Kenneth Blum, Thomas J H Chen, John Bailey, Abdalla Bowirrat, John Femino, Amanda L C Chen, Thomas Simpatico, Siobhan Morse, John Giordano, Uma Damle, Mallory Kerner, Eric R Braverman, Frank Fornari, B William Downs, Cynthia Rector, Debmayla Barh, Marlene Oscar-Berman
Opiate addiction is associated with many adverse health and social harms, fatal overdose, infectious disease transmission, elevated health care costs, public disorder, and crime. Although community-based addiction treatment programs continue to reduce the harms of opiate addiction with narcotic substitution therapy such as methadone maintenance, there remains a need to find a substance that not only blocks opiate-type receptors (mu, delta, etc.) but also provides agonistic activity; hence, the impetus arose for the development of a combination of narcotic antagonism and mu receptor agonist therapy...
December 2011: Molecular Neurobiology