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tathra writes:

MedicalXpress reports on a paper published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology about an antioxidant found to prevent and reverse the habit-forming effects of cocaine.

Cocaine promotes habitual behaviours and these can potentially be reversed with the use of an antioxidant, research at the University of Sydney has shown.

We show that exposure to cocaine speeds up habit learning and, importantly, this effect is not limited to drug use. We also discovered that these drug-induced habits can be prevented by taking an antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine (NAC)

This could lead to new treatments for people with drug addictions (or other bad habits), or to ways to prevent drugs from causing addiction in the first place. Which could be quite useful in medicine, if it could be applied to other habit-forming drugs such as morphine.