Revolutionary Thinker: Trotsky's Great-Granddaughter [heads National Institute on Drug Abuse in USA]

Washington Post ^ | Thursday, August 21, 2003 | Guy Gugliotta

[yonif]

Nora Volkow was born three years after Stalin died, and 16 years after the Soviet dictator sent a student with an ice ax to kill her great-grandfather. Her grandmother committed suicide, and her grandfather was shot to death in a Stalinist prison. She grew up in Mexico City knowing that her family was both steeped in greatness and marked by tragedy.

Today, Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the United States' leading experts on the science of drug addiction. "I've studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more recently obesity. There's a pattern in compulsion," she says. "I've never come across a single person that was addicted that wanted to be addicted. Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process, and I want to know what it is."

By all accounts, Volkow is an inspired, and sometimes electrifying, thinker. Oh, and she also is the great-granddaughter of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

[yonif]

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, with one of her paintings, something she does to help her think in different ways.

[The Radical Capitalist]

"Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process, and I want to know what it is."

Hey, Nora - I think they call it "choice."

[laconic]

I've never been one to hold the sins of the fathers against the children (she seems like a very fine person) but her grandfather was one of the WORST mass murderers of innocents in world history. Leon Trotsky was a COMPLETELY amoral, inhuman, uncaring swine (he used the US by living here in exile in the Lower East Side of NYC until he could return to foment his mass murders and then spat on the US with his world communist revolution; talk about a rotten ingrate). The best thing that ever happened to Leon Trotsky was when Mercador split his head open with the axe. Da svidanya, Trotsky.

[Springman]

Good read!!

[Domestic Church]

"Something has happened in their brains..."

One look at her "painting" and I say something happened to her brain too.

[RusIvan]

You absolutely right. I hope that Leon Trotsky is being burned in hell eternally.

[rmlew]

American intellectuals like to ignore the broken eggs of the failed ommlette called the USSR.
What are 30 million people killed when compared to the idea of a socialist utopia? GAG

[jmc813]

WOD Ping

[Paleo Conservative]

Your answer is overly verbose.

[JCG]

Your answer is overly verbose.

Nyet.

America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
http://video.ire.org/10650.ram (Requires RealPlayer)

Who is Steve Emerson?

[Al Simmons]

But as Monty Python might have put it:

"..still, she's got a nice pair there, luv!"

[MrLeRoy]

Wod_list (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/involved?group=124) ping

[bassmaner]

Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process, and I want to know what it is

So, Nora, like your great-grandfather before you, do you approve of throwing those whose brains don't conform with your vision of political utopia (the vaunted "drug-free" America, much like the kulak-free Soviet Union) into the gulag for "re-education"?

Seems that totalitarianism has a genetic component.

[philman_36]

Another control freak, just like her great-grandfather.