THE LOST CURE

One would expect word of a cure for alcoholism to take the world's
medical community by storm. This expectation would only increase if
the same method also cured heroin addiction. Prepare yourself for
disappointment.

Some fifteen years ago, the Finns figured out that alcohol addiction
was caused by endorphins produced when under the influence.
Endorphins are part of your body's learning mechanism. You exercise,
you release endorphins, you learn that exercise is good.
Unfortunately this also means that alcoholics eventually learn that
drinking is irresistible.

Endorphins are a naturally produced chemical similar to morphine -
literally "endogenous morphine". Opium, morphine, and heroin all
work by imitating endorphin, sometimes by doing a better job than
endorphins themselves do. When we take heroin our body learns that
whatever neural paths we were using immediately previous to and
during the infusion of the drug are the good paths, and that we
should use those paths more often. The neurons fire, they get fed
endorphin analogs, the addiction grows. Do it often enough and the
addiction grows out of control.

The opposite of this is also true. If the neurons fire and they
aren't fed endorphin or its analogs, then the addiction weakens.
Pavlov demonstrated this effect in the 1890's, and today it's
referred to as extinction. This is where a drug named naltrexone
comes in. Naltrexone blocks the uptake of endorphins. There's a
trick to it, though, and that's where the problem comes in. The
neurons have to fire for this to happen. And not just any neurons -
it has to be the same neurons that were involved in creating the addiction.

This means that, for extinction to take place, the person has to
drink or shoot up. For better results, they should do so under the
same circumstances in which they became addicted. The very thought
that we should encourage alcoholics to drink, even to cure them, is
so thoroughly anathema to the alcoholism treatment community that,
ten years after this cure's discovery, with tens of thousands of
success stories in Finland, it's still almost entirely unknown in the
U.S. and other countries.

This predisposition has done even more damage. It's produced dozens
of studies that combine it with every other current method for
treating alcoholism, all of which are geared towards discouraging the
person from ever drinking another drop. These studies show that using
naltrexone to encourage abstinence is ineffectual. This is, of
course, true because if the addict doesn't drink then the neurons
won't fire and extinction will not occur. Detoxification clinics
(which would be all but put out of business by this treatment) have
used these studies to demonstrate naltrexone's all-around
ineffectiveness in treating alcoholism.

You can see what this would do for research into extinction for
heroin. Can you imagine anyone in the U.S. telling their patient
"Here's your pill, here's your heroin, now go home and shoot up"?
Although studies performed in places like Russia have been promising,
and studies in the U.S. show these results for those who disobey the
conditions of the studies, there yet remains to be conclusive
evidence of this method's effectiveness for opiates.

All of this stems from our society's moral requirement to villainize
drugs and their users. Deep down, we believe that no treatment for
addiction could be effective unless it's painful. This is reflected
in our habit of treating drug abuse with prison and penalties instead
of treatment and empathy. Let the record show that America's 14
million alcoholics have become the latest victims in the War on Drugs.