Doctors are starting human trials of a vaccine to prevent cocaine addiction.
Medical professionals at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine got the green light to expand the reach of their drugs after testing it out on rodents and monkeys. Thirty patients will be part of the trial process and all of them will be cocaine addicts. The three-year study is funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and National Institutes of Health.
The 30 prospective patients will receive $25 each time they go through with attending a meeting for the study. The leading doctor behind the study, Dr. Ronald Crystal, explains the importance of the study, saying in part, “While there are drugs like methadone designed to treat heroin, there aren’t any therapeutics available to treat cocaine addiction — we hope that our vaccine will change that.”
Ultimately, if a vaccine proves to be successful as a result of the study, it will, “protect cocaine from entering the brain,” according to Crystal. Aside from payment per meetings, Crystal hopes that the $2,400 compensation for participating in the entire study will be a helpful incentive for getting addicts to sign on. An effective vaccine is expected to “gobble up cocaine like Pac-Man,” says Crystal.
Most cocaine gets into the U.S. through cartel drug trafficking. Colombian and Peruvian cocaine producers team up with Mexican cartels to get their product north of the border. Even though heroin is currently considered the major drug epidemic in the U.S., cocaine use has slowly been on the rise — including in major cities such as Chicago.
The Colombian and U.S. government both hope that cocaine production and trafficking will soon be greatly reduced by a peace deal between the Colombian government and Marxist rebels. The guerrilla fighters, the FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, have funded their decades-long fight against the government through cocaine trafficking. In the terms of the peace deal, the rebels agree to refrain from illicit activities such as drug trafficking if they wish to continue their political struggle in a peaceful manner.
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