Researchers Develop Vaccine to Help Crackheads Kick Habit

We know nothing about cocaine addiction -- aside from what we read and watch and watch -- but for those of you caught up in the matrix and struggling to kick the habit (we're looking at you, Whitney Houston), a study conducted by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, have successful tested a vaccine that treats cocaine addiction in mice.

The study, published in the online edition of Molecular Therapy, involved the not-entirely-novel but always tantalizing idea of vaccinating an addict against a high. Eliminate the buzz, the thinking goes, and the appeal of the drug vanishes with it. In the new research, investigators, began with a chemical whose molecular structure is similar to cocaine and attached it to an ordinary cold virus that had been stripped of its ability to cause illness but not of its ability to trigger an immune response. When the modified virus was next injected into laboratory mice, the animals' blood produced high concentrations of antibodies to the altered virus. When the blood was then mixed with actual cocaine in a test tube, those antibodies bound to the drug. This suggested that in the mice's systems, the antibodies would do the same, effectively tying up the cocaine before it could reach the brain. To test that supposition, the researchers gave both immunized mice and control mice high doses of actual cocaine — proportionately equivalent to what a human addict would use. As they anticipated, the immunized mice showed much less hyperactivity and other signs of intoxication that the ordinary mice did. Best of all, the effects of the vaccine lasted, on average, 13 weeks, which is far longer than other researchers have been able to achieve with other such inoculations. "This is the first [cocaine vaccine] that will likely not require multiple, expensive infusions and that can move quickly into human trials," said Dr. Ronald G. Crystal, Weill Cornell's chairman of genetic medicine.

The vaccine would be the first of its kind and could offer cocaine addicts -- and perhaps even nicotine, heroin and opiate addicts as well -- a simple way to kick their habit, but experts say it's not a magic bullet and y'all crackheads (again, we're looking at you, Whitney) by changing "their lifestyle and get over all the behavioral aspects of addiction."


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