Dr. Nora Volkow is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
NIDA recently sponsored a conference on an innovative concept called "Blending" - bringing laboratory researchers together with community-based counselors and physicians who work with drug addicts.
Q: What was the problem that "Blending" is designed to solve?
A: The problem that blending sought to address was actually a problem that is still prevalent in research on medicine. You can find these scientific advances and they are actually shown to have effectiveness or benefit to treating a condition, but they are not necessarily translated into practice.
We've (created) a forum to bring together scientists and those individuals who are out there in the trenches doing the day in and day out (treatment), to increase the likelihood that there is communication on both sides.
Q: Can you give a specific example where the scientists have provided information and it has been applied in the community?
A: Buprenorphine is a medication that was developed by NIDA for the treatment of heroin addiction. It's an alternative to methodone and it has many advantages over methodone. (It's better than methodone in that it's less potent and has a slower duration of action, which has advantages also when you stop the medication, you do not get that withdrawal because it leaves your body very slowly.)
Now, one of the problems is in the community treatment programs is: there is a rejection of any type of medication because this is a culture that believes you're actually substituting one drug for another one. So you needed to change the culture to actually be able to have buprenorphine succeed.
So (with blending) we had people in the community interacting directly with scientists who then become the spokespersons in these communities about the value of buprenorphine. So now we have buprenorphine being utilized in a wide variety of community treatment programs that in the past had rejected any type of use of medication in the treatment of drug addiction.
Q: What kind of advice would you give to other government agencies about how to communicate the results that are found in the lab relevant to people on the street, literally?
A: Well, the advice is to try to establish a dialogue between the academic centers that are providing these results and the community physicians that are treating the patients. And what we have, at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is that we've generated networks that are based on a strong academic center that is surrounded by community treatment programs.
Q: I imagine it's been a gradual process?
A: Yes. You need to build the trust. Without the trust, these things cannot develop further, and as you know, for almost any endeavor, trust is built with interactions and with time.
Q: So - how do you think it's going now?
A: It's going slowly. Everything in my view goes slowly and the reason why I say that is that I have this sense of urgency. I mean, there is an urgency in really addressing the problem of drug addiction. People are dying from drug addiction. And I guess we all know about it, to a certain extent. I don't think we know to what level people are dying, when you start to get relatives or friends, losing relatives themselves, and you start to recognize that this is not a rare event, your conscience sort of says "we need to stop it." I mean, and I always thought this, when is it that we are going to recognize that this is an urgent problem, as urgent as cancer? As urgent as cancer.
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