Groundbreaking Research from NIDA Addressing the Challenges of the Opioid Epidemic

The 2024 ACMT Ward and Ryan Donovan Memorial Fund lecture was presented by Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This article in an edited version of her keynote address during ACMT’s 2024 Annual Scientific Meeting. During the course of her talk, Dr. Volkow discussed the historical factors contributing to the ongoing global opioid epidemic, examined the evidence behind different front-line and policy strategies used to battle the opioid epidemic, and highlighted the importance of recent cultural changes that support more deliberate screening for substance use disorders and pathways for initiating treatment of opioid use disorders in vulnerable populations. An urgent need exists to improve inclusion of social and structural determinants of health in implementation science addressing opioid use disorders, with better attention to special populations, including Native American Indians and Alaskan Natives, African Americans, those over 65 years of age, and teenagers.