[extropy-chat] The Ultimate Anti-Drug

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Fri Sep 24 05:24:44 UTC 2004


The idea is to vaccinate against disease early in
life, while the drugs might be needed late in life?
Anti-anti-drug.  Possibly it could even be developed
during the trial of the original anti-drug - biotech
moves just that fast these days.

--- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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).
> 
> -----
> 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
> 
> http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software
> *
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