Drug abuse expert addresses Penn class

Attempting to clear up Americans' "tremendous misunderstanding" about the nature of drug abuse, Allen Leshner, director of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, spoke last Friday with an undergraduate behavioral medicine class. The lecture was held in the Treatment and Research Center at 38th and Sansom streets, a building funded by Leshner's organization. The center works with patients who have substance abuse problems and researches treatment for substance abusers. Leshner spoke to Joseph Volpicelli and Ronald Ulm's Biological Basis of Behavior 290 class about his work as both a scientist and politician in charge of a $450 million budget to fight drug abuse. Progress is being made in drug rehabilitation, he said. For example, he said an Institute researcher has recently discovered a chemical which blocks the high produced by cocaine. Leshner said the discovery would be announced in the next few weeks. He also noted that marijuana use has increased in the past three years for high school students. He attributed this rise to an change in the perception of the drug. "A drop in anti-drug advertisement -- and a rise in the glorification of drugs might be factors," Leshner added. Although the world believes drug abuse is a major problem, little funding is appropriated to combat addiction relative to other diseases, Leshner said. The National Cancer Institute, for example, receives more than 550 times the funding of the Institute for Drug Abuse. Leshner said he believes that although both cancer and drug abuse are major societal problems, drug abuse receives less funding because drug abusers are stigmatized by society. "People hate addicts," he said, explaining that this animosity extends to the scientists who treat drug abuse. "People take drugs because they like the [high]," Leshner said. "But they become addicts when a chemical switch in the brain removes their ability to resist the drug." Leshner also said the "war on drugs" has produced very few concrete changes in drug usage. He said there are the same number of hard-core drug abusers today as there were during the heart of the drug culture in the 1960s.

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