Dr Maristela Monteiro is a medical doctor, founder of the Latin American Society of Biomedical Research on Alcoholism, and former senior advisor on alcohol at the Pan American Health Organization. She was interviewed by Professor Thomas F Babor on 21 April 2026.
Thomas Babor: I’m Tom Babor, an addiction psychologist at the University of Connecticut. It’s my pleasure today to interview Maristela Monteiro, a psychiatrist and psychiatric epidemiologist, who has worked in the field of addiction research for all her career.
Maristela Monteiro: Before you start, just a correction, I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m a medical doctor. My PhD was in pharmacology, or psychopharmacology.
Right, so you never went through formal psychiatric training?
No.
So, we stand corrected here. But you have done a lot of psychiatric epidemiology.
Yes.
So, Maristela how did you get involved in the general area of addition research and policy?
Well, it started in medical school, from the very beginning I was interested in neurology, neuroscience and psychology, even before I went into clinical training. So in Brazil we have six years of medical school and in the third year you start clinical, some clinical training. And when I went through the internal medicine, you know the training was in a state hospital that attends mostly homeless and people with low income and there were a lot of people with alcohol dependence in there, in the unit and I got an interest in the topic. There was a study group led by Dr Jandira Masur, there was people, if they wanted to, they could come in and contribute and I joined that study group and from there I asked to be a volunteer, or start an internship at the Department of Psychobiology and that’s how I was exposed to research. I fell in love with it and I was actually disappointed with clinical work in psychiatry during my training. So, at the end of medical school, I decided that I didn’t want to pursue you know a residency and I signed up for graduate studies in psychobiology in the [larger department of pharmacology] with Dr Masur.
So, after that initial introduction in Brazil, you left Brazil, you did a postdoc in the United States and continued working in the field of addiction research. Then you got into research and policy administration with the World Health Organisation [WHO] and then you moved over to the Pan American Health Organisation [PAHO] and throughout this long career you have been moving in the direction of public health, after finishing your clinical training in medicine [at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil in 1983]. So, what was it that got you engaged in research and policy as opposed to staying with medicine?
Yeah, in research was, while still going to medical school, did preclinical research, I started doing studies with mice and rats in the lab all related to the facts of the alcohol. From there I started to do research with human subjects basically. And it was out of curiosity when I went to get training in ER, emergency room, I saw the doctors were giving injections to patients who would come in and, not in coma, but not fully awake, being very intoxicated with alcohol. I was curious how they are doing that and they wake up and leave the lab and I asked Dr Masur and she said, oh my God I can’t believe this is still happening. This is a very dangerous medication and they can die from it. So, I did a study in animals first on the facts of, well there might be a problem with the spelling, it’s nicotinamide, it’s a stimulant that wakes up briefly the person, but it can have hard effects, or even convulsions and the animals actually died as the doses increased. And it was my first paper that I published and from there I began to be interested in human subjects, studying diagnosis and that led to my decision to study people with alcohol dependence and the biological markers of, for diagnosis and follow up of patients. And I really enjoyed, it was you know, I think I was born for this. Anyway, so after my PhD I went to UCSD [University of California San Diego, in 1987] to do work with Dr Marc Schuckit on genetic markers, I was, you know my thesis was on biological markers and he was studying genetic markers, so it was a good fit to go there and I got a scholarship from Brazil to go. It was very productive there in again clinical research and doing the studies and he was then invited by WHO to participate in an international study on markers, biological and genetic markers of alcohol dependence. He asked me to join [in 1989], if I wanted to contribute to the protocol development and everything, and I did, and that’s how I got exposed to WHO.
So, the work you started with Marc Schuckit on the genetics, the behavioural genetics of alcohol dependence was what really started you getting you into high-quality research. And to what extent did the fact that Marc was working in San Diego contribute to your interest in doing alcohol research during that time?
Well, my decision to go to San Diego was based on the fact that it was in a US state that didn’t snow. That was really basically it. I don’t like the cold and in San Diego it’s sunny all day, all year. And I went there and I started to work in the lab and I had already several publications, international publications related to my thesis and so compared to the residents that were starting to work with him, I was more trained in research. I had statistics, research methodology and the usual psychiatrist, the residency people come without having any of that training. So, I began to get involved with them, supervising in a way some of the work and do some studies with residents and propose ideas to Marc. He gave me a lot of space to propose ideas and he offered also, let’s study this, or let’s write a paper about that and then came a review of the literature on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for I suppose at that time, on alcohol dementia, because they were beginning to review the diagnostic criteria for alcohol related disorders. So slowly I began to move towards work that was related to WHO and to epidemiology without a formal training in public health. It was when I moved to WHO, to Geneva is that I got exposed really…
So, how did that happen where you were doing a postdoc with Marc Schuckit and then you got connected somehow with WHO in Geneva?
Yeah, well my department [in Sao Paulo, Brazil], the Department of Psychobiology was a collaborating centre of WHO, but I was not involved in any of the work. I was a student and had no idea really that that was happening, it was far from my daily work. And then I started with Marc on this [WHO] international study with ISBRA [International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcohol and Addictions] and there were researchers from the West, from Finland, from Sweden, from Italy, Switzerland and when I went back to Brazil, WHO invited me to be part of the study as a principal investigator from Brazil. They didn’t have any country that was developing, only the developed countries and they didn’t give me any funding. But I got funding in Brazil and I was able to implement a full study, collect all the samples and send out for analysis. Dr. Boris Tabakoff coordinated a lot of this work at that time too. I think that got me to be known in WHO in a way. Then the Department, the WHO invited the Department, the Head of the Department was Elisaldo Carlini and they invited him to write a review, a consultancy work on drugs, HIV in women in Brazil. That was in 1993. He was not interested, so he asked me if I wanted to get that consultancy and do the work and I accepted. So I did the review, I did the report, it was qualitative and quantitative research and WHO liked that and asked me to expand to cover the Latin American countries and basically in early, the late 1993, they decided to have a global meeting on that topic, on women HIV and drugs and I presented the results from Brazil and Latin America [in Geneva]. That’s how, in person I got to be known for the first time in WHO. When I returned from that meeting they called me and like a month/two months later and asked if I wanted to do a consultancy on solvents, so volatile solvents for the Spanish Government, the Basque Government, because they saw in my curriculum that I had some research with volatile solvents.
Was that in Brazil or the US?
In Brazil a lot of street children were using solvents.
Because at that time there was an epidemic in Brazil, yeah.
Yeah and I did also some rat studies, you know on the toxicity of the solvents. I spent some time as a WHO consultant in Bilbao with the Basque Government in Spain and did a white paper for them on the situation. They also were having street children using those solvents. At the end of the consultancy they invited me to extend my time in WHO as a short-term professional for eleven months.
So, to what extent did your facility with language help you in working with WHO, you were born in Brazil, you speak, your native language is Portuguese, but you also speak Spanish and French and English. Did that help in terms of what WHO needed, which was expertise in different parts of the world?
Yes, the communication, yes in this case especially with the Spanish Government, they needed someone who could communicate in Spanish. My Spanish was still evolving, but it was successful enough that I would, they liked my work there and WHO was also, it was, my boss was, my first supervisor was Dr Mario Argandona, he was Bolivian. He was looking for a woman to work in the programme of substance abuse, because I think there was no other woman as a staff, or from a developing country. I was one of three, including María Elena Medina-Mora. So, they offered to me and I was already a federal employee, I was a Professor at the University in Sao Paulo. So, I had to go back and officially ask for my release to go. So, I spent another month in Brazil and then when it was authorised, I left in 1994 for eleven months and began to work on various projects in WHO.
So, one of the projects that you worked on at WHO was the GENACIS project, which was another genetic research project. This was the epidemiology of women’s use of alcohol in different countries and women’s roles as they were changing during the 1990s and that was conducted in how many countries and what was the role of WHO to get that started?
Well, the beginning was a meeting that I attended, it was either at KBS or the RSA, I’ve forgot now, which I met Sharon Wilsnack.
So, these are the Kettil Bruun Society and RSA, the Research Society on Alcohol.
Yes. I forgot where was the meeting, but I went as WHO staff and was interested in going to the informal gathering on gender issues and alcohol and they were discussing the possibility of having a collaborative study and I said well let’s see if we, WHO can help and that’s how we began to collaborate. I got some funding and of course a lot of the funding came indirectly from NIAAA [National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism] for [Sharon Wilsnack to conduct] data analysis and coordination. But the [inclusion of] developing countries [was] funded by WHO basically. [Initially I think there were 4 to 5 low- and middle-income countries. Later, with our support from PAHO and others who joined over the years,] there were many countries at the end, but I think in the beginning maybe ten countries that we were able to support, but it continued to expand even though I was not directly involved anymore. But many more, I think maybe more than that. I can’t remember now.
So, what do you think is the value of these international collaborative projects that you were instrumental in getting started. It’s very complicated. How do you get started on a project like that where there are good ideas and there’s an emerging issue that is very important and you’ve got some people who have the capability of visualising an international collaborative study? The logistics of getting it started and using WHO to act as a coordinator, how does that work?
Yeah, it takes some guts, because it is really complicated. The funding for researchers in developed countries is often beyond the reach of WHO, but they can get their own funding in their countries and the funding that WHO can provide goes for developing countries and it’s within reach, so to say. And what I saw was the group had a variety of researchers from other countries that were eager to learn about the scientific method and do research as well. They were not able by themselves at that point to do their own research, so collaborating was the most efficient way to get people to use the same language, the same methods, the same indicators. The reviews initially showed that each one measures something different, slightly different and it was not comparable. So, the benefit I think of the international collaboration is to standardise the methodology, to be able to train people and each implement and adapt in their countries the protocol and are able to implement the study. Then there was additional support for cleaning the datasets, merging datasets and creating a large dataset in which anyone could propose an idea of, to analyse from the data and publish papers, or their own reports from their countries. So, it’s very rich and that’s what fascinated me and I thought that’s the way to go, you cannot, it’s much more vast knowledge by collaborating like that.
And, what would you consider to be the major findings that emerged from an international collaborative project like the GENACIS project on women and alcohol?
Well first that gender matters. The way society perceives men and women’s roles impact on their consumption, or, of each sex actually. And the victimisation of women by men is also another issue that was revealed in a more complex way that women also drink, but they are involved in relationships where there is a power imbalance and men when they drink, they can be violent without the drinking, but when they drink, things get worse and they um, can be violent against women. And also, all the work that women do for example in the house, or to take care of someone with an alcohol problem in their families, all these issues are indicators of harms to the families that were also very linked to the role of women in the family and in society and I think that helped then um, the development of the concept of harm to others as well. [Drinking in excess affects others than the drinker, not only within the family but also within the workplace, public places, businesses.] That was taken in part from the tobacco field, because of the impact of tobacco smoking on children for example, on third parties and that was what they began to analyse and see that it was happening with alcohol as well in the latter, second phase, or a longer project, the GENAHTO (Gender, Alcohol and Harms to Others). Then also that generated a lot of new data on the impact of alcohol on children, on neglect of children. For example, on families that weren’t, not yet measured in a way that could be taught, the stories of women, the stories of families, but it was the first time that it was measured through indicators and variables that could be compared across countries.
So up until that time there had been very little research on sex and gender and here you have this international study across diverse countries looking at all the implications of alcohol use at a time when gender roles are changing at different rates, in different countries and the rates of alcohol problems are increasing dramatically.
Yes, absolutely and it was important also to understand that this was coming with the movement of women’s equality, more independence and all that. Some groups were interpreting that what we were saying about the impact of alcohol on women was to control women and we were never with that intention. These were two fields I think gender equality, or gender, regardless of being on alcohol, gender field and alcohol field they were not talking to each other. So that started also a process that led more people to understand alcohol problems from a different perspective.
So, in addition to GENACIS at that time in the 1990s you were also working on other international projects. The INEBRIA project [International Network on Brief Interventions for Alcohol and Other Drugs] was concentrated in Europe, but WHO had sponsored an additional study on development of the audit and then you were also doing that for drugs and the alcohol and the ASSIST, which was your acronym, Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test.
A screening test, yes.
Which covered all different types of substances. So, there was that project and you also were involved in the international project on emergency room cases.
Oh yes. I was leaving WHO to come to PAHO when the ER study with Cherpitel started and Vladimir Poznyak at that time took the lead there and a few countries participated, but when I started in PAHO I wanted to bring more countries from the region to that same study. So, we extended and included several other countries and there was a really good collaboration as well.
So, you kind of told us what it’s like to be working in this area from a scientific perspective and how much does the atmosphere, the culture of doing research and collaborating with people from many different countries, how much does that contribute to your motivation, your interest, your excitement for doing research. It’s a lot different from doing rat studies when you’ve got people from fifteen countries and each of them have different ideas and contributions to make.
Yeah, the culture and the differences in how people view a problem, or a situation, or how the community responds that was really fascinating and that in turn moved into how you can develop policy that would be applicable to all these different communities and different views that work and then becomes really more complex, given the political nature of the region. So, it’s not only the findings that you have, the data that you have, but how you present that and convince Ministers of Health and institutions, diplomats when it’s the case that what needs to be done and how to do it. So, that translation of science into policy is very important too.
And, particularly for developing countries.
Absolutely yes.
Because these are the first data that have been generated at a national level for many countries.
Yes, yes. And it helped I think to develop research community at least, it’s not enormous, but a few people in each of these countries that kept going beyond the study and continue to have any interest in doing research and being able to advocate for policy changes and begin to be part of this network on global policy.
So, what are the big challenges for doing this kind of research?
Well, funding certainly. The coordination when it, and especially when you have studies that involve biological measures and you need to choose a lab, or a methodology or sometimes initially centralise it. So, just shipping, for example, samples across countries, making sure that they don’t melt if they’re frozen. It is very complicated and very challenging. But even when there is no biological samples involved, there is the collection of the data, making sure that there is ethical approval of every, in every country, in every university, every hospital that participates, that people are following ethical procedures and then implementing as they should after training. The actuality of getting people together to discuss global data is also complex, because sometimes we could send an expert to the country and train the team there, but the other way around involves way more funding, three or four people, for example from one country to go to a global meeting. Anyway, it was, at the time when there was no zoom, there was no virtual meetings, and that came and probably facilitated a lot in the last few years in terms of collaboration, in spite of the changes and all the differences. Yeah, but it certainly improved with technology and the facility of collaborating.
So, in addition to funding, you at this time became more aware of the role of the alcohol industry and I’m sure part of that came from the way that the industry was targeting their products towards women, not only in the high-income countries, but in the low- and middle-income countries, where they saw huge potential for profit by getting women to drink.
Right and that started at global level a discussion on what can we do about this and I think at the time there was, the work of David Jernigan, who was one of the first to bring together the, what the industry was doing in certain countries in Asia and document that and there were attempts to block the report. So, we begin to realise that that force of the alcohol industry was major and it was not transparent, it was behind the scenes and it was very political because they had an influence with governments and they began to pay attention to what WHO was doing and the development of a global plan placed them in a position of uh, oh, we’ve got to do something about this. And it in a way started to, on both sides, them to organise themselves way better, to try to avoid what happened to the tobacco industry and on the side of advocacy of NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and research institutions, to document what they were doing and not let it go, so to say now.
So, WHO is facing opposition from the alcohol industry to policies that they’re recommending and they’re also out there following the research and in some cases coordinating the research, what is the value of science in dealing with the alcohol industry and their influence and what types of science like the Global Burden of Disease study, or the GENACIS study is that useful in helping to promote public health for something like alcohol and emerging epidemics of other drugs?
Yes, I think the global burden of disease was a major addition to the fight I would say for public health response to alcohol. It was the first to really document at global level and compare, in comparison to other drugs and to tobacco and to other diseases in a standardised way, despite the issues that in the beginning appeared in the methodology. But as they got better, the more they showed how alcohol was really important for the global public health in both developed and developing countries and the developing or low income, low- or middle-income countries were suffering proportionately a higher burden and that helped to bring the attention to the need for a response, a global response, especially to protect vulnerable populations. And studies like GENACIS and the ER studies helped to, contributed a lot to improvement of the data from the Global Burden of Disease in those analyses that they carried out.
And, what about research on alcohol and cancer?
This is more recent I would say, even though the IARC, which is in Lyon…
International Agency for Research on Cancer?
Yes, Lyon exactly. It’s a collaborating centre …
A WHO centre, yeah.
Yes, it is. And for many years they have identified alcohol as a carcinogenic substance. Then they critically analysed all the literature and came up with the statement that alcohol was on a par with tobacco and it was a Type 1 carcinogenic substance and people should not drink. If they start drinking, they should reduce the most that they could and if they didn’t, they shouldn’t start. And that was a key difference, a message that had a big implication for the whole field of public health. People were not used to that and the idea was that you can drink a glass a day and it was okay and all this, wine is better than other types of alcohol. There were all kinds of myths I would say and with that information it became more clear with studies of course showing that alcohol per se was the carcinogenic substance. So, it was the cause of the cancer not the type of drinks or anything else in those alcohols and probably the industry didn’t like that.
So, during your career you were helped along the way not only by the emerging infrastructure of addiction research, which included research centres, collaborating centres, international organisations like WHO, academic departments where they had training programmes for postdocs which you took advantage of, you also were involved in creating some organisations, professional societies like the Latin American Society of …
LASBRA, the Latin American Society of Biomedical Research on Alcoholism.
Yeah. So, within that infrastructure, who were the people who had an influence on you and what, if anything would you recommend to young people who are trying to have a career?
well very early on Lee Towle was from NIAAA and he was leading international work at NIAAA helped with Harold Kalant in Canada, in Toronto, at CAMH (Center for Addiction and Mental Health), to support me to start something for Latin America. There was nothing in developing countries. [That was how we created] LASBRA. I began to attend a few meetings, and they came up with this idea, why don’t you, and put the work on my back and I tried and they gave some seed funding. We were able to organise some meetings and I met researchers that I never knew before in person, or just through the literature from Latin America and that was really exciting. But then when I became a staff of WHO, I could not be supporting LASBRA anymore. But there were people in Brazil who took up and continued their work. I think for young professionals getting a mentor and trying to not only learn in your own field, but participate in collaborations is really, it’s exciting, not everybody likes it I suppose, but I think it’s very important and it opens up so much your universe for other ideas. Of course, you and Robin Room and researchers from several countries helped and supported a lot of international collaborations and you feel that you’re not alone, or that the work that you do is meaningful in a way, because there is this feeling that people in low-income countries are second class researchers, or they don’t do as good research as others. I think there are brilliant anywhere and it helps to build your confidence to do the research and publish internationally. The book like you developed, Publishing Addiction Science, probably has helped many, many people around the world and it’s just the type of support that people need. It’s not just money, it is a network of collaborators, of people that they can talk, email or ask questions without you know being afraid, or this is too big for me.
So, with your long experience within the field of addiction research, public health and policy, you’ve got a lot of experience in different types of research and how to translate research into policy and certainly your work with PAHO has been instrumental in taking the research and developing instruments that can be useful for clinical purposes, training programmes in delivering brief interventions. For example, screening programmes and introducing them into healthcare assistants to identify people using alcohol and other drugs. Then instruments like artificial intelligence have come into the field of international public health work in alcohol. Can you say something about where you see the field going, is it in a positive direction and what are the areas where you think there should be greater investment?
Well, I think artificial intelligence is here to stay with a lot of issues that are maybe negative, but also with a lot of positives. I think it can contribute to increase access to care if it’s done properly and ethically. But I think that there is not enough investment in that area, but I think most, in terms of public health the investment needs to be on policy really and on documenting what works and what doesn’t work in alcohol policy from the public health perspective, not only at the individual level and explain to people how to do the advocacy work that is needed to move an issue at the government level. As you know, over the years people they’re really passionate about the topic, but they don’t know how to navigate in different layers of the government, and they get stuck in their work, and I think that can be strengthened. You need a leader in a country, in a community, someone who is not giving up, but also has the connections with other sectors, that being an institution, but also in the Government, to start those discussions and to know how to also use the data that is available. The research that is published should not be, you know, in libraries or just in a journal, it needs to be strapped to the news, what it means to somebody that is not an expert that information and the ability to translate to the daily lives of people, what the research informs is fundamental, I think that’s when you get the hearts of people to say oh it affects me, my family, or my society, others, or young people, is how people can then create a movement that can pressure governments to change.
So, in your work with the Pan American Health Organisation, you built a programme practically from scratch. When you got there, there was very little research going on, or epidemiology, or public health around alcohol. The interest in emerging epidemics for drugs was starting, but there wasn’t a lot going on there and all of a sudden there were improvements in PAHOs ability to reach out to Latin America in particular and provide them with training opportunities. Can you say something let’s say about two important areas that you worked in, one was screening and brief intervention and you were one of the first who introduced artificial intelligence with the Pahola person, pseudo-person, and on the other hand there was also increasing attention to monitoring the activities of the alcohol industry, because it’s not only that they were interfering with research and public health, but they were using their knowledge of alcohol marketing to manufacture a problem which was one of the biggest public health issues in Latin America, which is heavy drinking. So, could you say something about your work at PAHO in terms of training programmes on the one hand and dealing with the alcohol industry on the other, a micro level and a macro level.
Yeah. Well, when I started at PAHO really the first thing I did was to look at the programme of work, of collaborative work between PAHO and the Ministry of Health for every country in the region and I was really shocked that not a single country had anything on alcohol. But when you asked people they all talk about alcohol dependence and alcohol problems and we knew some statistics already from epidemiology, but nobody was doing anything. So that, I started to, I organised a meeting and began to bring up the issue that we need to do work and this is not only mental health, it is also, there’s a risk factor and that led to the idea of developing a regional plan on alcohol that was later approved [by the directing Council, the meeting of the Ministries of Health at PAHO]. I got support from also the Valencia Government in Spain that helped support training in screening brief interventions and developing national alcohol policy in five countries in the region and also to have an ER study and the GENACIS study in these countries, so all that. So, we brought together as much as we could in terms of gathering data and getting new research to inform the policy development in these five countries and that led to other countries being interested as well. And along the way we saw how the alcohol industry was having [an influence], was trying to interfere with the work of PAHO per se and then indirectly going, just bypassing, they don’t need to go through PAHO, they’re going to Ministers of Health and offering to fund the studies, that often concluded that alcohol was not a problem, when it was, and it was just a way that they use indicators or change variables that it showed that it was not a problem. So that was how I began to realise that their influence was really extensive and much without our ability to control. I would learn sometimes from somebody in the country, the focal point, should I meet with this person, they are offering this and that and realising that was directly the alcohol industry. And even, once during the Directing Council of PAHO, it’s the meeting of the Ministers of Health, they organised a parallel meeting to discuss alcohol problems at the same time in Washington DC they wanted to organise there and it was only when we raised the flag of the competition of agendas that they, you know the Director, talked to them and was able to cancel the meeting. Anyway, when COVID came, it was, you know, the first idea of using artificial intelligence actually emerging in WHO in the tobacco field and for COVID offered pro bono by a private company, use “their AI” and train the AI to give information to the public about COVID and tobacco. And I participated in a couple of meetings online and I thought this would be perfect for alcohol, but WHO didn’t want to include alcohol in the beginning. So, I proposed at PAHO, why don’t we do this here and that’s how it came about, the idea of an AI, a virtual health worker that would provide information on any topic almost related to alcohol, information to the public. But also, for people who were interested, they screened themselves, they could see if they were at risk and the AI could provide a simple advice, to therefore say you need to look for doctor we recommend, or, when it was at the higher level of risk. And there was really early on in this, the use of AI in public health, it was very successful. I’d say as a prototype it needed to be developed further and further, because you learn from the experience and we were learning as we were going, but after the second year there was a lack of interest I suppose, I don’t know if we should publish there, but PAHO, the leadership decided it was not the way to go, it could not be sustainable and the project was suspended, the information was given back to WHO and they incorporated it into the AI that now talks about any topic in health and does not give any brief intervention. But there were some programmes already in some places, in Boston I think they were trying to develop AI for screening and brief intervention, or in Spain and other countries where there were a few papers being published. So, then actually INEBRIA created a group about technology I suppose and solutions and I believe this is continuing to grow and expand. It was very innovative and I heard from people saying that it was too early, if the project had started like two years later it would be way more accepted. It was very early for an organisation like PAHO or WHO, but it was really fun, yeah. It was very interesting. A lot of work, you know Pahola [PAHO’s AI agent] could speak in four languages, could speak like a human and was via video and text and some people thought she was real. It was very close to a human and very accurate too, because all the content was only based on scientific studies and the literature that we curated for the AI and WHO information and not generative so to say. So, it was not picking from the web at that time, from the internet, it was very problematic, but nowadays you ask these AI’s, they’re generative and they usually give appropriate answers in relation to alcohol and harms.
So, in your career you had a variety of opportunities and directions to go in and if there are young people looking at all of the things that you’ve done, what would you say if they were not only curious about alcohol and interested in research, but also if they wanted to have an impact on the world, what would you recommend as a direction to go in, is an international organisation like Pan American Health Organisation and the World Health Organisation a good place to be, to have an impact?
It depends on the times, I think. Being in a research institution or university you can do more focused work, but one needs to realise that WHO or PAHO are political institutions. So, it’s not only the research that matters and there are other political decisions that are made, the convincing, the dealing with priorities and a broader knowledge of public health is needed to be able to respond to people as well, I want HIV, or I want mental health, or …? There are so many competing problems and to be able to focus on alcohol given the creativeness of the alcohol industry is a challenge, it’s very difficult. So, for a young person I think they should start in a research institution or university and then apply to influence through their data the work of PAHO or WHO. I think starting young, again can be frustrating in WHO. Anyway, some people do start and they succeed, but you are developing a career as an international civil servant, you are not a researcher per se. You can do collaborations and facilitate stuff, but it is a different role than somebody working as a staff in WHO. So, I don’t know, I think I would start outside and then go inside. After, when you analyse the whole thing, it’s a small world anyway in each field of knowledge, or let’s say on alcohol. So, you end up getting to know the key players in terms of research and learning about the trends in research and how you can influence decision making and you go from there. What I wonder is if one does political science per se for example and you get an interest in public health if that would be a better path to influence the decisions in WHO. I don’t know if many people do that, but that would be interesting anyway.
Okay, so we can wrap things up, thank you on behalf of the addiction research field, thank you for your great career and thank you from the journal Addiction for sharing all of this information and experience with us and …
I want to thank, because I never expected that invitation to come, I’m very proud and honoured by it and want to thank you. I mean along all these years we’ve collaborated so many times and you opened so many opportunities and I think people like you are what we need in the field really and Robin Room and others that really understand how collaborative research is done and what are the benefits of it and have also the reputation, that brings people you know under your arms and let them flourish. I’m really proud to have met you.
Yeah, it’s been fun, there are so many great people in the field, we all share I think the common goals and lots of knowledge.
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