Depending on the sample, you can chop it up at each drum hit, and then use your tools to trim the hit off the beginning, leaving you with the melodic part at the end which can be played in sequence to reconstruct the melody without the drums (at a different tempo obviously). Usually it's not possible to completely remove the 'release' of the drums such as cymbals, large kicks, and heavy snares without sacrificing a good part of the sample you want to keep, but like j-mak said, layering and good decisions make the artifacts barely noticeable. If you want the original tempo, you can use stretching, compositing, cross-fading, douple/triple-tapping, reverse releases, etc. to fill in the parts you trimmed out.