BETWEEN 2000 and 2015 half a million people in America alone died of drug overdoses—mostly of opioids, a class of addictive, generally synthetic painkillers related to morphine. On August 8th Tom Price, the secretary for health and human services in America, raised the possibility of a vaccine to prevent addiction—something he described it as “an incredibly exciting prospect”. Experts have cautioned that such treatments are nowhere near reality. But research is going on. A study published in this week’s Nature, for instance, describes the search for a vaccine against fenethylline—a drug particularly popular in parts of the Middle East.

Fenethylline is a stimulant, rather than a painkiller. It is a combination of two drugs, rather than being a pure substance. One component is amphetamine, itself a well-known stimulant with a large black market. The other is theophylline, which is prescribed for respiratory problems such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Fenethylline was developed in the 1960s, under the trade name of Captagon, to treat hyperactivity in children, though it is no longer used for that purpose. Despite now being illegal in most places, it remains in recreational use. Seizures of it in Arab countries represent a third of all amphetamines seized around the world. In Saudi Arabia, three quarters of those treated for drug problems are addicted to amphetamines, almost all of them in the form of fenethylline.

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