Ask the scientist
Ask the scientist
Through virtual debates with leading international scientists, young people will be able to think through doubts and concerns about drugs and the effects they have on our health. You can also check out the questions that other students have made to Dr. Nora Volkow and Dr. Rafael Maldonado in previous debates, by clicking on the following questions:
How do we behave?
- How do sexual relationships change with drugs?
- can you die from taking a single dose of a drug?
- Why does the same drug and the same amount cause pleasant effects in some people and unpleasant ones in others?
- Are people under the effects of any drug more easily influenced?
What happens in our brain?
- Does occasional drug use in adolescence have a bearing on the future?
- What happens to the brain of a person who takes two drugs with opposite effects such as cocaine and heroin?
- When you have an addiction, the limbic zone creates a dependency. If you stop taking this drug, does this dependency continue?
- When is it considered that a person is a drug addict?
What happens to our bodies?
- What happens to the brain so that drugs become addictive?
- Can bipolar disorders develop as a result of taking drugs?
- How can drugs cause sexual impotence?
- Having given up drugs, how long does it take for the body to return to its normal state?
About Dr. Nora Volkow
Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the USA, Dr. Volkow is an internationally renowned expert in the field of research into drug addiction. She is mainly known for her research into the cerebral dopamine system, focused on the brains of people who are addicts. Her studies have charted the changes in the dopamine system that affect the actions of the frontal areas of the brain involved in motivation, the desire impulse and pleasure.
About Dr. Rafael Maldonado
University Chair in Pharmacology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His studies are focused on the changes that drug-taking causes in people’s behaviour. In 2006 in the United States he was awarded the National Excellence in Research Prize and in 2009, the ICREA Prize.
