America's first war on drugs, launched under Nixon, was fought partly with treatment clinics. Historian Emily Dufton traces what became of that effort and how medication for addiction turned into an industry.
Readical Key Points
- A history of medication-assisted treatment in the United States, from 1971 to the present
- Covers methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone
- Draws on original research and more than a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, lobbyists, patients and families
- Hardcover, 416 pages, University of Chicago Press, 2026
Dufton follows medication-assisted treatment from the federally funded clinics of the early 1970s to the Reagan administration's dismantling of that system in 1981, when enforcement took its place. She then traces how treatment was rebuilt as a private business, and asks why medications for opioid addiction became costly and hard to reach even as that business grew. A closing section looks abroad for alternatives.
The book serves readers of drug policy and American political history, and clinicians, advocates and policymakers working on the opioid crisis today. It reads the crisis through the record of a treatment system that was built, abandoned and then sold.
About the Author
Emily Dufton holds a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University and writes on the history of American drug policy. She is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America, received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and has written for the Washington Post and Smithsonian magazine.
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