Originally published at: Research raises hopes Fentanyl vaccine may be answer to Opioid Use Disorder | Boing Boing
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Also would be used as a plot device by people going up against Sicilians in games of wit and such.
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Next will be a vaccine against starting a ground war in Asia.
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Capitalism will never solve the problems that capitalism caused.
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“Swan Song for Lady Horse.”
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Not a great idea if you get cancer later in your life.
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I don’t get the purpose.
If I’m not a drug user no need. If I am a drug user why would I want a vaccine for my drug of choice.
The only possible use I could see is a drug user who doesn’t want to risk their drug of choice being laced with fentanyl.
I’m sure I’m missing the point but I’ve read a few articles and it still escapes me.
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Recovering from addiction is difficult. I could see someone with a fentanyl addiction who is in recovery/sober wanting this vaccine to help them if they relapse.
Edit for clarity
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I didn’t think of that.
I’ve been sober for decades, I’m trying to think if I would have welcomed that early on, I’m not sure. I know everyone finds their own way so for that use the vaccine is a good thing if it can be easily gotten to the people who need/want it at no cost.
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“Use disorder” is not the same as “addiction.” Fentanyl is not for everyone, but it’s an important drug for controlling pain among those who can tolerate it and for whom other treatments have failed. If a vaccination gives you an immunity to it, it will never be useful to you, so you better hope you don’t find yourself in need of it in the future.
Of course, with the politics around opioids and fentanyl in particular, it seems unlikely responsible doctors would ever again be able to offer fentanyl as a treatment even when it’s the last appropriate alternative on the table. So maybe getting vaccinated isn’t really giving up that much.
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If only.
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When I got a colonoscopy they used fentanyl. I got the impression it was the standard for the clinic (all they did, all day long, was colonoscopys. Interesting business model). According to wikipedia it is the preferred opioid for anesthesia because it has a rapid onset (5 minutes) only last for about 2 hours and has a rapid recovery. Not mentioned is that, given that it is 100 times as powerful as morphine. you need very little of it and therefor it is pretty cheep.
All that being said there are plenty of other opioids out there as well as other families of effective anesthetics and sedatives. The inconvenience of not being able to use it vs how much it could help people seems like a clear choice.
Of course I did say “could”. As someone else pointed out capitalism and all that. The problem isn’t that addictive things exist but rather people contracting Shit Life Syndrome.
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… wasn’t this literally the plot of Neuromancer—Case needed somebody to unvax him so he could get off on drugs again? I forget 
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I wonder if this might have the inadvertent effect of encouraging more dangerous use strategies.
A decent concentration of antibodies in your bloodstream could certainly bind a fair amount of fentanyl; probably very helpful against inadvertent exposure from adulterated drugs or against fentanyl administered orally and entering the bloodstream gradually at some distance from the central nervous system; but there just wouldn’t be enough antibodies to bind it all if you quickly introduced a dose just downstream of the central nervous system(analogous to the problem with necrotizing venoms, where you can suffer a fair bit of local tissue damage even if antivenom levels are high enough to neutralize venom that enters the bloodstream and starts to spread away from the injection site).
I can’t help but be pessimistic about the results if people looking for an effect can only get it by either sufficiently heavy doses to swamp the antibody supply in the short term, or relatively fast administration in the vicinity of the brain.
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Now I’m genuinely curious—if a person gets cancer or some other chronic condition that might otherwise call for a Fentanyl prescription but the patient is a recovering Fentanyl addict does the prescribing doctor usually just shrug their shoulders and go ahead anyway or do they put in an extra effort to find alternative drugs?
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I’m not sure that people addicted to opiates are so selective.
But if you have cancer that hits the incredibly painful phase - fentanyl definitely is in the treatment mix. At least it was for both mom & dad.
I think at the end of life - addiction isn’t the problem.
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I’ve posted this before in another thread. Fentanyl is a wonder drug, but it should only be used under direct monitoring by anaesthesia professionals. In that context, it’s currently irreplaceable.
Remember reading about patients waking up during surgery, screaming in pain? Rare, but not rare enough - until fentanyl became available. Now it never happens where fentanyl is used.
So, no, I don’t think responsible doctors/nurse aneasthetists will abandon fentanyl unless something just as effective becomes available, regardless of the politics.
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They gave my dad morphine…
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It was a combo of different things for them - some for breakthrough pain - but that fentanyl patch was always on.
You can be sure that the hospice nurse came back just to dispose of the pain meds. Smart with some of my siblings.
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I remember that too…
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