5 Street Drugs Your Doctor Might Prescribe You Someday

5

What Kicks Opioid Addiction Better Than Methadone? Actual Heroin

Opioid addiction is nothing to joke about. It's one of the greatest health crises facing America today, and is responsible for thousands of deaths each year. Anything that might delay its grim march has to be seriously considered. Anything.

Including giving people straight-up heroin.

Bayer"WE'RE BACK, BAY-BEE!" -- Bayer

The idea behind most forms of drug treatment is to slowly wean addicts off of their dependence. Because it's done in a controlled setting, you reduce the risk of accidental overdose and the toxic effects from tainted drugs. Though it isn't always practical or advisable to wean addicts off of their drug of choice using the exact same substance. For example, with people addicted to opiates and opioids, we usually use methadone, but that treatment has a number of limitations. In fact, recent research has suggested that, at least when compared to methadone, heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) methods may have better results. (In related news, we now have a new favorite inappropriate acronym. Step aside, Pederasts Under Punitive Prosecution for Youth-Crimes.)

In one study, researchers found that opioid addicts treated with heroin improved in both health and social stabilization, reducing their drug use at levels superior to similar methadone treatment programs. Even more interestingly, after four weeks, there were no detectable intoxication effects -- subjects could have potentially been able to drive after dosing up. Nobody wanted to be the first to hand them the keys to the school bus or anything, but still, that's theoretically impressive.

Heroin-assisted treatment is already a thing in some parts of the world. In both England and Switzerland, doctors can dispense small amounts of heroin to patients if they haven't been successful with methadone programs. The main barrier to implementing this program everywhere is really nothing but mindset. We'd have to stop considering addiction a moral failing, stop applying any kind of inherent morality to the drugs themselves, and start treating it like a health issue.

So, uh, have fun with methadone forever, Americans.

4

A Safe, Simple, Reliable Painkiller For Use While Giving Birth? Ketamine

You know what hurts? Words. There are some things you just can't take back.

3

MDMA Helps Traumatized Patients Cope With PTSD

MDMA is the drug of choice for anybody who likes dancing for eight straight hours. Bobbleheads, wacky waving inflatable arm guys, all those guys? Serious, crippling MDMA addictions. Just sad.

But the very things that make MDMA appealing to neon werewolves may also make it useful in therapeutic settings. MDMA makes its users feel safe and content. Which, yes, leads to you unwisely hugging guys named PentaGraham in a dank warehouse, but it could also help a patient open up to their therapist. This is particularly useful for treating patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), some of whom aren't able to discuss the traumas that are still killing them.

2

Psilocybin Helps The Terminally Ill Cope With Their Fate

Magic mushrooms do not actually grant their users magical abilities. They mainly help you be weird in the woods with friends. But recently, researchers have come up with another, possibly more useful purpose for them: treating people with depression.

The active ingredient in magic mushrooms is psilocybin, which can reset some of the neural pathways in the brain linked with depression. Subjects in a study on treating depression with psilocybin reported feeling "reset" or "rebooted" after taking the drug, while MRIs revealed reduced blood flow in the areas of the brain thought to be responsible for fear and stress. The effects seemed to last, too -- researchers saw continuing benefits up to five weeks after treatment.

1

Want A Better Depression Treatment? Try LSD

LSD used to be legal back in the bad old days, when people went around lickin' stuff for fun and profit. See, back in the '50s and '60s, researchers were beginning to uncover LSD's potential for treating depression and addiction, so it seemed like a useful thing. Then the great drug crackdown came, and LSD was relegated to stoners who were bad at finding mushrooms.

The old research was never completely shut down, though. It's just that after LSD became illegal, any scientist wanting to work with it had to jump through endless hoops to do so. So what should have taken years instead took decades, but it still got done. One study used MRIs to scan people who were scientifically tripping balls and found that while LSD was inhibiting synapses in certain parts of the brain, it was also causing connectivity between other areas that don't normally talk to each other.

Imperial College LondonPictured: the galaxy brain meme, but, like, real.

Another recent study supported this, suggesting that LSD induces a sort of "mental looseness" -- an ability to make connections that the human mind normally doesn't. Subjects also reported a heightened sense of curiosity and psychological well-being. Taken to an extreme, this kind of "mental loosening" could lead to psychosis, but with mild doses, that doesn't appear to be a risk. Two weeks after dosing, subjects showed no particular signs of delusion.

Given the potential benefits and controllable (usually wholly absent) side effects, this feels like research well worth pursuing. Let's have more therapeutic methods that involve licking.

Oh, they inject it intravenously now? What a waste.

You're still totally welcome to adopt your own wacky waving inflatable arms guy.

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For more check out 5 Illegal Drugs With Surprisingly Wholesome Medical Uses and 5 Realities Of Having The Government Ban Medication You Need.

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