Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 14, 1995                   TAG: 9503140145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BALTIMORE                                 LENGTH: Medium

CURING COCAINE ADDICTS

Heroin users and alcoholics have long had substitutes to ease them off their addiction. Cocaine users have only had willpower.

Now doctors at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Johns Hopkins Medical Center say they know how to block cocaine's effects.

``It's not hypothetical that someday this might happen,'' Dr. Solomon Snyder, Johns Hopkins' director of neuroscience, said Monday. ``It's a very straightforward drug-development task from this point.''

The findings were presented at the Winter Conference on Brain Research in Steamboat Springs, Colo., in January and are being submitted to the journal Science.

``The single biggest need in this country's battle against drug abuse and addiction is a treatment for cocaine,'' NIDA Director Alan Leshner said. ``This is our best shot at the moment.''

A Baltimore-based company, Guilford Pharmaceuticals, of which Snyder is a founder, has begun developing the drug, which is expected within a few months to two years, according to George Uhl, acting director of NIDA's research facility in Baltimore.

Researchers have long known that cocaine attaches to a protein in the brain called a dopamine transporter. If the researchers are right, they've discovered how to stop cocaine from binding with the protein without affecting the protein's other functions. That's important because the protein does important work: sending messages from one nerve cell to another.

Once a drug is approved, Snyder said, it could be given to addicts as infrequently as once a month, robbing them of the effects of cocaine should they suffer a relapse. A second possibility is a drug comparable to methadone, a heroin substitute, that would offer some of the high while weaning the addict off cocaine.

With an estimated 2.1 million chronic cocaine users, according to a 1993 White House report, the market for the drug is potentially enormous.

Some critics, however, warned of a problem: Changing drugs isn't the same as quitting drugs.

``With methadone, people stay on methadone,'' said Alex Abraham, operations director at Father Martin's Ashley, a Havre de Grace, Md., drug and alcohol treatment center. ``In our philosophy, that's still a dependence and an addiction.''