Name Mark Gold | ||
Education University of Florida College of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis Books The good news about depression, The Good News about Pa, The Encyclopedia of Alcohol, Marijuana, Alcohol | ||
Dr. Mark S. Gold: Drugs Change The Brain and Create Dual Disorders
Dr. Mark S. Gold is a scholar, researcher, and author known for his work on the effects of food, tobacco, cocaine, and other drugs on the brain and behavior. He is the author of general audience books and has written over 1,000 scientific articles, chapters, and abstracts published in journals for neuroscientists and health professionals.
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Dr. Gold is the 2015 John P. McGovern Award Recipient in honor of his contributions to public policy, treatment, research, or prevention which has increased our understanding of the relationship of addiction and society.
Biography
Dr. Gold was the University of Florida Distinguished Alumni Professor for 2011-2014. He was the Donald Dizney Eminent Scholar and was a distinguished professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, community health and family medicine. He is the former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
He created the Division of Addiction Medicine at UF and its treatment program, the Florida Recovery Center. With Drs. Bob DuPont and Tom McLellan, he has studied physician and health professionals who have become addicted and their outcomes after treatment. He has reported on physician treatment since reporting on the sequential use of clonidine and naltrexone in addicted physicians.
He has served as a consultant on website design for NIDA: The Science of Drug Abuse and Addiction in 2013 and also is a member of the ASAM Drug Testing White Paper Committee (2013).
Dr. Gold was Chief Scientist for the Afghanistan National Urban Drug Use Survey which gathered information on second and third hand opium exposure in Kabul and other urban Afghan areas for the US State Department and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
Dr. Gold was the Chief Scientist for the State Department's funded study which identified second and third hand exposure to opiates in the body, fluids and hair of children of Kabul and subsequent epidemiological studies of the mothers. [1]
Research
Dr. Gold has been working on a new, addiction-based models for understanding hedonic overeating, food addiction and the development of new therapies. He has carried out similar work for opiate addiction which led to the discovery of clonidine's efficacy in opiate withdrawal and cocaine addiction which led to the dopamine depletion hypothesis (Patent #4/312,878).
He has worked on smoking, second and third hand tobacco smoke with support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and FAMRI. He has worked with a variety of government agencies concerned with drug use and youth. Among those organizations are the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, Media Partnership for a Drug Free America, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, and the Betty Ford Center Foundation.
Along with tobacco, alcohol and other neurobiology of drug addiction studies, Dr. Gold has worked for over 30 years to evaluate the hypothesis that hedonic overeating is a pathological attachment to food like any other addiction. Dr. Gold is a co-editor of the 2012 textbook, Food and Addiction, published by Oxford Press.
In a recent interview for the Congressional Quarterly (CQ Researcher), Dr. Gold stated that there is universal agreement that genes can be changed by exposure to drugs. He used the example of a person whose mother smoked when she was pregnant. This person has genetic receptors that were changed because of the exposure, making that person more likely to become addicted to nicotine. Friedman J. Treating Addiction. CQ Researcher. 2014 May 2; 24(17). Intrauterine and early childhood exposure may also change risk trajectories for other drugs and food and become an acquired risk for obesity.