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NIDA's New Leader: From Rejection to Direction

Brian Vastag

JAMA. 2003;290:2647-2652.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

A funny thing happened to Nora Volkow, MD, the new director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), when she first applied for a grant from the agency: she was rejected.

Nora Volkow, MD, shown here in her office at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, divides her time between leading the agency and her own research aimed at understanding drug addiction. (Photo credit: Rhoda Baer)

In 1984, she was finishing her residency in psychiatry at New York University, where she had pioneered brain imaging studies of drug users. "I started to find out cocaine abusers had vascular pathology, sort of small vascular accidents," said Volkow, now 47. "NIDA came back to me and said, ‘there's no evidence that cocaine is toxic.'"

Discouraged, the young Volkow [pronounced VOHL-kov] abandoned further vascular pathology research. Although cocaine was gaining traction as a recreational drug, it had been licensed as . . . [Full Text of this Article]