Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Isidore Obot was born in 1948 as the sixth of seven children in a small village in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. In the period leading up to Nigerian independence there was a growing emphasis on educating young people to prepare them for post independence challenges. He attended primary school and then a residential seminary school run by Catholic priests from Ireland. His final year (1967) coincided with the beginning of the Nigerian civil war when schools were closed in affected areas, but he was able to complete his secondary school education later in another school. Like many of his mates Isidore took his studies very seriously and developed interest in reading on a wide range of subjects. His sister and her husband had left for the United States on a study abroad scholarship programme and he joined them in the US, studying at Loyola College in Baltimore from 1973. His family expected him to study medicine, but he chose psychology instead, a subject which no one in his village knew anything about. He completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, did a Master’s in the same department and then moved to Howard University in Washington where he did his doctorate. He later completed a Master of Public Health degree at Harvard University and has held several training and post-graduate fellowships. In those graduate programmes he encountered direct references to addiction, and he began to focus greater attention on substance abuse as a behavioural health issue (however, his interest in the field of addiction had initiated in high school in Nigeria when he read about behaviour in foreign magazines, in particular Time and Readers’ Digest). He also developed a strong interest in survey research. As a research fellow working with Jim Anthony at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, he was drawn to analysis of data from secondary sources like the US National Household Survey. Isidore returned to Nigeria in late 1982 for a compulsory year of national service, went back to the US for postdoctoral training and then took up a position at the University of Jos, in Nigeria, in 1985. Among the courses he taught was the psychology of substance abuse, the only course on addiction in the university. He and his colleagues wanted to do research, but little funding was available. Personal funds were the only means of supporting research. In the late 1980s he gained a small grant from the university to conduct a population survey of alcohol and other drug use in the central (middle belt) region of the country. This resulted in the publication of a monograph, and he also contributed data from the survey to a WHO publication edited by Robin Room. Addiction was not regarded as a serious problem in Nigeria before independence and professionals who saw the problem coming called for a response based on law enforcement, where the main problem was cannabis and the way to limit use was to limit supply. The late 1980s to early 1990s was a period of growing interest in all aspects of the drug scene in Nigeria. From what was primarily a trafficking country, citizens became users in large numbers and addiction became a disorder of public health concern. The earliest published studies were by Professor Lambo and colleagues working in psychiatric facilities. In the late 1980s Dr Ona Pela founded the Nigerian Institute on Substance Abuse. Obot expanded addiction research to include social and behavioral aspects. In 1990 he founded a research society: the Centre for Research and Information on Substance Abuse (CRISA). The Centre is known in particular for two activities: the first is the Biennial International Conference on Drugs, Alcohol and Society in Africa, launched in Nigeria in 1991; the second is the publication of the African Journal of Drug and Alcohol Studies, launched in 2000, of which he is editor in chief. Both the conference series and the journal have benefitted from many external grants. Working in the addiction field has not been easy as addiction is a highly stigmatized area in Africa. CRISA has conducted surveys with funding from the Nigerian government and has also received small grants to conduct research on alcohol, train practitioners, organize conferences and provide services for people who use drugs. Obot was influenced by the work of Thomas Adeoye Lambo, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Ibadan, who later became deputy director of WHO in Geneva. In terms of where the field is heading, the Nigerian government has adopted harm reduction as a policy. The national survey, funded by the European Union and carried out by CRISA in 2017, opened many eyes to the extent of the problem and is about to be repeated in 2025. Obot considers that there is a need for stand-alone and degree-awarding programmes in substance use within social and sciences to give addiction independence as a core discipline in higher education.
Source: Addiction
DOI: 10.1111/add.70279
Author: Virginia Berridge
Institution: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4417452794
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