Mother of Methadone
A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis
Brings together the stories of two doctors battling the opioid epidemic half a century apart to reveal the origins of today's public health crisis
A call to remove the stigma against addicts, addiction, and treatment providers
Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren’t used more broadly. That’s when she found Dr. Marie Nyswander.
In the 1960’s, Nyswander defied the DEA and medical establishment to co-develop methadone maintenance as a treatment for heroin addiction. According to some addiction specialists, its discovery could be…