Cut Cocaine Addiction With A Drug That Erases Your Memory

The constant bloody noses, bloodshot eyes and complete lack of meaningful sleep earned in attempts to be cool may soon be a thing of the past.

Devin Mueller and James Otis at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have discovered what may be a potential drug therapy to break cocaine addiction. Propranolol, a beta-blocker currently prescribed for hypertension and anxiety, was successful in blocking animals’ brains from dialing up cocaine-related memories, which are a key to addiction. So while right now thinking about how much more personable and exciting you were at the bar last night brings the urge to rack more lines, in the future popping a pill may help you forget just how great getting high felt.

Most treatments for other highly addictive drugs, like heroin and nicotine, have relied on patients easing off use. Rather than go cold turkey, withdrawals from which are joyless and shitty enough to make you want to light or shoot up again, using methadone or nicotine patches and the like help you slowly drop your use to nothing. Ideally, that is. Methadone itself has plenty of addicts, and there are legions of former smokers who have been chewing Nicorette for years. Nicotine-blockers and new drugs are always in development, but results are mixed. Most people just try to quit by substitution.

Unfortunately, cigarettes aside, there isn’t any sort of cocaine light out there, and some sort of patch will surely never be made. So cocaine addicts have always been stuck trying to kick the habit by just plain stopping. The physical withdrawals aren’t as bad as heroin, but that’s only half the equation. There are also psychological cravings, and memories, being a lot less-understood and more ethereal, are hard to beat.

“Right now, there are no FDA-approved medications that are known to successfully treat cocaine abuse, only those that are used to treat the symptoms of cocaine withdrawal, which are largely ineffective at preventing relapse," Mueller said in a release.

Giving up the sweet reflections of events where, for example, you thought more of yourself thanks to cocaine use is an incredibly hard aspect of addiction to conquer because those memories become so associated with your psyche. Currently, the best way to try to help cocaine addicts is exposure therapy. A patient is repeatedly exposed to stimuli that induce cravings, and by not fulfilling those cravings the patient’s mind starts to slowly disassociate cocaine with Depeche Mode concerts or whatever it was that caused them to enjoy blow in the first place.

But exposure therapy doesn’t have a high rate of success. It takes a long time to break memories from urges, and all that time patients are quite literally triggering cravings. About 80 percent of people trying to quit cocaine relapse within six months. Propranolol may help. Scientists first began looking at the drug because it helped patients going through exposure therapy continue therapy for longer. However, Mueller said that propranolol has never been used to block or eliminate craving-based memories before. But with animal trials showing positive signs, fans of cocaine may be able to start scrambling their memory to kick the habit in the near future.