Division 28: Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse

President’s Column

James Zacny

I would like to thank my colleagues across the country for voting for me, and am aware of the responsibilities placed on me for this coming year: to represent, to serve, and to be responsive to the membership, and to hopefully make contributions to the division, as all of my predecessors have.

I would also like to thank Jim Sorensen for his service to the division as President in 2004. I learned a great deal from him, and am glad that the system is now set up so that he is still someone I can fall back on when advice is needed. As well, I can seek advice from our president-elect, Alan Budney.

A number of people have rotated off the Executive Committee and each of them deserves a really big ‘thank you’ for their service to the division: Frank Holloway (past-president), Cora Lee Wetherington (member-at-large), Hendree Jones (Secretary), Nancy Petry (Newsletter Editor), and Herb Barry (Archivist). John Roll was our membership chair, but I am happy to say he has agreed to become our Newsletter Editor. As you can see from the back page of the newsletter we have some very competent people who have joined the Executive Committee, and we have some colleagues who have graciously agreed to serve extra terms – Ron Wood, Jane Acri, and Anthony Liguori.

One of the initiatives I wanted to take up during my term as president was working with John on revamping the newsletter. Nancy Petry, and before her Craig Rush, and before him me, actively solicited for articles, letters to the editor, etc. But such materials did not come to us in any abundance. To that end, John will be assembling a small committee whose mission it will be to examine newsletters from other APA divisions and from organizations outside of APA to determine some of the features they run on a regular basis, and then to discuss what features might be added to our newsletter, and give those features a trial run.

John and his committee will also be exploring the possibility of switching over to an e-version of the newsletter. The newsletter would be assembled as a PDF file and one could simply print out the copy. I am only presenting this as something that will be discussed – the input of the membership will be solicited. I would anticipate that for those members who want the newsletter mailed to them by the U.S. Post Office that they will be accommodated.

Diana Walker is our Division Program Chair and based on the quality of the submissions that she has received, the program for this year’s convention in Washington, D.C. ought to be excellent.

Related to the convention, I would like to close this column with what I hope is an interesting story. I am not sure what the theme is – I think there are several: 1) if you have an idea about the division and how to better it, pass it on to me or to anybody else on the Executive Committee, because that idea could very well come to fruition; 2) it is amazing how some things just pick up momentum and fall into place; and 3) sometimes long-past wrongs can be rectified.

Vic Laties was musing one day with Ron Wood about how some of the highest impact work in behavioral pharmacology was never published, and thought that it should be recognized in some way. So Vic was invited to participate in one of the monthly Executive Committee teleconferences in the early spring of 2004 during which he suggested that the division consider giving an award to two scientists who in the early 1980s did pioneering research on nicotine psychopharmacology.

The two scientists, Drs. Vic DeNoble and Paul Mele, at the time worked for Philip Morris, and in one of their studies they established that nicotine served as a reinforcer in rats. A manuscript reporting these findings was sent to Herb Barry who was then field editor for Psychopharmacology, and on two separate occasions (1983 and 1986) the authors withdrew the manuscript for further consideration because of injunctions and threats of lawsuits by Philip Morris.

In 1984 the two scientists were fired from Philip Morris, and the non-publication of the paper, according to Jack Henningfield, “set the field back for at least six years before work like it could be accomplished by Canadian researchers (Drs. Corrigall and Coen).”

The Executive Committee liked Vic’s idea of recognizing the work of Drs. DeNoble and Mele, and through further discussion thought that perhaps a symposium centering on the paper as well as current nicotine research and policy might be more suitable than an award.

I was assigned as the point person to further explore this. The first thing I did was to call Klaus Mizcek who is a current editor of Psychopharmacology to ask him whether there was any possibility that the paper could be published in the journal that had originally accepted it for publication close to 20 years ago. Klaus not only said the paper could be published but that he would be willing to devote a special issue of Psychopharmacology to nicotine-related research.

Next I hunted down Drs. DeNoble and Mele, who no longer work in the field, and they were willing to have their paper published and they were willing to participate in the symposium (Vic DeNoble said he still had the manuscript and if he rooted around in his basement could probably find the figure glossies!).

Note that the only other place this manuscript can be read is in the online archives of the Waxman committee hearings in 1994, where this sequence of events had a huge impact: it was dramatic proof that the tobacco companies had covered up evidence documenting abuse potential that was generated in their own laboratories. The rest is history.

Things just kept on falling into place. Jack Henningfield and Ian Stolerman, two world-renowned experts on tobacco, agreed to co-chair the symposium. Speakers will be Drs. DeNoble and Mele describing their research and their travails with the tobacco company, and Drs. Athina Markou, Jed Rose, Maxine Stitzer, and Jack Henningfield. The discussant will be Mitch Zeller, a lawyer who served as Associate Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration during the Clinton Administration. Zeller led FDA’s investigation of the tobacco industry, and helped reveal the role of self-administration research as well as the saga of DeNoble and Mele’s ill-fated efforts to publish their work in Psychopharmacology.

All of this initiated by a comment from Vic: the serendipity I encountered throughout all of this; the enthusiasm of everybody I talked to (I don’t think I heard the word “no” once); and justice will finally be served when the paper gets published, after a “delay”H5 of 20 years. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Dr. DeNoble tried to present the paper in 1983 at the annual APA convention but could not because Philip Morris had placed an injunction on the poster. So he stood in front of an empty poster board on Friday, August 26, 1983. Now the story of Dr. DeNoble and Mele can be heard at this year’s APA convention. In closing, I hope to serve the Division well during my term as President. And I am always open to hearing your ideas and concerns: jzacny@dacc.uchicago.edu.