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Brainstorming: The Science and Politics of Opiate Research

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"Brainstorming": was published in 1989, just in time for a new drug war. There have other new, new drug wars since. "Brainstorming" was not encouraging, but it is still worth reading.

Richard Nixon was no more sincere about drugs than about anything else. Nevertheless, Nixon's drug war had one good, dramatic and unplanned result.

Solomon Snyder, a laboratory medical researcher, had not paid any attention to opiate addiction until a friend was appointed Nixon's drug czar. By a little bureaucratic one-upsmanship, they managed to shake loose some money (about 2% of the federal antidrug effort) for basic research.

The results were immediate and extraordinary. Snyder and his student Candace Pert identified the receptors in the brain that accept opiates. This explained the mysterious effect of naloxone, which was already used in 1973 to shut down an opium overdose.

Other researchers found similar receptors in the pituitary gland, a big surprise.

The obvious question was: Why had evolution equipped humans with specialized nerve systems to recognize the juice of a poppy? (Another of Snyder's students, a high school student, David Aposhian, showed that all vertebrates have opiate receptors, and it was later shown that invertebrates do, too.)

The answer was that the body creates its own powerful drugs, later named enkephalins and endorphins, and the juice of the poppy happens to mimic their effect.

This led to hopes for a powerful synthetic drug that would block addicting opiates, and for new, non-addicting painkillers. Snyder explains why neither hope was fulfilled. Nor are they likely to be.

On the other hand, the research techniques -- and even more important, the conceptual innovations -- used in the opiate research opened a window on an unsuspected feature of physiology. Though a failure from the antidrug point of view, the knowledge gained has been helpful against many other diseases, such as diabetes.

This is not at all what Nixon and his henchmen intended. They just wanted votes.

George Bush I's drug war has already had its unexpected effect. Unexpected by me, anyway. A most diverse array of commentators -- including many with impeccable conservative credentials, like Milton Friedman -- have responded to Bush's call for action with countercalls for realism.

Snyder is among these. In 15 lucid pages he explains why antidrug laws, starting with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, turned drug use in the United States from a mild problem, which resulted in no deaths, into a continuous disaster that has killed tens of thousands.

Provocative thoughts are packed into Snyder's slim volume, and reforming America's moralistic approach to drugs seems to be among the least significant to him.

His exciting story about breakthrough research has its moments of scandal. "One might have thought that our work identifying and characterizing opiate receptors would be welcomed by narcotic researchers," but one would have been wrong. But beyond telling this interesting tale, Snyder seems most concerned to use his own experience to remark upon the best way that effective scientific research can be fostered.

Government and science are hard to control. Bad motives sometimes produce good results, and the result is even more true. Snyder, an earnest man and therefore an anachronism in the '80s, has a moral to make -- that the handing down of knowledge and values, from teacher to student, is the most effective method in scientific research.

There is not a single word in "Brainstorming" about Bush I's drug war, but the history from this veteran of the last one condemns the repetition of mistakes that were old a generation ago.

2007 UPDATE: Calls for "realism" about drugs are seldom heard in the 21st century, except from users and Libertarians. The new "realism" demands open-ended, open wallet, endless "treatment," although it is now obvious that treatment for addiction doesn't work, at least not often enough to deserve public funding. Besides, alcohol is still the costliest drug of them all.