AHS Views

Have you heard of addiction vaccines? I really don’t get the point. They’re for people who are already on drugs and are really motivated to get off them. The vaccines are said to prevent the person from being affected by the drug (they take it and they don’t get high.) The rationale being that if they don’t get high, they won’t want to continue taking the drug. This seems redundant to me. What’s wrong with drug rehab and other forms of addiction help? There are plenty of them out there that work - especially if the person is really motivated, which is a requirement for the vaccine to work.

Experts say that the vaccine itself won’t be enough to handle anyone’s addiction. They’ll still need counselling to help them handle the reasons they want the drugs. Otherwise, they could really just switch to another drug. One for which they have not received a vaccine and does get them high. It really doesn’t matter what drug they take in the end - they want to escape reality, and you can do that with any number of drugs.

Right now there are successful drug addiction help services available. They help the person through withdrawal, rehabilitate them physically through proper nutrition, exercise, and so on, get down to the bottom of the problems they’re having that make them want to take drugs, and work out what it’s going to take for them to resist them in the future.

That’s successful drug rehab. That’s addiction help services that work. If more people would avail themselves of programs that use that kind of line up rather than quick fixes, they could handle their drug problem. We don’t need a vaccine. We don’t need millions of dollars to be spent on more reseearch. We need more people going into programs that offer successful addiction help.