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Morphine Relief Without Addiction?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Morphine has been used as a painkiller for decades, if not centuries. Unfortunately for patients, morphine is also an addictive substance. Now, Brigham Young University (BYU) chemists are using a vine plant that grows in Australia to develop a new painkilling molecule, but with fewer side effects. The Deseret Morning News reports that the BYU chemists hope to ease pain with hasubanonine, the synthetic compound they created and which has a similar molecular structure as morphine. Still, more tests need to be done before this natural drug can replace morphine."
If you read TFA instead of the completely misleading summary, you'll note that...
(1) The BYU chemists don't know if the compound has painkilling properties at all. It's the mirror image of another molecule which is known not to be a painkiller. The mirror image is similar to morphine, so they hope it might have the painkilling properties of morphine. But it's painkilling properties are at this point entirely theoretical.
(2) They have no clue whatsoever whether, if it has painkilling properties, it is less addictive than morphine. It just as easily be more addictive. All they know is, while it looks like morphine, it isn't exactly morphine, so it will probably have slightly different properties.
(3) And of course, they have no idea whether the new molecule would have other, less desirable differences from morphine -- like being a deadly poison to the kidneys. Whether the stuff could even be safely taken by humans is still unknown.
In short, the summary on this article wildly exaggerates its content.
If I recall correctly, Heroin was originally designed the same way, or at least to help people get off of a morphine addiction.
you might be thinking of methadone to treat a heroin addiction.
No, he WAS thinking of Herion.
The drug chemists were trying minor modifications on the morphine molecule, trying to find something with the pain relief but without the addition. This new one had all the pain killing power, so they tried it on a number of the lab personnel and it didn't give any of them withdrawal symptoms.
So they marketed it as the "Heroine" that would rescue the world from addiction by killing pain without hooking. Only to discover that it hooked at least as well as it cured pain.
Turns out:
a) The body jut converts it back to morphine.
b) There is a small fraction of the population that doesn't get hooked on morphine and its derivatives. And it happened that all the people in the lab they tried it on were members of that subset - a statistically unlikely occurrence.
(There was a theory that such people also gravitate toward research science fields, such as chemistry and medicine, for unknown reasons, though I haven't heard whether this was ever checked out.)
= = = =
One of the most tragic parts of the whole additction / drug war / underprescription of painkillers by doctors for fear of prosecution is that morphine and derivatives, given in appropriate doses for relief from actual severe or chronic pain, apparently DON'T addict. It's a dose spike far above the pain-relief level that sets the hook. (Not that it's easy to tell in chronic pain cases, since the return of the underlying pain is a fine substitute for withdrawal symptoms. But for acute pain tapering the dose - even (especially) by self-administration, also tends to avoid the hook.
But DEA scrutinizes doctor dosing habits and sporadicly prosecutes doctors who prescribe "too much" narcotics. And they don't adequately take into account whether the doctor is a specialist in pain treatment or treatment of illnesses with a lot of associated pain, and thus have an atypical patient mix biased toward need for pain medication and high doses.
So doctors underprescribe. And that leaves many chronic pain sufferers with no alternatives but ongoing excruciating pain, suicide, or recourse to illegal drugs (with their uncertain strengths, and high cost requiring IV administration with its sudden onset, leading to dose spikes and addiction).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way