YouSaid · the spoken record

Nora Volkow

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-05-25
most recent: 2023-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Also, may be given an opportunity or not to access treatment and two, how they respond to treatment. So as you were speaking, for example, with psychedelic drugs, we are very concerned that if a psychedelic therapist, if they get into mainstay clinical practice, if they are proven to be useful, that they are equitable and it doesn't end up with like many of the very fancy treatments that we have now that are only accessible to a very few. So that's the only other thing that I would want to say.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very difficult to stay at, it's very painful. And the other point that I did want to bring to that we haven't discussed, which is in understanding how we understand the effects of drugs and addiction and how we understand also mental illness is how important the environmental factors are and how crucial they are, particularly where when you are a child or an adolescent, I think that we've all become much more sensitized to them with a COVID pandemic because we came to realize that there are certain people that were at much greater disadvantage and that's those that deal with people that are in circumstances of economic inequality, of trauma during childhood. And what we call the social determinants of health that are really playing very important roles in people's encounter with drugs and how they respond to it and how they ultimately”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there are two things that I would have liked to add. One of them is that addiction is very frequently comorbid with other psychiatric disorders. And most notable is anxiety, depression, suicidality. And I bring it up because you need to address these comorbid conditions because otherwise it's not going to be possible for the person to be able to recover. And also from the perspective that if you are depressed, if you are anxious, if you are suicidal, you are likely to take drugs as a means to auto-medicate, to escape that mental state. And it is crucial to send this message because it's not as simple as saying that you take drugs because you want to get high and you're taking the drugs. I mean, people are taking the drugs too many times. Initially, yes, for curiosity or many times to feel good. But once you become addicted, it is really to escape a mental state.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That in three of the four individuals that they've treated on that pilot study, they were able to, again, very dramatically reduce anxiety and they decrease the consumption of opioids. So it showed a positive effect in three or four. They basically told me these effects that we're getting with a low intensity ultrasound that they've tested eight people are as dramatic or more dramatic than what we're seeing with the deep brain stimulation of the nucleosoccums. So they target also the nucleos of convents with low intensity ultrasound. So it's very intriguing. You know, I'm a scientist and I love and I get excited with data, but I do want to reiterate it's very pilot. It's very, very pilot, but it has to be studied. It's like what we were saying with a psychedelic drugs. It's very interesting. It has to be studied.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the consistent findings that they are seeing is that they see a reduction in anxiety. They see a reduction in craving. It's pilot work. I want to reiterate that. It needs to be replicated. But, you know, when I saw that pilot date, I said, oh my God. And it was the group that was Virginia who has been doing the deep brain stimulation for the treatment of opioid addiction. And they inserted this.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the high intensity ultrasound and the high intensity ultrasounds becomes ablative. So, you are targeting, for example, the subtalamic nuclei, just like you do with surgery. But in this case, you are not opening it up, and you can very precisely damage it. So, this brings psychosurgery to a completely new level. And so they applied it and they're also, I think that one of the targets is a subtylamic nuclei. But I also think that they've targeted parts of a very small nuclei in the thalamus too. So it's fascinating also from that perspective of in instances where psychosurgery may be valuable, that you can do it as minimally invasive and as precisely and as small an area as possible. So I think it's quite remarkable.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we know that when people have strokes in certain areas of the brain, particularly frequently involving the insula, there are cases where people just stop taking the drug. They forget about taking the drug. They don't care anymore about it. So there's been instances which have shown that the insult, a stroke, in a particular area, cured the person of their addiction. So what about if we gain that knowledge about what are the relevant circuits and areas? And we have the tools now to manipulate them in ways that are much more effective than we had in the past, that opens up the possibility of in the future that we may be able to cure addiction.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, The pile of data is there. It's pile of data. That's why I say now that you're speaking to me and last time we spoke, I'm very excited of TMS. I'm not in any way going to minimize it. But actually, what I like so much, and I'm just going to say, you push the limit. And I said, let's push our own thinking. If you are able to do this long-lasting effect through this, as you learn to understand better how these frequencies for ultrasound stimulation affect the tissue, I think that one day we may be able to cure addiction. And no one has ever heard me speak about cure addiction. So why do I think it is possible?”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's super interesting. It's fascinating. And you need to apply it for 10 minutes. And the pile of data is showing that you see it for, say, the effects at two weeks or four weeks with a single stimulation.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The high-intensity, but the researchers are looking at low intensity for neurological diseases and for addiction and other mental illness. And the beauty is that sound goes through the tissue. So you can target your nucleus accumbents directly with a much greater precision than with transcranial magnetic stimulation.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outside of the brain. If you just use high intensity, you can very specifically create an ablation. So you can do what you could do with surgery, but very precisely without having to open the hair. But that's high intensity. The beauty of the low intensity is you do not produce damage to the tissue, but you can modify it for a long time. So they are doing research right now, and the high intensity ultrasound was recently approved for Parkinson disease, and they are now doing this.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what they use it, and it's a technology that's a proof for the treatment of depression. Deprain stimulation then basically is an invasive procedure. You put the electrodes inside the brain. It's being used, for example, for treatment of addiction, research. It's being used for research, also treatment of depression and other diseases. And the nucleus occumbents is one of the main targets both for depression as well as for addiction. But there are other neuromodulation technologies, so transcranial magnetic, the other one is direct electrical current stimulation, which instead of giving magnetic signals from the outside to give electrical pulses. But the one that I am very intrigued and I want to actually introduce you to it, if you haven't heard about it, is low intensity ultrasound. So it uses ultrasound and if you can use it with high intensity or low intensity and you apply it on the”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TMS goes for transcranial magnetic stimulation and is a technology that is not invasive. You actually administer magnetic currents in the scalp and then these magnetic currents actually go into the cortex of the brain and they are signal transferred as electrical signals. And it can be used to modulate either at high frequencies, to stimulate or sort of lower frequencies to inhibit the areas that you are targeting. And by understanding how in the cortex, because the brain is a very complicated network. And so it links with almost everything.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are incredibly interested, and I'm going to introduce you to a new technology that has my brain even more excited than TMS.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I look at it in terms of what has been done. Again, this is all of these areas are under investigated, but I'm going to check it out because I want to see if anyone has published anything on silocybin for chronic pain. So I was jumping into the classical psychedelics, which have very different mechanism of actions than ketamine. And I think ketamine was that drug that led us open up the doors to say, here we have a drug that nobody that is a dissociative type of drug, that it's also a drug that can produce addiction, a psychedelic classical psychedelics don't. And yet, despite everybody's prejudices show to be beneficial for treatment of depression. So I think that that is an example about why we cannot just close our eyes and say no. And we need to look at this classical psychedelics. So I would like, you made me now curious about it.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't thinking of ketamine because I wasn't thinking, I mean, ketamine is not considered, as you know, a classical psychedelic drug, but there is a lot of work on research ongoing for the value of ketamine for the treatment of chronic pain.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You feel it just like in the addicted person, the memory of the pleasure leads you to continue wanting it. So it's not just that I think it could be beneficial for different types of drugs, but I do think there's value in actually even considering the extent to which if they are shown to be able to modify neuroplasticity, treatments for these chronic pain conditions, which are devastating and for which we really don't have anything. I mean, not that I know that there's much research into it, but I'm just telling you where my brain is jumping into.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be very intrigued in that notion is if we were to understand the mechanism and the common mechanism across all of the addictions is that you create long-term potentiation in regards to circuits. So you are strengthening the signaling on systems that basically are associating the drug with pleasure and reward. And you are weakening the signaling that's associating pleasure and reinforcement for other stimuli and require. So just a strengthening process and a weakening processing. And you generate it in such a way that you've created an artificial need for that drug, just like you have a need for food. Now you have an artificial need for that drug. And I'm very much intrigued about the similarities with pain. When you have pain where the insult is no longer there, but the memory of that pain continues making...”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been studying as a researcher multiple addictions, I mean cocaine. Because they all share as a common phenomenological presentation that compulsiveness of the behavior and the loss of self-regulation. So you cannot stop it and you just basically escalate on that behavior. So I've been intrigued about recognizing the common elements in the brain. And then, of course, studying also their uniqueness. But the neurocircuitry is basically very similar. What is different is the way that you engage it. So to me, in and of itself, it's not surprising that you have a therapeutic that is going to be valuable for multiple addictions. And we're funding other type of research with other molecules with the aim of basically targeting just a medication for addiction in general so that we could also start to address the problem of polysubstance addictions that we have without having to just go specific. So it doesn't per se surprise me.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly separate them. To me, if it can be corroborating that there is this neuroplasticity and we learn to use it properly, then imagine how extraordinary it is to be able to generate a window in time whereby exposing you to a stimuli under the effect of psychedelic drug if it in fact turns to be the case, you could strengthen a particular memory. And that would allow you to actually cover a memory that may be very painful. So you are competing one memory against the other. So I think that this is to me one of the most fascinating areas about why I think that these psychedelic drugs deserve attention for research. Because to have a means to monitor, to accelerate learning and memory process, this neuroplasticity, long-term potentiation phenomena that we've been studying in neuroscience, could be a very powerful.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, and there's been actually papers that have done that that actually have looked at the association between the intensity of the subjective experience and their therapeutic benefits and then have shown that those that have the more intense mystical experience had the better therapeutic response. But that element of meaning and understanding is basically not in any way exclusionary with that of neuroplasticity because it may be that in fact that that experience that you have there while you are leaving it under the effect of the hallucinogenic drug may generate a longer lasting memory because of those neuroplastic effects. And again highlighting why that combination of the drug itself with a psychotherapeutic intervention becomes crucial. So you cannot”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other psychedelic drugs, for example, that may have the same pharmacological target but they don't produce hallucinatory experiences, which would make it much easier to actually implement. So we are interested on a whole gamut of research that could help advance our understanding of the potential of psychoedelectrox for therapeutics.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you are looking at, we have these brain networks that interact with one another. And what they showed was that that architecture of network was significantly disrupted during the hallucination stage when the drug was on board. And so if you can do research that can identify biomarkers of the effects of the psychedelic drug, that's one area that were interesting, but also through those studies, can you understand the mechanisms that are responsible for the therapeutic benefits? So by looking at how the brain changes its operations, and then you can determine if that is associated with therapeutic benefit, you can start to understand mechanisms of actions of psychedelic drugs. We're also funding researchers to develop, we know what the psychedelic drugs that we currently have, but with chemistry, you can create”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grant the two, which is important, is that we help them in terms of the interactions with the FDA. Because the FDA at the end of the day is the one that's going to be able to say, what data do they need in order to be able to consider that a clinical trial is done in a way that they make it feel comfortable to approve an indication for a psychedelic drug or not? So it is crucial that they work with it from the beginning as they are planning to do their clinical trial that they engage with the FDA and we absolutely help them. I mean, we try to provide them support if the FDA, for example, wants them to do toxicology X or Toxicology Y or look at the biodistribution, there are certain things that we can through our contracts help them obtain. And we are specifically requesting this, and I'm speaking right now of... Clinical trials.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no simple solutions of how difficult it is to control for a placebo, but it is an important one. So one of the recommendations is to use a very low dose of the psychedelic drug. So you are giving them the psychedelic drug, but a dose that is considered to be sub-therapelic. And that's what some of the researchers are doing right now. And to follow all of that guidelines and practices, if you're going to be doing a randomized clinical trial, which are the ones that you basically divide participants some get the active intervention, others do not, and you randomize it. And you follow them. And that's the way that you actually collect data that then allows you to determine if there is a difference or not. But I think that the grantees that are coming up with proposals are know this. I mean, how to propose one of the randomized clinical trials, one of the things that we work with”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it is therapeutic. That's one of the hypotheses. So, how you should be administering, how do psychotherapists get involved? And all of these are scientific questions that we need to basically explore with research because we don't have the data there that is needed to build up. And if we don't build up and people start to use it and they start to have negative effects like suicides, then that can lead to actually the jeopardizing the future use of these medications. The FDA may say this is too dangerous or the DEA may say this is too dangerous. We are not going to agree to its utilization. And that is where the danger comes around of pushing something to preliminary.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out there, and my concern is that, and you already see it, you go into the web, and there's a lot of sites advertisement treatments with psychedelic drugs, not just for mental illnesses, but for also for well-being, when the data is not there. And so we don't know, first of all, we need to replicate, but assume that you replicate and it does work, what are the doses, how to give it, what are potential negative side effects. I mean, what clinical trials have reported is in a small number of people, there is a risk of suicidal behaviors. And suicidality. So who is at risk to show that? How do you actually, if you start to see it, how can you prevent it? How should you administer that psychedelic drug? It is believed that the psychedelic drug is adjunctive therapy, that it is the interaction with a therapist while you're under the influence of the psychology.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what's intriguing, and speaking about it in terms of the nicotine, is that the effects actually appear to be larger than the ones that you see with medications that we use for the treatment of nicotine dependence, just like shantics or nicotine replacement therapies. So the number of people that stop smoking is actually significantly greater than that, that is the percentage that stops smoking with medications that have been approved by the FDA. But study number one, only one study, and the sample sizes are small. So that's why we're funding the researchers. This is a group at John Hopkins University to actually replicate that study. So the data is quite interesting, but it is very preliminary. And I do want to emphasize this because sort of people like to make conclusions before the evidence.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Illness and improve their depression scores, and that was quite significant. There's also data showing potential for PTSD and the use of psychoelectric drugs. So these may be the two disease conditions for which there's more data. The clinical trials are limited in sample sizes and in numbers, but the effect sizes are significant, despite the small sample sizes. There are some studies that have been done in substance use disorder. Nicotine is one of them. Alcohol use disorders, alcoholism is another one. And again, both of them are on psilocybin, and for both of them, there is”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a very interesting potential promising area of therapeutics. The way that I see it is the evidence that exists is very limited but is sufficiently intriguing that you cannot ignore it and behooves you in terms of why we are identifying this as a priority area of research in the whole issue of psychotherapeutics of the use of psychedelic drugs. The data is strongest for the use of psilocyving for depression. Studies have shown and I think that even though the sample sizes are not very large, they have consistently shown improved the outcomes on patients with terminal illnesses. Most of them I think if I recall correctly were with cancer in whom the psylocybin allowed them to accept better emotionally the fact that this was a terminal.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into the rock taking and escalating their drock taking. So you are exacerbating the nature of the problem by putting them in jail and prison. So it doesn't work no matter what you do. And that's why the whole notion of criminalizing the person that takes drugs is basically very negative vis- ⁇-vis the outcomes of the person and also in no way that benefits society. It is actually very costly by itself. When an issue becomes politicized, then it becomes much harder to change and shift. I think that we've seen over the past, I would say, Certainly five or eight years, an openness to recognizing that the war on drugs did not work and that criminalizing drug users is basically a negative and it's promoting structural racism.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did it horribly with crack cocaine. So if you were smoking crack cocaine, it was like, I don't recall exactly, but it was at least 10 times greater penalty that if you were just norting cocaine, snorting cocaine or injecting cocaine hydrochloride was much more favored by white people, whereas crack was favored by black people. Cocaine hydrochloride white crack cocaine black. Why do you see such a difference in it is the same cocaine? Basically, it's cocaine is cocaine. And yet one called noted a much higher penalty than the other. That's an example of the consequences. But what science has shown is that when you do throw people into jail or prisons that have a problem with substance use disorders, then when they leave, they are at much greater risk of, first of all, relapsing in immediately.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was it created a mechanism that could perpetuate structural racism? It is very tragic to see how its enforcement led to the incarceration of young black Americans. And again, that punitive system where someone could be stopped and this will happen if you are black on the notion that you had drugs which you and thrown in jail or prison because you had drugs on you, it's such an unfair system and it didn't work in any way because it did not reduce the amount of drugs that people were taking or the negative consequences to our society. So it did not work. And I think one of the aspects that it did show is if you do throw a person that's taking drugs in jail, if you criminalize that person that's using drugs, like for example,”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer it, but I guess actually that story that you just told of your friend, that how he by taking fentanyl unbeknowing what it was, it just killed him. And this is what we are observing a lot. And I think it's important to educate people that this is a seriously dangerous drug. And unfortunately, I think that we have cried Wolf so many, many times that we've lost credibility. If there was a way that we could convey that in very objective, we don't need to exaggerate in any way. I mean, fentanyl, it's two milligrams will kill you. And the counterfeit peels contain five milligrams, some of them, two doses to kill you. So it is very, very tragic. But coming back to your question in terms of the war on drugs, I think that what it did.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In veterinary medicine, silacine. And that actually silacine does not respond to Narcane, which is the antidote that we use for fentanyl. So this shifting nature of the drugs that people are exposed to, the fact that they are increasingly more potent, and the fact that they are basically disguised in many ways is expanding the number of people that are now overdosing and in some instances we don't have good strategies that we can use to help them to revert those overdoses.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These guys as Vicodine, which is an opioid medication for pain, they go and buy it on the web and they are less expensive than the real thing. So it's not just that people that are addicted to opioids can overdose. Now those that are taking cocaine can overdose those that can take methamphetamine can overdose. And students that may buy appeal in order to study for an exam may overdose and die because the pill they got had fentanyl or a person cannot get their physicians to prescribe them as sleep medicine. They go and buy it on the web and they overdose. So this is the nature of the major challenges that we have. And we're seeing more and more new substances emerging, which is like, again, running in a treadmill because we develop antidotes for the overdoses from fentanyl, but now they are mixing fentanyl with anesthetic that is used.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You synthesize it and in the synthesis is very simple and because it's so potent you need 50 times less volume of drugs so you can bring it through the borders much more easily than with heroin or any other drug that we know of and so it has both pharmacological effects that make it dangerous but also the production makes it actually very enticing for the drug dealers so they are incentivized to distribute it and that's what we've seen accelerated during the COVID pandemic basically fentanyl permeated all of the country everywhere and so they started to also mix it with other drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine and now more recently with counterfeit peels that are sold like adderal which is an amphetamine or like activan which is a benzodiazepine that you use for anxiety or sleep or even”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The introduction of fentanyl. Fentanyl, we all been hearing about it in the news is a synthetic opioid that was developed in order to have a more potent analgesic, is widely utilized in medicine for breakthrough pain for cancer patients, for example, when the medications that they have no longer controls the pain, you can use fentanyl. But it's also widely used by anesthesiologists because when you combine fentanyl with an anesthetic, you actually can control and regulate much better the level of consciousness of your patients. So it's a very useful drug. But it is by its potency, it is highly, highly addictive. It's also highly dangerous because of its potency. It can make you stop breathing very, very rapidly. And it's a drug that is very cheap to manufacture. You don't need to cultivate any plant.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunate, I wish it were different, but it is in really a state of very severe overdose that are very difficult to control and regulate. And what we are observing is that we are seeing more and more people dying with very diverse demographics from overdoses, which again makes it so very hard to control. Because at the beginning, the crisis started because we started to over-prescribe opioid medications and people diverted them and people also who should have not been given them because they didn't have severe pain syndromes became addicted and that opened up the door for heroin and then we started to see a rise in 2011 more or less of heroin injection and people dying and then in 2016 there was a transformative very malignant change which was”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And behold, I did have withdrawal over the night and it was so bad. I didn't understand at first what was happening. I was restless. It was worse than pain. And that's sometimes you need to experience these things to understand it because you say what can be worse than pain. It was just I could not be comfortable no matter what. So I took one of the pills that he had given me and that was the last I took. And then the physical dependence that was responsible for that withdrawal disappeared. And that's it. That's my story with opio, which made me very aware that I do not want to be exposed to opius unless I have horrible pain because I can see their allure. I can see how someone could easily fall into that nirvana, that chemical nirvana that they create. And that's the story of that demeral. And that's why I say I did. I have to be honest. It was an extraordinary experience for me to be.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“well being extraordinary sense of well being from the opioid. And that is the only time I really that I've had a real ability to have a consciousness of how an opioid makes you feel. And so when they discharge me, they discharge me on Monday, the accident was on Friday, I was waiting on the car and I felt all chemical. Everything felt very unreal. And the doctor had sent me home with two weeks of medication for the pain and I stopped.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, they get me into the ambulance, take me to the hospital, and there the doctor says, Nora, we have to try to move the fracture so that we can accelerate the healing, because otherwise we're going to have to go for surgery. So we're going to give you Demerol. And they injected me with Demerol, and it was extraordinary. I mean, it was not just the intensity of the suffering. It was disappearing. Everything was fascinating. And opioids make you sleepy. And I was forcing myself not to sleep because everything was so extraordinary. And so it gave me an insight of how powerful that drug was, that despite everything that was there, I wanted to be aware of every sensation. And they admitted me to the hospital and I had to spend there, two nights and three days. And I recall I was under terrible pain and they would give me the demerol and it was this sense of...”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting, you know, because I love Demerol. I probably shouldn't be saying these things, but what happened to me, I was in a horrible car accident. I was the passenger and there was one of those hits that the car, it was I see the car, there was a 90 degree flip and the car in the opposite direction comes in and strikes me in the passenger seat. Seeing the car coming to me, I did not want my brain to be hit by a car. And so I said, okay, I put my foot into the car to protect my head and to get my head as far away as I could from the door because I saw it coming. And so I did not get hit in the head, fortunately, but the door came crashing and I was trapped. My leg was trapped. It was broken. I was under a lot of pain and I wanted to lose consciousness because the pain was so intense. And so they finally had to come up with this jost of life to open up the door because they couldn't get.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, you know, this happened to me. I mean, my first grant was basically just red line, totally and absolutely. And I was very depressed. And at that time, actually, people in the institute at Naida said, Nora, try again. And I was in that respect. And again, I do not take no for an answer because sort of like, and this is a message that I say to young people, you should dare to do things. And no one has the right to say you cannot bring a new perspective into things. And so I always say be daring and persevere with all of my postdoc students. They get rejected on a paper. They get rejected on a grant. I mean, the answer is just stand up and jump back on the horse. I mean, just like as simple as that.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's in the nature of the scientific progress. But as someone that is directing and allocating resources for science, I am very sensitive to ensure that if there are situations where there may be something that is very innovative that others are not seeing, that we don't curtail it. So I tend to in many instances say, okay, let's give it the benefit of the doubt because if it is correct, it's going to be much more transformative than if we just continue doing science that follows the rules of the game very, very precisely where basically what you are expecting, you've already seen. So I do think that we need to push the limits with open access to scientific databases. This is happening more and more, which is very exciting.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cocaine, as well as other stimulant drugs, produces vascular damage and pathology. But it is the way that science goes, and you sort of say science should be guided by data, but science has a religious nature to it also. And once a model is created, it becomes very difficult to change it. So, and it takes a long, long time for concepts that have been consolidated as accepted as the truth to be questioned. And I see, I mean, it happened to me there, but I see it constantly. And that statement that I stated there is very, very valid. If you come up with something that is ahead of, it's time, you're going to have trouble getting it accepted. And you may not actually necessarily be recognized for it when it becomes everyday life, then obviously, well, what's the big deal?”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Journal of Medicine, which is the most important medical journal, clinical medical journal, they review it and they came back again saying, well, there's really no evidence that cocaine can be damaging to the blood vessels. They were completely wrong. And now it's clear.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm a very persevere in person, and I never give up. So this sort of thing, my perspective is on this issue has always been like that. And that finding, actually, I'm still working on that to try to understand how cocaine affects and producing these strokes and how we can prevent them and how we can help people. But at that time, I was very young. And you have this sense of you trust the system and you believe, well, maybe I'm not good enough. Having consolidated the believing yourself because you are basically recently trained, you are using no one had used that technology. So at that point, there was this belief that cocaine was safe. So here comes this person showing this data on images that others had never seen and with the background that cocaine was at that time felt to be safe. And I submitted it to the New England.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always push whether it is with people that are my mentors or I'm organizing it with experts, I do like to get that going.”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that scientific creativity is enriched by playing with ideas and concepts. And I encourage it a lot. And so we have team meetings where I really probe them for people to get into those spaces. And so it's crucial that you empower them. You make them feel confident because otherwise people don't dare. They feel intimidated that they may say some things that others will think it's stupid. And that's so very common when you are in groups. People don't want to be seen as saying something that will make them feel embarrassed. And to me, I always actually start meetings and say, look, guys, we're here to basically push the limits. So please do not feel embarrassed. If you don't speak up, we'll never have an opportunity to understand whether where that idea may go through. So it's something I always...”
2023-05-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #673: Dr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT