Word: drugged
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Americans are fond of the idea that they can keep from doing "bad" drugs by taking "good" ones instead. The heroin/methadone model has actually been institutionalized: you can go to government-funded clinics to get methadone as "maintenance treatment" for heroin addiction - since both drugs bind to the same brain receptors. Experimental types in the '60s believed that LSD was a wonder drug that could cure alcoholism. The same claim was made during the '80s for a drug that was, at the time, perfectly legal and even used by a few psychotherapists: MDMA, a chemical now better known as ecstasy...
...decades, the holy grail in the search for good drugs to supplant bad ones has been a pill that might replace nicotine, which is powerfully addictive and - especially when delivered through cigarette smoke - incredibly dangerous. And in 2006, the holy grail seemed to have been found. Pfizer released Chantix, a drug the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved in May of that year to help smokers quit. Since then, doctors have written more than 6 million prescriptions for Chantix. It's no magic bullet. Chantix fails with most people who take it; fewer than half of those on the drug...
...paper in the journal Biological Psychiatry says the drug, which carries the generic name varenicline, has also helped a group of regular drinkers consume less alcohol. So could varenicline be a new anti-addiction panacea...
...there's a downside. Varenicline reduces cravings by binding to and blocking nicotine receptors in the brain. The drug affects how your brain releases dopamine, the key neurotransmitter that plies the brain's reward pathways and lays down roots of addiction. Typically, your brain gets a shot of dopamine every time you have a drink or - if you're a regular smoker - every time you drag on a cigarette. (Or, for that matter, every time you do anything pleasurable, like win at a craps table or snort a bump of coke or crystal meth...
...varenicline also may change the way some people experience joy. Last year, the writer Derek de Koff (who was a longtime smoker and also - full disclosure - an acquaintance of mine) wrote a harrowing New York magazine account of his experience with varenicline. He experienced awful hallucinations while taking the drug - he wrote about speaking to a man in a bar who turned out to be a shadow cast by a potted plant. De Koff also became despondent. "I wondered whether [varenicline] was zapping my brain's pleasure-delivery system to such a degree that not only did I find...