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Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

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Re: Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

#101
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/yvnr4n/comment/iwg... "So I’m an anesthesiologist. This vaccine would wreak havoc with surgery. Fentanyl is the go-to opioid for surgery. If you can’t use fentanyl then sufentanil can be used instead. Both are desirable because they have durations of under an hour which allows for surgical analgesia but still waking the patient after the procedure. The abstract here says the…

Of course fentanyl is the preferred opioid for a reason. Using other options could increase surgical risks. But that seems pretty insignificant for anyone with OUD given how likely they are to die from overdose vs. other causes.

Proposal, people with "opioid use disorders" are more than likely suffering in some way that needs evaluation and treatment. Many of them were probably on something and then cut off suddenly from the supply of that something, leading them to seek illicit sources instead and leaving them in the position of both unregulated treatment, and being unable to get proper regulated treatment because they are labeled either addicts by people who know about their illicit use, or "drug seeking" by people who don't that they ask for access to their drug of choice and almost all sources of proper health will refuse to treat them without them first continuing to insist they stop their use entirely. Cutting them off suddenly again by simply making their drug of choice stop working does nothing at all to address the underlying reason why they think or do need the drug and treatment in the first place. Given that our medical system often gives you a drug and then kicks you out the door to deal with it and its effects on your own, this "vaccine" seems more likely to exacerbate the larger drug problem, even if the specific "opioid" problem is solved. More likely rather than getting someone off their drug habit, this will simply drive users its forced on into seeking out other drugs to get the same results, possibly at higher and even more unsafe dosages.

Drug use is a symptom, and until our medical community wises up to that fact, the fight against any "drug use disorder" is going to continue to be a losing fight.

Re: Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Selling fentanyl as candy in every street corner shop is going to fix this?

I really don't undertand this binary thinking regarding drugs. It seems like there's at least a third option in there somewhere between "ban it all and everything related and lock people up for decades if they touch the stuff" and "put it in a Pez dispenser and give every elementary school student a 12 tab slider with lunch every day." We don't do that with alcohol or weed, I don't see why that's the first (and often…

Well, even as a legalization sympathetic person, I can _sorta_ see the argument when you look at how marijuana legislation has gone. Dispensaries all over the damn place and the endless variety of products and general "mainstreaming" of weed use... I'm not opposed in principle but as sympathetic as I am I can't help wondering if some of it has gone a little far.

That said though, I totally agree that "legalize all drugs" doesn't have to imply that we would do the same super fun dispensary thing that we do for weed for something like fentanyl, or even something more benign like mushrooms. I imagine legal fentanyl would be more like a freely available prescription or similar, where you can be dispensed a certain amount under reasonable conditions as opposed to just walking into the fentanyl dispensary and picking your favorite strain in a colorful container.

Re: Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

#103
post #53

Oh boy, the pharmaceutical companies can sell a new product to help solve the mess that one of their previous products created. An opioid that's more potent, more addictive, and more deadly than heroin should never have gone to market in the first place. It speaks of enormous corruption and a complete lack of ethics when regulators didn't see an issue with fentanyl and let it move forward. The "but people are in pain…

A memory that un-repressed itself about a year ago was being a teenager and hearing my mom wailing, "I can't do it anymore. I'm done." in the later stages of her cancer treatment. Apparently shortly after that they had a fairly significant intervention with the physicians and she got fentanyl patches. I got about another year with her.

I completely agree that there's a ton of recklessness in the history of opioid prescription. It's been a horrible plague on society that will have generations of lasting impact. But there's uses for it. I dunno, maybe heroin patches could have become a thing?

Re: Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

#105

Flash reactions: * You could identify fentanyl passed off as heroin, cocaine, etc because they don't work as well. * "Damn this cocaine is weak. Maybe I need to take more" - I could imagine this leading to more fentanyl overdoses. * Something like this happened in neuromancer.

actually have a friend who nearly died from snorting fentanyl passed off as cocaine. fortunately an ambulance got there in time and saved him with narcan. his doctor friend also snorted coke with him, was carrying narcan in her purse and managed to Pulp Fiction herself on the way down.

fentanyl is scary stuff.

Re: Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

#107

This is kind of strange. Is it really fentanyl-specific, or does it effect all opioids? Problems either way; if just fentanyl, then, duh, that's not the only way to get high. If all opioids... So it makes opioids no longer available for pain relief... forever? ("vaccine"?). (Major surgery and recovery without opioids is no walk in the park, it's PTSD-inducing excruciating pain). It claims to block the ability to get…

>This is kind of strange. Is it really fentanyl-specific, or does it effect all opioids? This is answered in the article. >“The anti-fentanyl antibodies were specific to fentanyl and a fentanyl derivative and did not cross-react with other opioids, such as morphine. That means a vaccinated person would still be able to be treated for pain relief with other opioids,” said Haile. >Problems either way; if just fentanyl,…

Does the vaccine make fentanyl less dangerous then, does it keep you from OD'ing on it?

Re: Fentanyl vaccine tested in rats

#109
The real issue here that people don't seem to want to face is the WHY. Why do so many people want to check out of life completely by abusing medicine? If we don't address that nothing is going to stop the drug abuse let alone the relapse and overdose. I'm not talking about "more 12 step" here but more of a Frommian psychoanalytic approach. You are broken because society is broken. You have the ability to change yourself and subsequently society. A lot more empowering than just "submit to a higher power" which is clearly not working for the majority of users.
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