Some information I dug up.
It doesn't neccessarily answer all my questions, but after some digging, this is what I found;
"I've heard that cocaine with a 4-fluoro on it is about the same but 60 times stronger. It is also uncontrolled in Canada, as in fact are all cocaine analogs...
I have seen the synthesis of the compound before, but I have not found an actual journal about the effects (one site had a name and a date, not further reference to something someone could actually find). So I can't really say if the above is true but it seems to be decently well known on various clandestine chemistry sites. It's just nobody has the reference!
I also saw an analog that had some extremely high potencies for blocking dopamine reuptake, it replaced the normal methyl ester on the cocaine molecule with a plain propyl group (no ester) and a 4-fluoro aromatic ring also directly bonded to the central tropine ring.
It seems that in any case, 4-fluoro rings are always more potent than the plain compounds.
Now, here is a question- wouldn't blocking dopamine re-uptake always make the user feel great? A lot of analogs have very high strengths for causing dopamine levels to shoot through the roof. However, many don't seem to replace cocaine very well, according to the monkeys who get tested all the time. Couldn't it just be that they are not triggering some other receptor involved in cocaine addiction, and that the drugs themselves ARE abusable but simply don't replace cocaine because they aren't mimicking all of it's effects?
It could be that all of these cocaine analogs that don't replace it for addicts might have great possibilities as recreational compounds, it's just no human ever bothered to snort his research project to see how good it was, and when the monkies wanted their crack back they just decided it had no potential as a recreational compound.
On 4-fluorococaine I managed to locate the following paper:
Journal of Neurochemistry Volume 62 Page 1154 (March 1994)
http://rapidshare.de/files/32780562/4-fluorococaine.pdf.html
from page 7:
"There is evidence that inhibition of DA
reuptake by cocaine is responsible for producing euphoria
and its consequent abuse (Ritz et al., 1987).
The PET results with labeled 4'-fluorococaine imply
that para substitution with fluorine does not alter cocaine's
interaction with its binding sites in the brain.
The in vitro competition experiments supported this
implication, because cocaine and 4'-fluorococaine
had similar affinities for the DA reuptake site. They
also exhibited similar affinities for NE reuptake sites.
However, 4'-fluorococaine was about 100 times more
potent than cocaine at the rat brainstem 5-HT reuptake
site labeled with [3H]paroxetine . This observation,
together with the nearly identical striatal kinetics
oflabeled cocaine and 4'-fluorococaine, confirms that
binding to 5-HT reuptake sites is not important in the
striatal uptake of ["C]cocaine. No increased uptake
of labeled 4'-fluorococaine relative to cocaine was
seen in any regions, including the brainstem and frontal
cortex . Presumably, the small size of the baboon
raphe nuclei (1-2 mm) precluded visualization in a
tomograph with spatial resolution limited to 6 mm.
Frontal cortex contains 5-HT reuptake sites, but their
concentration is lower than that of DA reuptake sites
in the striatum . The affinity of 4'-fluorococaine for
5-HT reuptake sites may be too low, or the dissociation
rate constant too rapid, for visualization of frontal
cortex 5-HT reuptake sites against the background
of nonspecifically bound radiotracer. Our ICSO value
of 7.5 nM (Table 3) corresponds (Cheng and Prusofh
1973) to a K; for 4'-fluorococaine for the 5-HT transporter
of 0.3 nM assuming a KD of20 pM for paroxetine
(Ritz et al., 1990). Tritiated paroxetine does preferentially
label in vivo brain regions relatively rich in
5-HT transporters (Scheffel and Hartig, 1989), perhaps
because its affinity is 15-fold higher than that of
4'-fluorococaine . It also binds to nonserotonergic
sites, however (Biegon and Mathis, 1993)."
(My apologies for the Rosco Bodine-quality of formatting)
In my point of view these tropacocaine analogs seem interesting curiosities. Although not as potent as cocaine, they are (relatively) easier synthesised than cocaine analogs and they are legal here in the Carolingian Empire (cocaine analogs too).
Studies with differentially labeled [11C]cocaine,[11C]norcocaine,[11C]benzoylecgonine, and [11C]- and 4'-[18F]fluorococaine to probe the extent to which [11C]cocaine metabolites contribute to PET images of the baboon brain.
[My paper] S J Gatley, D W Yu, J S Fowler, R R MacGregor, D J Schlyer, S L Dewey, A P Wolf, T Martin, C E Shea, N D Volkow Department of Chemistry, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973. The psychostimulant drug of abuse, cocaine (benzoylecgonine methyl ester), is rapidly metabolized by cleavage of its two ester groups, to give benzoylecgonine (BE) and ecgonine methyl ester, and by N-demethylation, to give N-norcocaine (NC). The recent use of [N-methyl-11CH3]cocaine to image brain cocaine binding sites with positron emission tomography (PET) raises the question of whether PET images partially reflect the distribution and kinetics of labeled cocaine metabolites. We prepared [O-methyl-11CH3]cocaine by methylation of the sodium salt of BE with [11C]CH3I, and showed that PET baboon brain scans, as well as regional brain kinetics and plasma time-activity curves corrected for the presence of labeled metabolites, are nearly identical to those seen with [N-methyl-11CH3]cocaine. This strongly suggests that 11C metabolites do not significantly affect PET images, because the metabolite pattern is different for the two labeled forms of cocaine. In particular, nearly half the 11C in blood plasma at 30 min was [11C]CO2 when [N-methyl-11CH3]cocaine was administered, whereas [11C]CO2 was not formed from [O-methyl-11CH3]cocaine. Only a trace of [11C]NC was detected in plasma after [O-methyl-11CH3]cocaine administration. Nearly identical brain PET data were also obtained when 4'-[N-methyl-11CH3]fluorococaine and 4'-[18F]fluorococaine (prepared by nucleophilic aromatic substitution from [18F]fluoride- and 4'-nitrococaine) were compared with [N-methyl-11CH3]cocaine. In vitro assays with rat brain membranes showed that cocaine and 4'-fluorococaine were equipotent at the dopamine reuptake site, but that 4'-fluorococaine was about 100 times more potent at the 5-hydroxytryptamine reuptake site.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS) "