Charles O’Keeffe, M.B.A.

Charles O’Keeffe is a professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Preventive Medicine & Community Health at the VCU School of Medicine. He did his undergraduate work in pharmacy and chemistry at the Medical College of Virginia School of Pharmacy and Temple University and earned his MBA at Loyola. He developed the first child-resistant, abuse-resistant vehicle for dispensing methadone as president of Drug Abuse Rehabilitation Services and served as president of Washington Reference Laboratories, which was the largest clinical toxicology laboratory in the nation, providing toxicology services to the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. He has served in the White House under three presidents; as Advisor, Special Assistant for International Health, and as Deputy Director of the Office of Drug Abuse Policy, he was responsible for encouraging the U.S. Senate to ratify the Convention on Psychotropic Substances and has served on U.S. delegations to the World Health Assembly and the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. He has served as expert advisor to the WHO, UNFDAC, UNSDRI, and other UN agencies. As president of Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, he was responsible for the industry portion of the NIDA/industry cooperative development of buprenorphine for the treatment of opiate addiction and was instrumental in assisting the US Congress to reach consensus on the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000 which allowed agonist addiction treatment in private physicians’ offices for the first time in over 80 years, and its subsequent revisions. He is the founder of the tripartite International Programme in Addiction Studies (VCU/University of Adelaide/ King’s College London) and a Fellow in the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.