The drug is still available today, though not much used for alcoholism except in Denmark, where it’s widely prescribed.
This is not quite true. Disulfiram is currently used in Russia (and other former USSR countries) to treat alcohol addiction. (Random clinic website that offers disulfiram implants for ~$200.)
Also in the 90s disulfiram apparently was used to treat alcohol addiction in a quite questionable form:
Coding (kodirovanie) is a catch-all term for various Russianalternative therapeutic methods used to treat addictions, in which the therapist attempts to scare patients into abstinence from a substance they are addicted to by convincing them that they will be harmed or killed if they use it again.
Thanks. Are you able to determine what the typical daily dose is for implanted disulfiram in Eastern Europe? People who take oral disulfiram typically need something like 0.25g / day to have a significant physiological effect. However, most of the evidence I’ve been able to find (e.g. this paper) suggest that the total amount of disulfiram in implants is around 1g. If that’s dispensed over a year, you’re getting like 1% of the dosage that’s active orally. On top of that, the evidence seems pretty strong that bioavailability from implants is lower than from oral doses, so it’s effectively even less.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping someone implanting 100x as large a dose, and maybe bioavailability can be improved (or isn’t that big a concern). But if not, my impression was that most implants are effectively pure placebo effect.
This is not quite true. Disulfiram is currently used in Russia (and other former USSR countries) to treat alcohol addiction. (Random clinic website that offers disulfiram implants for ~$200.)
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Also in the 90s disulfiram apparently was used to treat alcohol addiction in a quite questionable form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_(therapy)
Thanks. Are you able to determine what the typical daily dose is for implanted disulfiram in Eastern Europe? People who take oral disulfiram typically need something like 0.25g / day to have a significant physiological effect. However, most of the evidence I’ve been able to find (e.g. this paper) suggest that the total amount of disulfiram in implants is around 1g. If that’s dispensed over a year, you’re getting like 1% of the dosage that’s active orally. On top of that, the evidence seems pretty strong that bioavailability from implants is lower than from oral doses, so it’s effectively even less.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping someone implanting 100x as large a dose, and maybe bioavailability can be improved (or isn’t that big a concern). But if not, my impression was that most implants are effectively pure placebo effect.
Yep, the first google result http://xn--80akpciegnlg.xn—p1ai/preparaty-dlya-kodirovaniya/disulfiram-implant/ (in Russian) says that you use an implant with 1-2g of the substance for up to 5-24 months and that “the minimum blood level of disulfiram is 20 ng/ml; ”. This paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64036/ says “Mild effects may occur at blood alcohol concentrations of 5 to 10 mg/100 mL.”