The National Institute for Drug Abuse Is Working on a Serum That Will Make it Impossible to Get High

Last night’s 60
Minutes

featured an extensive interview
with Natalia Volkow, director
of the National institute for Drug Abuse and Leon Trotsky’s great
granddaughter. The bulk of the segment is about how addiction is
awful and how sad it was when Trotsky was murdered by Stalin’s hit
men. Toward the end of the segment, however, 60 Minutes
got Volkow to talk about her end game: 

Narrator: Doctors did what they could, but
Trotsky died a day later. He’s buried in the family garden. Esteban
Volkow went on to become a chemist who helped develop the birth
control pill. Nora Volkow was born 15 years after Trotsky’s death.
Addicted, since childhood, to the pursuit of science.

Natalia Volkow: I think yes, we all have this
sense of public service, social consciousness, responsibility
towards not only yourself as individual, but for your society.

Narrator: The road from the house of ghosts in
Mexico has taken Nora Volkow to a place of influence in Washington.
She starts each day with a seven-mile run, getting a healthy dose
of dopamine. And looking forward down the road, she sees a day when
science might banish the curse of addiction.

Nora Volkow: A cure would be fantastic. And
that means you get a medication like an antibiotic. I cure you.

Narrator: Volkow’s labs and others around the
country are working to develop vaccines to block drugs from
entering the brain. The complexities are enormous, and progress is
slow.

Nora Volkow: We’re not there yet. But perhaps
one day we may be. And in my brain, if you don’t dare to think very
ambitious things, you’ll never be there.

End scene.Â