WHY ISNT BASIC RESEARCH INTO DRUG ADDICTION INFORMING THE HUMAN CONDITION (TREATMENT, CRAVING, ETC)?
SN: One of the main reasons may be that we rely too much on self-administration and that the mechanisms behind this are entirely different from human addiction. JF: Heroin can be replaced by methadone, is there something similar for cocaine? NM: Amineptine! SG: Yea, but it doesn’t work, though. SN: How does methadone work anyway? Gr: It’s a partial agonist, right? RK: It’s actually a full opioid agonist with the same euphoric effects and addictive potential as heroin itself. These are only dampened by its slow absorption resulting from oral administration. Gr: Do people show sensitisation to the effects of stimulants like we see in rat locomotor activity? SG: No. C: When cocaine self-administering rats are abstained and then reinstated, they use more cocaine than before. SG: In the early days rats’ relapse could only be induced by stress. Later they found that certain cues could also induce it. Finally a prolongation of the abstinence period turned out to produce a very high rate of re
