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Can Amphetamines Help Cure Cocaine Addiction?

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Can Amphetamines Help Cure Cocaine Addiction?

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tweetmeme_url = ‘http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1864767,00.html’; tweetmeme_source = ‘time’; Share digg_url = ‘http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1864767,00.html’; digg_title = ‘Can+Amphetamines+Help+Cure+Cocaine+Addiction%3F’; digg_window = ‘new’; When methadone was first proposed for the treatment of heroin addiction, it sounded like a pointless gambit sort of like substituting vodka for gin. That’s enabling addicts, critics said, not helping them. But over the years, maintenance treatment with methadone and other synthetic opiates like buprenorphine has proved successful more than any other heroin-addiction therapy in getting people off illicit drugs and lowering HIV transmission rates, crime and death among users. That success, in part, has got researchers wondering whether addiction to other drugs namely to the stimulants cocaine and methamphetamine could be curbed in the same way, by substituting a chemically similar alternative. (See the Year in Healt

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When methadone was first proposed for the treatment of heroin addiction, it sounded like a pointless gambit sort of like substituting vodka for gin. That’s enabling addicts, critics said, not helping them. But over the years, maintenance treatment with methadone and other synthetic opiates like buprenorphine has proved successful more than any other heroin-addiction therapy in getting people off illicit drugs and lowering HIV transmission rates, crime and death among users. That success, in part, has got researchers wondering whether addiction to other drugs namely to the stimulants cocaine and methamphetamine could be curbed in the same way, by substituting a chemically similar alternative. (See the Year in Health, from A to Z.) “It’s an idea that really does need to be rigorously evaluated,” says Frank Vocci, director of the pharmacotherapy division at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “But right now there is more discussion than data.” The problem of stimulant addiction i

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