaba. Darryl, cocaine is in the news again, this week with something interesting, in the form of a vaccine?
Darryl: Yeah, you know that, its just amazingly how long its taken the vaccine to even get to this stage, because I remember during the height of the cocaine epidemic during the 80s they were talking already about the development of a vaccine and there was a leakage of it and there was this, it didnt hold, so its just been a long haul, finally they published a report saying they think they have something that has value now but if you read the report its only about 38% effective in ways you have antibodies high enough to really create a package that is, lops onto cocaine as it enters the blood stream so that it becomes unabsorbable – it cant go through the blood-brain barrier to enter the brain, it cant go into the heart, so it renders cocaine harmless by virtue of an anti-body, antigen reaction where this vaccine just latches onto the cocaine. Now if only about 38% of people get effective cocaine blockage that way Im not sure how valuable it is; they also mention that, they in this study, had to give five shots of the vaccine in a twelve week period so its almost every two weeks you have to get a shot in order for the vaccine to work. Its interesting to me also that a two week period is about the time where payday occurs, and its about the time one of the obscure metabolites of cocaine sort of degrade and many people believe that metabolite as it degrades actually is one of the reasons why people crave cocaine every two weeks or you get a greater amount of craving every two weeks. I always thought it had more to do with the fact that people get paid usually around the world on a two week basis and you get into this you get into this rhythm you know where every payday youre going to present yourself with this little gift for having to slave away and work so hard by getting a little bit of cocaine. It just doesnt seem to me that its going to be that much of a benefit or that much of a boon people fighting cocaine. I believe still that with the current treatments that we have and unfortunately expensive but starting off with residential treatment going on to maybe day care or intensive out-patient treatment that we get a good rate, at least close to a 50% rate anyway of people being able to remain cocaine free for a while, then theres the anti-craving medicines like bupropion or wellbutrin or the other types of a anti-depressants that are helpful in decreasing cravings. So, how much of a boon is this vaccines going to be, I really cant tell.
CNS: Yeah, at the rate of only a little over a third and that I also read that it seems to decrease in efficacy after a couple of months.
Darryl: Im not sure if thats the case or if the case was they quit injecting it. I think it showed to get the highest amount, well first of all, even though they injected everybody with five shots over twelve weeks, some people only 30% got the high antibodies and most of the other people got much lower antibodies and its just something, yeah, it didnt work for everyone and in fact also it made it sound, I havent read the actual study itself, just the reports on the study from the BBC and others but it made it sound like they had to keep injecting it in order to continue maintaining levels and I dont know if thats worth it.
CNS: So, from what you know about the physiology of the human and the pharmaceutical function of the cocaine alkaloids, is there something that would make it particularly difficult to present an interaction to or an antagonist, something in the chemical structure thats particularly difficult?
Darryl: well, cocaine itself
CNS: Obviously theres something
Darryl: Its a very, very rapid acting drug, within twenty, forty minutes, cocaines already metabolized, acetylcholinesterase one of the most abundant enzymes we have in our body and its everywhere and it just attacks cocaine and totally destroys its activity within a matter of a few minutes after cocaine enters the body, so I dont know if thats what we need an antagonist, the vaccine is hoping to make cocaine unabsorbable into the brain and therefore it makes it vulnerable for more acetylcholinesterase which is more prevalent outside the brain, than in the brain. Or maybe we should, you know I was thinking, maybe we can boost up acetylcholinesterase and make it more active but then I was thinking, what are the things that are important in acetylcholinesterase is breaking down and maybe that wouldnt be a good idea. So its not clear to me whats the best way of approaching this issue, obviously since this is become an issue in the news, is teaming with all these stories about the cocaine vaccine. Another story about how cocaine abuse has grown so massively in Wales, just over 1000% but were talking small numbers. You know only forty one people were known to abuse cocaine in the early 2000s and now they have about five or six hundred so
Darryl: The cocaine, I have a feeling that Plant Columbia did not work. Plant Columbia was when Bill Clinton was president, and he brought in General McCaffrey and General McCaffrey carried on toward the Bush administration and they put all their efforts into eradicating cocaine growing and the cartels in Columbia and I’m sure they were effectively able to show a decrease in the number of plantations, cocaine production in Columbia maybe the cocaine underworld who were trafficking it. But its clear to me that the cocaine growers, most of them and most of the producers just moved. Actually, I believe the last check on it and Ill have to check on more modern times, but they had moved out of the, out of Peruvian high lands and Columbian high lands and actually moved into the Amazon basin where cocaine doesnt usually grow that well but theres another plant, theres actually three or four species of the cocaine plant and one of those plants is the Erythroxyl Epadu. The Erythroxyl Epadu plant grows in low elevations, grows in the Amazon basin and what I remember it had more potent or more dangerous alkaloids in it and the erythroxylumcoca plant which is a common cocaine and that they were seeing in South America themselves new cocaine abusers who were abusing basica and pasta which is the intermediate product extraction of cocaine from the coca leaves and from the Epadu plant theyre seeing more toxicity because theres a different mix of chemicals and alkaloids in the Epadu as there are in the Era toxin plant.
CNS: And of course, a couple weeks ago we talked about the activities going on in Bolivia where the government was actually encouraging coca growing and how that might be back firing.
Darryl: Cocaine is an important plant, cocaine has been a part of South America from the beginning probably of human written history and before that, even the pottery chards and the drawings we find on the walls and stuff. So people chewing cocaine, so its been a part of that culture for a long time and they would want them to eradicate it for exportation, cocaine is still very important to the people in that region who use it safely actually very much like we drink coffee in this country so
CNS: Because we dont, they dont over, over refine it, I mean
Darryl: They just chew it straight from the leaf.
CNS: The over-refining of food is whats gotten us into the situation with obesity in large measure.
Darryl: In many ways, were doing that to everything. Opium in itself, is a mixture of twenty five different chemicals, some of them are very good to protect the heart, some are stimulants, anti-depressants and probably opium is much more healthier for you than to refine it into morphine and morphine to heroin or refining codeine which we know is much more dangerous and addictive. I think the same thing is true with cocaine, youve got all these eighteen or so alkaloids and the coca era toxin coca plant when they chew it, I actually read, when they chew it with guano – was the safest way and most healthiest way to chew it, because the guano – droppings, bird or bat droppings mixed with the coca leaf, was a suitable organic, if you will, way of pulling the cocaine out of the leaf where it could be absorbed into your gums and was healthier – then when the missionaries came in, the Spanish came in, found out that they couldnt convert the natives to religion, they couldnt make the natives work for anything else but they found out that if they were able to give the natives cocaine – not just the kings and monarchs but the common natives cocaine, the natives did anything for them. So they started allowing the natives that culminate it to have cocaine to work in their minds, coca leaf, that they told them, dont mix it with that bird dropping thats unsanitary, its dirty, whatever and they taught them how to mix it with soda lime, with a lime minerals, also with ash and with that from the medical records or from skulls we dig up and stuff they start with tremendous dental problems from chewing cocaine. Whereas when they used it with, or chewed it with bird droppings they didnt have such bad dental problems.
CNS: I guess it just goes to show that the advance of civilization is not always the positive thing that we think that it is.
Darryl: You know and in line with the book, we wrote Uppers Downers All Arounders Chapter one, we find that when theres these refinements and changes in, in how a drug is more powerful or refined out or pure, packaged in a different way for different routes of administration, it always results, if its a psychoactive drug able to affect the reward reinforcement center like all addictive drugs. It just results in a massive growth in addiction and problems and thats what we are seeing and with cocaine a good history showing that all these refinements through out the whole history, of cocaine even the free base cocaine phenomena during the 1980s, have led to spiking abuses of this drug.
CNS: Right, well well see what happens with the vaccine and how that plays out. If you have any comments or questions about this topic or any others we would just very much like to hear them, drop by our website which is cnsproductions.com and you can write an email from that location or actually you can respond in the pod cast section, the blog section, to any of the pod cast that you hear there, OK then Darryl, thank you very much.
Darryl: Hey thank you Howard.
CNS: And well talk again soon. That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com.