Cocaine Vaccine Information

Cocaine is quickly becoming one of the most popular drugs in North America. More than 2 million Americans and over 220,000 Canadians take some form of cocaine regularly. Most recently, it was found that approximately 90% of all bills in circulation in the US and about 85% of all Canadian bills had some trace amounts of cocaine.

With the ever-increasing pervasiveness of this highly addictive substance, come increasing rates of addiction. Cocaine addiction can be an extremely hard habit to kick. The path to sobriety can be long and hard. Even after months of living cocaine-free, a single relapse in a moment of weakness can cause the physical and psychological cravings to surge. One single slip, and your cocaine addiction can take over your life again.

Our Cocaine Addiction Treatment Program arms you with the coping skills needed to resist your triggers. However, we also recognize that abstinence is not the only effective treatment model and that, for some addicts, alternative medical treatments suit them best.

Cocaine Vaccine at Sobriety.ca Foundation

We read and study new addiction research constantly, considering new treatments we could integrate into our various addiction treatment programs. This very often includes investigations into various medical drug therapies to control craving and relapse at the physiological level.

From our perspective, we see that an addiction treatment program that combines individual psychotherapy and medical therapies appear to be most effective in ensuring long term sobriety. Recovery rates are twice as high for addicts participating in a psychotherapeutic-medical combined program. Participants, conversely, whose addiction treatment program consist of medical interventions alone, do only half as well.

We advocate that some form of psychotherapy be a corner stone of any addiction treatment program, as it is with all of our programs.

Cocaine Vaccine Background Information

Thomas Kosten, while at the Yale School of Medicine, conducted a trial of an experimental vaccine against cocaine. The vaccine was cleverly engineered to entice the immune system to produce antibodies against cocaine, effectively attacking the drug’s molecules in the body. Antibodies bind to the cocaine molecule, making it too large to pass through the blood-brain barrier. Cocaine is thus trapped by the immune system and excreted by the body without having any effect. 

However, initial studies also found that immunization against cocaine is very difficult to maintain in practice. The human immune system has evolved to fight invaders, which enter the body in low numbers. We require only low levels of circulating antibodies. Cocaine, by comparison, enters the body in one big hit, overwhelming antibodies. In order to keep antibody levels high enough to cope with the flood of cocaine, booster shots have to be given every 2 to 3 weeks.