[extropy-chat] The Ultimate Anti-Drug

[Emlyn]

A drug to stop people experiencing narcotic-induced euphoria? Well, ok
I guess. But the idea of giving this to kids (ie: people not able to
give informed consent) is totally crap. But then I don't support
genetic modification of kids (or of embryos destined to become kids)
either (except in cases where to not do so would be  clearly harmful).

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The Ultimate Anti-Drug
By David Borden, AlterNet. Posted August 10, 2004

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/19520/

Biotech corporations are formulating the drug to end all drugs – a
vaccine against the 'disease' of drug-induced euphoria.

A government-convened panel of scientists in the UK is considering
what the Independent properly termed "a radical scheme" – a proposal
to use vaccines, currently under development by pharmaceutical
corporations, to immunize children against "euphoria" from drugs such
as heroin, cocaine and nicotine. Panel members say the plan would
target children who are at risk of becoming drug users in the future.
They have not said how it would be determined who is at risk.

It's only a matter of time until some of our own drug war zealots or
anti-drug mad scientists take this idea up here in the US.

An anti-drug vaccine differs fundamentally from vaccines designed to
protect individuals from diseases like measles, the example a
committee member raised to the Independent's reporter. Measles is a
disease that no one, or virtually no one, wants to catch. It is
communicable and could therefore spread to large numbers of people if
unchecked. Perhaps measles vaccinations should not be compulsory, if
we believe in freedom of choice. But the wisdom of such vaccinations
is clear, and it's legitimate for society to encourage and make them
widely available.

An anti-drug vaccine, on the other hand, is designed to produce a
permanent chemical alteration to an individual's brain chemistry to
disable one's ability to experience certain mind states that humans
are designed to be able to experience – and which despite their
downsides many people desire to experience. Though heroin and cocaine
are illegal, that may not always be the case, and nicotine is legal.
Legal or not, it is the individual's human right to seek such
experiences. But even if one disagrees with that last statement, to
alter a human being's brain and body to make the experience
impossible, forever, is an extremist approach.

The "side effects" of such an alteration are hard to predict. Heroin
is an opiate that was developed for pain control, for which it is
still used in some countries. It is derived from morphine and hence
fundamentally similar to many other pain medicines. Would a heroin
vaccine interfere with the ability of a pain patient to gain relief
through other opiate medications?

Cocaine is also used as a medicine, not for such a large number of
patients as the opiates, but important for the ones for whom it is
used. Would a cocaine vaccine interfere with a patient's ability to
gain those medical benefits? Would it interfere with the potency of
similar drugs like novocaine? Does nicotine have current or potential
medical uses that would be stymied by a vaccine?

Not necessarily – the physiological processes occurring in pain relief
are not identical to those involved in opiate use to produce,
euphoria, for example, or for relieving the cravings of an addiction.
Nor, however, are they entirely dissimilar – it's the same substance,
after all. How can we determine in advance, with surety, that no such
problems will arise?

The anti-drug vaccine is a fundamentally different proposition in this
respect as well, for at least two reasons. One is that it is not
necessary, as effective alternatives for reducing or avoiding the
harms that sometimes from drug addiction are already available –
moderation, harm reduction, and abstinence.

The other reason is the sheer scale, in time and in numbers of people,
that would be needed to thoroughly assess an anti-drug vaccine's risks
and effects. It's not something that can be accomplished in one or
even 10 years, with any reasonable number of people.

Take the number of people needed for a proper drug trial. Then divide
that by the fraction of them who statistically are likely to suffer
from serious medical conditions in the future that require with
opiates (a larger number) or cocaine (a smaller number). That much
larger number of test subjects is the minimum number needed to ensure
that the subset of the test subjects who will develop severe chronic
pain and other serious conditions in the future will be available and
still part of the study. There would need to be an ample number of
them requiring heavy use of opiates. And the time scale is a lifetime,
as the subjects would receive the vaccinations as children while the
drugs are most often needed as medicines late in life.

We're not talking thousands of test subjects, nor tens of thousands.
We are talking about at least hundreds of thousands and probably
millions or more – a substantial chunk of a generation – with
statistically significant results not possible for the better part of
a century, to determine with any degree of confidence that such
vaccines will not interfere with important medical treatments later in
life.

If informed, consenting adults want to take an anti-drug vaccine, and
if it could work on adults, maybe they should have that right. But the
government should play no role in sponsoring, nor even encouraging,
such a practice. An anti-drug vaccine for children is such a bad idea
that it isn't even worth considering.

-- 
Emlyn

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