The Heroin Vaccine That Could Save ‘Quadrillions’ On Healthcare Costs By All That Is Interesting on July 17, 2015
Money as the Great Equalizer The next step for Janda and his team of researchers is to secure investigational new-drug status from the FDA, which would allow them to conduct human trials. They’ve already received funding from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to the tune of $27.1 million—but that’s not enough to cover the cost of human trials.
And that brings us to a pretty embarrassing point: we live in the richest and most powerful country on earth. Janda and his team have stumbled onto something here that could change life in America in untold ways, and still they struggle with pedestrian concerns like money.
Think about it: without addiction, we’d make fewer arrests; our jails would be emptier; our cops would be less distracted with hunting and imprisoning drug addicts; our courts would be greatly unburdened, and we could turn our attention toward treatment instead of the jail-first-and-ask-questions-later approach we have now. In short: we could stop treating addicts like criminals and treat them instead like human beings with a disease.
Can we even put a price tag on that? According to the Affordable Care Act, the answer is no. As far back as December 2014, it was being reported that provisions in the still-new law would require non-grandfathered health plans to provide services recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Although the ACA is still clearly in its infancy, it seems to have laid the groundwork for more widespread coverage of preventive medicine—including, perhaps, vaccines like Janda’s.
But I can hear you already: Addiction is a choice—not a disease! Sure; it may start as a choice, as many things do, but neither you, nor I, nor anybody else, has a comprehensive understanding of what happens in the brain between that first “taste” of heroin and full-blown addiction. And that makes the management of America’s various addictions a job for scientists—not for cops.
The good news is that, in the world of pharmaceutical and health technology, sometimes all it takes is for one company, or even one person, to say or do something that captures the attention of the world.
In the fight against aggressive robo-calls, for example, all it takes is one frustrated plaintiff. And in the worldwide effort to rid the world of addiction, that one pivotal person may well turn out to be Kim Janda.
At the end of the day, acknowledging a degree of fluidity in the way we respond to national health crises could help us save an incredible amount of money. George Koob, who has been at Janda’s side throughout these vaccine trials probably said it best:
“I am not sure Americans realize that if they treated alcoholism and drug addiction they would save quadrillions of dollars in health care costs.” So if we can’t answer to our hearts, maybe we can at least answer to our wallets.
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