The Impossibility of "Just Say No" | Nora D. Volkow | Big Think

The Impossibility of "Just Say No"

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, separates the drug addicts from drug users.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nora D. Volkow:

Nora D. Volkow, M.D., became Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health in May 2003. NIDA supports most of the world's research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction.

Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age. She has also made important contributions to the neurobiology of obesity, ADHD, and the behavioral changes that occur with aging.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What makes somebody become addicted to a drug?

Nora Volkow: Many surprising findings have come across the studies that have completely destroyed all of the hypotheses that we initiated with. For example, when we first started doing these studies, one of the things that I had postulated, not because it was my great idea, but because a lot of people had been postulating it and in animal models, there was evidence that that could be the case, that people that were addicted because drugs were more rewarding, more pleasurable. And thus, their brain will have a much greater release of dopamine in these limbic areas when they took it. And so, that was the idea. But we did the studies and consistently now in three independent investigations that we've done in our laboratory, and similar findings have been reported by others at Columbia University, we've shown exactly the opposite. Which is fascinating! What we're observing is that in cocaine addicted individuals, and individuals addicted to alcohol, that in these subjects, the ability of drugs to increase dopamine is actually markedly decreased and their subjective experience of the drug is also decreased. But what's fascinating is that this fact, almost in contradiction, in contrast to these decreased responses, when they take the drug, they immediately, it's almost like triggers the desire of more, of more, of more. Like, almost like you open the faucet and there's this intense drive to want more drug and this inability to get satiated.

And I always try to understand when someone is telling me this experiences, have I ever felt that way? And I've never been addicted to anything, but I am a very compulsive person, and I can get into stages, certainly for example, with food, certain foods, I generate, and you eat a chocolate chip cookie and it tastes so good that you immediately know that you want more and you do another bite, and you already in your brain are saying, "I'm going to want more." So when I think about it, this is the closest it gets. Or when you've been incredibly, incredibly thirsty. I actually, I just start to drink water, it seems like you need more and more and more water, right? Eventually, of course, you just get bloated and that's the end of the water. But in the person that's addicted, that's what seems to happen.

So the reward center itself is decreased, but it triggers a response that is abnormal, that you don't see in people that are not addicted. And our imaging studies, of course, we've been trying to understand then, what is driving this different response, even though you have less reward, why are they generating this response? And what we have shown and certainly other investigators have looked at that is, that you've shifted the response to the drug to add stimuli that is associated with the drug and this is done through memory and learning, condition. We all know about conditioning, because Pavlov taught us that if you show a dog, taught him hear a sound when they get meat, and you do that repeatedly and repeatedly and then one day you bring the dog and you just show the sound, that animal will salivate with the sound. There's no meat, they salivate. That's a transfer of the physiological response that initially was triggered by the meat into the sound. And that's what we call conditioning.

Read the full transcript at