❄️ Can listening to music make you a drug addict?

Cocaine epidemiology & music

Hello and welcome to Careviser: years of research summarized in a weekly 5-minute email for you to be at the vanguard of healthcare.

🗝️ While we have been talking about whether Instagram is bad for teenagers’ mental health, there are other (bad) influences young people are exposed to. Pop culture could be one of them. 

Hswen, Y., Zhang, A. & Brownstein, J.S, Estimating the incidence of cocaine use and mortality with music lyrics about cocaine. npj Digit. Med. 4, 100 (2021)

• 🔎 The study: Deaths due to cocaine have been multiplied by 2 between 2012 and 2017, while 57% more people have tried it for the first time in the US. The authors explored whether music lyrics about cocaine have influenced cocaine use. Cocaine's main specificity is that it is almost always consumed in social settings to signal high social status. So its coverage in pop culture can increase its appeal.  

One study reported that one in three top-charting songs portrays drug use. Given how many hours the average American spends listening to music, they are potentially exposed to over 50 references to drugs a day.  

• ✅ Findings: The authors analyzed 6,523 unique mentions of cocaine from 5,955 songs. Between 2000 and 2010, cocaine mentions were stable before they sharply increased (almost x2) until 2017. 

  • A 0.01 increase in mentions of cocaine was associated with a 12% increase in incidence of cocaine use in the same year and a 16% increase in mortality by cocaine in 2 years. 

  • Ties between lyrics mentions and mortality could not be replicated for drugs that are less status-based (codeine and heroin)

  • Findings were controlled for cocaine price changes

  • Obviously, these results show an association, but not necessarily causality between the mentions and the cocaine use 

• 🚀 Opportunities ahead: Keeping track of the change in cocaine mentions in music lyrics could be an early indicator of cocaine epidemiology. The type of mentions (from the neutral term “coke” to slang) also show that cocaine is becoming a mainstream drug that is also used in low to medium-income areas. 

I could not identify promising early-stage biotech companies working on cocaine addiction therapeutics. 

So I’d like to introduce a twelve-year-old public biotech: Opiant. The path of their development was initially impressive: in 3 years they got the first nasal naloxone spray approved by the FDA. Injectable naloxone had been approved for opioid overdose for decades. It was not a user-friendly way to treat a patient on the spot during an overdose. So their nasal spray formulation was welcomed by first responders. It can also be used by friends or family without prior training. They have commercialized it with emergent and receive royalties of 6 to 12% of Net Sales. 

Their current pipeline includes:

• A more potent nasal spray for opioid overdose -phase II

• A nasal spray for alcohol use disorder that patients could use when they feel a craving - phase II

• An injectable formulation of an antagonist for acute cannabinoid overdose (licensed from Sanofi) - phase I

• A heroin vaccine that would block both its pleasurable and harmful effects - developed with public institutions - phase I  

That’s a wrap for today! Don’t hesitate to reply to this email with comments, I read and answer all emails :)

Marie