Ask for drugs

New drugs are not a joke. They require close attention. You need to monitor those who use them. Look at them on the forums on the Internet. Interrogate with addiction. Find out when, how and how much substance they accepted.

And immediately start the clinical trials of these substances - in order to sell some of them in pharmacies in the future.

The column with such a message David Natt, a professor at the Royal Royal College of London, printed in November in the journal Nature . “Millions of people use these drugs, and not all of them are illegal,” he carefully remarks in the text. And for Colta.ru, he even clarifies what results he expects: “We can collect information about cases of getting rid of alarm of anxiety, depression and other psychiatric disorders.”

A week after his article, Natt took part in a conference about depression, where an expert economist counted: this disease costs Europe 92 billion euros per year -which makes the future medicine no less valuable for humanity by discoveries than the source of cheap thermonuclear energy.

Natt signs his letters with a long abbreviation dm FRCP FRCPSYCH FMedSci - what does "Doctor of Medicine, a member of the Royal College of Doctors, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a member of the UK Medical Sciences Academy of Medical Sciences." Until 2009, he was the chief expert of the British drug government - and lost his post after he declared reference to statistics that ecstasy ( MDMA ) is less harm than from riding .

Depression costs Europe 92 billion euros per year.

“Some“ legal ”drugs have a chemical resemblance to therapeutic drugs and can cheer up or reduce anxiety,” writes Natt. The word "legal" means, of course, not tobacco and alcohol. We are talking about psychoactive substances, recently invented for bypassing prohibitions - they are also called design drugs. Smoking mixtures and baths for baths that advertise on the asphalt by the metro are only some of the examples. In July 2014, Academic Journal Drug Testing And Analysis counted that one new substance appears on the market every five to six days . Over time, almost all of them fall into the lists of prohibited.

This is not to say that in medical laboratories designer drugs were not at all involved in earlier. They were tested and tested, but it seems little to clinical trials. The tests answer other questions - as, for example, to identify a substance in a bag seized by the police or in the blood of a detainee for a ride on the oncoming lane. And what urgent measures to take in the hospital when the user of Spice in an unconscious state brings an ambulance there.

NATT with co -author, Andy Green from Nottingham University, in Journal of Psychopharmakology formulated a set of advice for colleagues. First of all, a scientist who is dealing with a designer drug should not look at him as a forensic expert hired by the police, but as a pharmacologist . What receptors do you have? Is it very toxic? What is his cycle of chemical transformations in the body? How does it interact with other medicines or alcohol in the blood?

Professor NATT lost his post in the government after saying: ecstasy is less harm than from riding.

“The main task is to find out if there is a potential therapeutic effect of new drugs. The fact that MDMA has several applications in medicine, and cocaine is a medicine, we already know, ”explains NATT in a letter. And Green conducted an exemplary study of Mephedron-the same “Bath Salt” , which was considered a legal equivalent of ecstasy before his ban in 2010. He found out that the mechanism of action on the brain is fundamentally different, the dependence develops easier - and on the medical prospects specifically this substance put a cross.

This does not happen with all psychoactive drugs. In April 2014, a team of psychiatrists from Oxford discovered: ketamine - a forbidden drug that is popular with veterinarians as anesthetic for animals - heals a clinical depression that is not amenable to ordinary therapy. Eight out of 28 hopeless patients were recovering after three or six portions of ketamine from a dropper; Doctors watched them for another six months and made sure that the effect is long -term, but there were no side effects.

Do I need to look for new drugs if you can just legalize ketamine? It turns out that not everything is so simple. Eight out of 28 is not bad, but what about the remaining twenty? For a medicine that can be bought at a pharmacy, this is too low, but for researchers and such numbers are said a lot. The former drugs dealt with serotonin brain receptors, and ketamine is associated with NMDA receptors : this is a completely different family of molecules, and they marked completely different nerve cells. So, we clarified the target of the medicine, and now it is time to sort out other substances that beat precisely on it. Among such substances, for example, prohibited phenciclidine ( PCP ) and methadone - they themselves are not suitable for various reasons, but you can sort their derivatives. These derivatives differ from each other in how they are excreted from the body, how quickly and firmly contact the receptor, how good they are in competition for it with other molecules and whether it distinguishes its different options. All this is called pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics.

Eight out of 28 patients with depression that is not amenable to therapy went to recover after several portions of ketamine from the dropper.

Research is prevented by two things. Firstly, laws prevent psychiatrists from dealing with illegal drugs. In the 2010s alone, in the USA and the UK they allowed them to work with a narrow circle of psychedelics, and in scientific journals, articles about the effect of LSD in combination with psychotherapy or a course of psychotybin, the active substance of “magic mushrooms”, as a way to quit smoking , began to appear in scientific journals. But it is still very difficult to organize experiments on volunteers using designer drugs, it is still very difficult.

Secondly, those who take new drugs at home and talk about it on the Internet never know with a sufficient degree of confidence that they were sold from under the floor. This reduces the value of reports for analysis by “big data” methods.

However, laws may change, and the pharmacological properties of substances will remain the same. In August 2014, a cartoon “War with the Drago” appeared on the Web, shot by order of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (among its members, for example, the former Secretary General of the UN COMI Annan, writer Mario Vargas Llos, Nobel Laureate in literature, and several former presidents). In the cartoon, the wise king cuts the heads of the winging dragon Drago ( Drugo ) , who lures more and more of his subjects to himself, the dragon grows up more and more heads, and around the city is burned to the ground - and in the end it becomes clear that all evil is primarily from the war itself.

For starters, Professor NATT offers to stretch the dragon a bottle, around which a pharmacy snake is usually drawn.