Nora Volkow is a Mexican-born American psychiatrist who currently serves as the director of the ‘National Institute on Drug Abuse’ (NIDA). She was born and raised in Mexico City, where she lived in her great-grandfather’s house. He was a ‘Bolshevik’ leader who was expelled from his home country, the Soviet Union, by Stalin. Nora grew up with three sisters. She and her sisters would often give tourists short tours around their house, which had been turned into a museum. She graduated in psychiatry from the ‘New York University’ and started her research work on the science of substance addiction. She concluded that addiction was a mental illness that was determined by the flow of a hormone named dopamine, which is associated with pleasure. She further concluded that sex, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and all other addictions were a result of chemical imbalance in the brain that allowed the sufferers to lose their free will and get entangled in the grasp of substance abuse. Over the years, she has received several honors for her impeccable work in the area.
