ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the use of positron emission tomography (PET) to characterize the behavior of cocaine in the living human brain. Although cocaine has been used as a stimulant drug for over 5000 years, the increase in cocaine abuse over the past decade and the medical complications associated with its use have placed an urgency on understanding the mechanisms responsible for its addictive and toxic properties. PET is exquisitely suited to the measurement of the regional concentration and kinetics of an organic compound such as cocaine in a volume element of tissue in the living body providing that a rapid synthetic route can be devised for replacing a carbon atom in the organic molecule with the short-lived isotope of carbon, carbon-11. PET measures annihilation photons resulting from positron emission resulting in a PET image of the distribution of radioactivity. It contains no information on the chemical species giving rise to the image.
