Anti-cancer drug may help cocaine addicts

From UCI

Here's just what you wouldn't think of giving someone with a cocaine addiction -- another drug. Even more unexpected is that the pharmaceutical that might help them would be a substance in development to combat cancer. Researchers say that sodium butyrate assists, when injected into mice in experiments, in behavioral therapies often used to treat coke addicts. In what's usually a long and often unsuccesful treatment, addicts learn to disassociate contexts and cues that they have tied in their minds to their drug use; sodium butyrate seems to help measurably with this kind of care. With mice, it broke them swiftly of their patterned desire to head into a chamber where they were given doses of cocaine.

Experiments suggest anti-cancer drug disrupts remembered desire for addictive coke