Vaccines pose ethics challenge

The new breed of vaccines raises ethical questions.

What if parents want their children to be inoculated to prevent them from getting fat or starting to smoke?

Should vaccination be forced on pregnant addicts to protect the fetus? Should judges make use of a cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine vaccine a condition for more lenient sentences for convicted drug addicts?

Would the obesity vaccine become the latest diet drug, used over and over by people wanting to lose a few pounds?

"I can envision a well-meaning parent who drives her 13-year-old to the pediatrician's office and says inoculate him against nicotine and cocaine," said Christine Hartel, director of the National Academy of Sciences' Center for Studies of Behavior and Development.

"And since we don't know the long-term effects of repeated injections of a vaccine, that would be a big problem," she said. "I don't think the [Food and Drug Administration] ... would approve these vaccines for that kind of use."

The pressure to vaccinate children against addictions, as they are vaccinated against measles and other infections, is expected to increase if the vaccines prove safe and get better at providing protection, said Laurie Zoloft, director of the center for bioethics, science and society at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

But addiction, she added, is coming to be understood more as a disease than a vice, and those vaccines could be an appropriate way to fight it.

"The reality is we have these addiction problems and they're not going away," said neuroscientist Dr. Margaret Haney, of Columbia University Medical School.

In a preliminary study, Haney found that an experimental cocaine vaccine developed by the United Kingdom's Celtic Pharma reduced the euphoric effect of crack cocaine by 70 percent in heavy users.

In addition, she said, "there's no evidence that they switched to any other drug of abuse. They didn't drink more alcohol and they didn't use more marijuana."

The addicts, who had been spending $200 to $300 a week on cocaine, reduced their drug purchases by 75 percent.

"To have this vaccine as an option other than telling people to 'just say no' has potentially huge public-health consequences," Haney said.