My Science Friday: Getting Off The Monkey's Back

Science Daily is reporting that researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have demonstrated a multiple drug treatment regimen which significantly reduces cocaine use in nonhuman primates.

In the June issue of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Dr. Leonard Howell and his team report on a therapy which involves simultaneous use of Dopamine Transport Inhibitors and Seratonin Transport Inhibitors to help break the grip of cocaine addiction. While they have yet to identify an optimum set of dosage levels for the therapy, this could obviously have significant impact on human drug treatment programs, as well as hopefully reducing the massive societal costs associated with crimes committed by drug-crazed monkeys.

The secret to the success of their method seems to lie in its two-pronged approach: The Dopamine Transport Inhibitor tickles the same parts of the brain that cocaine would, so to speak, while the Seratonin Transport Inhibitor works to break the reinforcement cycle in the brain's neurochemistry. One common Seratonin Transport Inhibitor which has been used successfully in their trials is fluoxetine — better known by its trade name of Prozac.

Better still, the treatment appears to offer a fairly limited abuse potential, possibly because of the presence of drugs which block the reinforcement cycle from the very start of the procedure. It is even possible — although the authors of the study have certainly not speculated on this — that this approach could be adapted to other types of addiction treatments.