Clinical evidence for different narcotic receptors and relevance for the clinician

Analgesics such as morphine are toxic drugs that kill by producing respiratory depression. Further morphine-like drugs produce a high level of physical dependence and are highly reinforcing in some subjects. A systematic search, conducted over the last 50 years, for safer and less addicting analgesic has revealed that opioid analgesics act on different types of opioid receptors (mu, kappa, and sigma), and that they may function as mixed agonist-antagonists or as partial agonists. Thus some mixed agonists function as competitive antagonists at the mu receptor and as partial or strong agonists at the kappa or sigma receptor. When mixed agonists produce the same pharmacologic effects (eg, analgesia) by acting on different receptors, they invoke the principle of receptor dualisms. Drugs that produce agonist (analgesic) effects by acting on the kappa receptors are an order of magnitude safer than the mu agonists and produce a lesser degree of physical dependence than strong mu agonists. Thus safer, less addicting analgesics have been produced that act either as agonist-antagonists or by being partial agonists.