In her Rema Lapouse Award lecture, Professor Kandel will share insights about the scientific quest from a life in the public health sciences as well as reflections on epidemiological evidence about prescription opioids in the United States. She is Professor of Sociomedical Sciences in Psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. Her major research interests are in the epidemiology, risk factors and consequences of drug use and dependence, comorbidity between substance use and psychiatric disorders, and the intergenerational transmission of deviance. Her current work focuses on the epidemiology of non-prescription drug use in the United States. Dr. Kandel pioneered charting the developmental phases of drug use and identified the specific risk factors for adolescent initiation into each major stage, which provided the basis for the Gateway Hypothesis. In collaboration with Dr. Eric Kandel, she is participating in translational epidemiological research designed to test the Gateway Hypothesis in an animal model in rodents. This research has not only demonstrated that there is a unidirectional sequence from nicotine, alcohol, or VIM – a synthetic cannabinoid – to cocaine at the behavioral, electro-physiological, and molecular levels, but it has identified a fundamental molecular mechanism of action of these drugs on the brain that partially explains the Gateway effect.