Nora's Blog

This is Archived Content. This content is available for historical purposes only. It may not reflect the current state of science or language from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). View current Director's content on nida.nih.gov

Nora's Blog

Monitoring the Future Results Show Reduced Opioid Misuse but Popularity of Vaping Among Youth

December 14, 2017 | Today the results of the 2017 Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey were released by NIDA-funded researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and overall the news is encouraging.

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NIDA’S Avant-Garde Award Competition Continues to Foster Transformative HIV/AIDS Research

December 1, 2017 | NIH-funded science continues to make great strides in the fight against HIV. To foster such research, 10 years ago NIDA created its Avant-Garde Award competition to fund bold projects that...

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Mobilizing Citizen Science to Address the Overdose Epidemic

November 16, 2017 | Social media and crowdsourcing apps could be particularly useful for gathering and sharing information in real time about overdoses and using that information to prevent overdose deaths, thereby translating "citizen...

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Addressing the Opioid Crisis Means Confronting Socioeconomic Disparities

October 25, 2017 | When we speak of addiction as a chronic disorder of the brain, it thus includes an understanding that some individuals are more susceptible to drug use and addiction than others.

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New Medication Formulations Could Quickly Make a Difference for Treating Opioid Addiction

August 22, 2017 | As Francis Collins and I wrote in May, NIH and NIDA are committed to an"all scientific hands on deck" effort to end the opioid crisis in America by halving the...

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The Concerning Link Between Inadequate Sleep and Adolescent Substance Use

July 10, 2017 | Researchers have found striking links between insufficient sleep and a range of adverse outcomes in adolescents, including obesity, poor school performance, and behavioral problems including substance use.

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“All Scientific Hands on Deck” to End the Opioid Crisis

May 31, 2017 | In 2015, two million people had a prescription opioid use disorder and 591,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder; prescription drug misuse alone cost the nation $78.5 billion in healthcare...

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Smoking Cessation May Improve Behavioral Health Conditions (CRAN Blog)

May 10, 2017 | Cigarette smoking remains the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in the United States, responsible for over 480,000 deaths a year. Even though smoking has been decreasing overall...

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Opioid Use Disorders and Suicide: A Hidden Tragedy (Guest Blog)

April 20, 2017 | In 2015, over 33,000 Americans died from opioids—either prescription drugs or heroin or, in many cases, more powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Hidden behind the terrible epidemic of opioid overdose...

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Addressing America’s Fentanyl Crisis

April 6, 2017 | Every day, 91* Americans fatally overdose on an opioid drug. It may be a prescription analgesic or heroin—4-8 percent of people who misuse painkillers transition to heroin—but increasingly it is...

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NASEM Report Recommends Removing Barriers to Cannabis Research

February 28, 2017 | The new report is based on reviews of research on both the cannabis plant itself and its constituents, but its conclusions are substantially similar to the 1999 report: While cannabis...

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Improving Access to Substance Use Disorder Treatment in Baltimore City (Guest Blog)

February 13, 2017 | Tackling the opioid crisis and overdose epidemic in our nation is a task that involves partnerships among stakeholders at all levels: federal, state, and local governments and other organizations and...

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Taking Stock of NIDA’s Achievements and Looking to the Future

January 19, 2017 | The need for better substance use disorder treatments, better diagnostic methods, and better prevention strategies has never been greater. The beginning of a new year gives us an opportunity to...

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As Some States Implement New Marijuana Laws, Science Should Guide Public Health Policy

December 8, 2016 | After the election on November 8, marijuana is now or will soon be legal for adult recreational use in eight states plus the District of Columbia. Careful thought should be...

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Syringe-Exchange Programs Are Part of Effective HIV Prevention

December 1, 2016 | One of the best available strategies for reducing the spread of HIV among drug users is syringe-exchange programs (also called syringe service programs); their effectiveness has been proven through abundant...

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The Surgeon General’s Report: Facing Addiction in America

November 16, 2016 | Today marks, I hope, another turning point in our country's health, as Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General's Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health...

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Rethinking How We Talk About Addiction

October 27, 2016 | People with substance use disorders and other mental health issues face greater stigma than those with other illnesses. Many of the addiction-related terms widely used in our society—even in the...

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Medical Marijuana Might Not Be a Safe Nausea Solution for Pregnant Women

September 20, 2016 | Medical marijuana is becoming more widely accepted and it is being used for a wide range of conditions. Scientific evidence of its effectiveness for most indications is still slim or...

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Participant Recruitment Now Underway for Landmark Study on Adolescents

September 13, 2016 | The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which has been in the planning phase for just under a year, is now recruiting more than 10,000 9- and 10-year-olds at 19...

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Responsibly and Sensitively Addressing Chronic Pain Amid an Opioid Crisis

September 2, 2016 | Last week, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, sent a personal letter to more than 2.3 million health care practitioners and public health leaders, seeking their help to address the...

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Psychiatrists Should Take a More Active Role in Treating Pain

June 17, 2016 | The recommendation to move away from opioids as the first line of treating many types of chronic noncancer pain has generated an understandable outcry from some pain patients who fear...

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Probuphine: A Game-Changer in Fighting Opioid Dependence

May 26, 2016 | Medications like buprenorphine and methadone have revolutionized the treatment of people with opioid use disorder, including those with severe disorders (addiction).

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New Regulations on Flavored Tobacco Products and e-Cigarettes Will Protect Public Health

May 5, 2016 | Despite great successes in reducing tobacco use over the past five decades, smoking leads to more than 480,000 deaths in the United States annually and remains the number-one preventable cause...

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The CDC Provides Crucial New Guidance on Opioids and Pain

April 6, 2016 | Although these medications have a legitimate and important role in the treatment of severe acute pain and some severe chronic pain conditions, it is clear that they are also overprescribed...

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A Major Step Forward for Addiction Medicine

March 31, 2016 | A major milestone was reached on March 14, 2016, when the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) formally announced recognition of the field of Addiction Medicine as a medical subspecialty.

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Intervening Early to Prevent Substance Use Disorders

March 9, 2016 | The brain is an organ that adapts in both short- and long-term ways to its environment, and prevention science over the past few decades has shown clearly that a person's...

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NIDA's 2016-2020 Strategic Plan

February 2, 2016 | Over the last four decades, NIDA-supported research has revolutionized our understanding of drug use and addiction, driving a new understanding of the neurobiological, genetic, epigenetic, social, and environmental factors that...

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Saving a “Lost Generation”: The Need to Prevent Drug and Alcohol Abuse in Midlife

January 28, 2016 | By Dr. Nora Volkow (NIDA) and Dr. George Koob (NIAAA)- We have long expected to see increasing substance use in middle and later life with the aging of baby boomers—...

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Listening to the Dead

January 19, 2016 | Guest blog by Bill Williams - a reminder of the devastating and incomprehensible experiences faced by families who are fighting the disease of addiction.

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Encouraging News from Monitoring the Future

December 16, 2015 | Revealing the results of the annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey of drug use and attitudes among American middle- and high-school students is an annual mid-December ritual at NIDA. This...

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A Personal Story of Despair and Hope, and the Origin of the Jacob P. Waletzky Award

December 2, 2015 | A guest blog by Jeremy Waletzky, M.D. Every year since 2003, NIDA has honored a young career scientist with the Society for Neuroscience Jacob P. Waletzky Memorial Award for Innovative...

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NARCAN Nasal Spray: Life-Saving Science at NIDA

November 18, 2015 | The FDA announced its approval of the NARCAN Nasal Spray, an intranasal naloxone formula that can immediately restore normal breathing in a person overdosing on prescription opioids or heroin and...

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New Study Shows Benefits of Reducing Nicotine in Cigarettes

November 5, 2015 | Can the addictiveness of cigarettes be minimized by reducing their nicotine content? This idea was first proposed as a public health measure two decades ago, but when the Food and...

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Grant Awards Mark the Launch of Landmark Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

September 25, 2015 | The teen years are the period of highest risk for substance use and for the development of other behavioral disorders, and they are also a period when the brain is...

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Addiction Science Can Help Us Understand the Bee Crisis

September 1, 2015 | Recent research now suggests that bees may be preferentially drawn to foods laced with pesticides as a result of reward mechanisms. It is a fascinating lesson in how knowledge gleaned...

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Researching Marijuana for Therapeutic Purposes: The Potential Promise of Cannabidiol (CBD)

July 20, 2015 | Three weeks ago I had the opportunity to testify before the Senate on cannabidiol, or CBD—one of the main active ingredients in the marijuana plant, and a compound around which...

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The Importance of Integrating HIV and Addiction Treatment

July 17, 2015 | Great progress has been made in reducing the number of new HIV infections and transforming the disease into a manageable and livable condition, but we still have some way to...

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Seeking Input from the Community on NIDA’s Scientific Reorganization

June 12, 2015 | "Advisory Council periodically reviews the various programs and Divisions within the Institute to ensure they best reflect NIDA" capacities and mission. At our May 2015 Council meeting, an Advisory Council...

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Addiction Is a Disease of Free Will

June 12, 2015 | When I was five or six years old, my grandfather—my mother's father—died of what I was always told was complications of heart disease. It was not until much later that...

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The Major HIV Outbreak in Indiana Was Preventable

May 11, 2015 | One of the fastest-spreading recorded U.S. outbreaks of HIV since the inception of the epidemic is now occurring in southeastern Indiana, and it is being driven by injection drug use—specifically...

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Taking a Science-informed Approach to Medical Marijuana

April 28, 2015 | Opinion on marijuana has changed dramatically in the United States. The public increasingly perceives it as a benign substance, and there is growing interest in its potential medicinal uses.

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The 2015 Prescription Drug Abuse Summit

April 17, 2015 | This event, which is the brainchild of Kentucky Congressman and House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, has grown in attendance each year, successfully shining a light on this terrible public health...

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HHS Announces Actions to Attack the Opioid Abuse Crisis

March 26, 2015 | Deaths from opioid painkillers now exceed all other drug overdose deaths, and we are seeing increases in heroin use and increased deaths from heroin as people addicted to painkillers transition...

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Knowns and Unknowns about e-Cigarettes and Teens

February 3, 2015 | When asked in early 2014, 17.1 percent of high school seniors and 16.2 percent of 10th graders reported using e-cigarettes in the previous month. We are still wrestling with whether...

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Brain in Progress: Why Teens Can’t Always Resist Temptation

January 27, 2015 | The changes in the brain common to obesity and drug addiction are especially pertinent to the struggles teens face to resist drugs, because adolescence is a crucial period both of...

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Good News from Monitoring the Future 2014

December 16, 2014 | At the end of a year that has seen further tragic deaths from addiction and new designer drugs that put young people at risk, today's results from the 2014 Monitoring...

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Reproducibility Issues May Be Science’s Growing Pains

November 20, 2014 | I have written before about the reproducibility crisis in the health sciences. High percentages of published findings are failing to be reproduced, and this has prompted NIH Institutes and other...

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Marijuana Advertising and the Power of Conditioning

October 23, 2014 | As social acceptance and public policy around marijuana shift, and especially if legalized recreational use becomes more widespread, we will need to consider the influence and potential regulation of its...

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Opioids and Chronic Pain—A Gap in Our Knowledge

September 25, 2014 | Opioid prescriptions have increased three-fold over the past two decades, and we have seen how this skyrocketing availability of medications has helped create a new drug abusing population, some of...

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Substance Use in American Indian Youth is Worse than We Thought

September 11, 2014 | We have long known that American Indian communities are particularly vulnerable to problems with substance use, which are tied in part to limited socioeconomic opportunity. But because national surveys fail...

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Science Should Guide Marijuana Policy

August 18, 2014 | In a series of recent articles, The New York Times' editors presented a case for repealing the federal ban on marijuana, including the disproportionate impact of current marijuana laws on...

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Seeking Input from the Research Community on the Upcoming Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Substance Use

July 4, 2014 | As we wrote in early May, the time is ripe for a large prospective cohort study that will comprehensively assess the effects of adolescent substance use on the developing brain.

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National HIV Testing Day, June 27, 2014

June 27, 2014 | Almost 1.1 million Americans are currently living with the HIV virus, and nearly a sixth of those don't even know they are infected. That means they aren't getting needed treatment...

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What Can We Do About the Heroin Overdose Epidemic?

June 24, 2014 | A striking new dimension of our nation's ongoing opioid epidemic is the escalating number of deaths from heroin overdose.

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Increasing Diversity in Research

June 10, 2014 | Diversity enriches any workforce, and that is especially true of science. People with different backgrounds and experiences may think in different ways, produce different ideas and insights, and approach scientific...

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National Longitudinal Study of the Neurodevelopmental Consequences of Substance Use

May 16, 2014 | A major new longitudinal study aims to examine the effects of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other drugs on the developing brain.

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National RX Drug Abuse Summit

April 21, 2014 | The Summit brings together people on all sides of the problem, including representatives from government agencies, law enforcement, and the treatment world.

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UNODC Recommends Treating Addiction as Health, Not Legal, Issue

March 27, 2014 | Earlier this month I went to Vienna for the 57th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), part of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). There...

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Naloxone—A Potential Lifesaver

March 4, 2014 | Naloxone can reverse or block the effects of other opioids. It can very quickly restore normal respiration to a person whose breathing has slowed or stopped as a result of...

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Addiction and Free Choice

February 18, 2014 | The recent death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a result of drug addiction has provoked many thoughtful, sympathetic responses in the media, from people in recovery who understand how hard...

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Another Reminder of the Terrible Toll of Addiction

February 5, 2014 | This past weekend Americans were shocked and saddened to learn that one of our greatest actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, had died at age 46 of an apparent heroin overdose. Hoffman's...

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National Drug Facts Week

January 27, 2014 | This week—January 27 through February 2—the fourth annual National Drug Facts Week. Every year since 2010, NIDA has sponsored this observance, during which schools and other community organizations host events...

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Monitoring the Future Reveals Both Encouraging and Discouraging Trends

December 18, 2013 | Every year, the NIDA-supported Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan asks 8th, 10th, and 12th graders across the country about their current and...

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Remembering Nancy Mello, an Addiction Research Visionary

December 10, 2013 | A professor of psychology (neuroscience) at Harvard Medical School and a long-time NIDA grantee, Mello was a pioneer in the study of addiction, having done some of the first laboratory...

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World AIDS Day 2013—Addiction Treatment Supports AIDS Treatment

November 27, 2013 | December 1 is World AIDS Day. At NIDA, we always stress the principle that drug abuse treatment is AIDS prevention, because of the close links that exist between drug abuse...

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Talking to the Dalai Lama about Addiction Science

November 12, 2013 | Recently, I had the privilege of visiting Dharamsala, India, for a dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about addiction science, as part of a five-day conference at his Mind...

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Tobacco-Related Mortality and Mental Illness

November 4, 2013 | Addiction goes hand in hand with other mental illnesses. People with psychiatric conditions smoke at twice to four times the rate of the general population, and they are estimated to...

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Support for Basic Science

September 20, 2013 | In tough fiscal times, scientists from a wide range fields worry that their area of research will be disproportionately hurt. As the Director of NIDA, my job is to ensure...

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Improving Reproducibility and Transparency in Biomedical Research

September 12, 2013 | An alarming phenomenon in science that has come to our attention is the failure of many published results to reproduce.

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National Recovery Month

September 1, 2013 | September is National Recovery Month-an annual recognition of the fact that millions of Americans suffer from addiction and other mental disorders, which can be successfully treated, allowing people to live...

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Anti-retroviral Drug Prophylaxis to Prevent HIV Transmission

August 26, 2013 | Current prevention strategies have reduced the incidence of HIV worldwide, but that decline has slowed in recent years. We need new prevention strategies if we are to realize President Obama's...

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NIDA Prescription Drug CMEs Have Been a Great Success

August 13, 2013 | The epidemic of prescription opioid abuse in this country is linked partly to the dramatic rise in prescriptions for these medicines over the last two decades, as well as the...

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FDA calls for public input on regulating menthol in tobacco products

August 6, 2013 | Menthol is a popular additive in cigarettes, potentially making them more palatable, but its use in these products is currently unregulate

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Preventing HIV/AIDS in Vietnam

July 31, 2013 | In April of this year I visited Vietnam along with Jacques Normand, Director of NIDA’s HIV Research Program, to foster research collaborations between NIDA and Vietnamese scientists on issues of...

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World Hepatitis Day

July 28, 2013 | Today is World Hepatitis Day, an annual event started by the World Hepatitis Alliance in 2008 to raise awareness about hepatitis in order to better prevent its spread and improve...

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