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Brings together the stories of 2 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 1960s, 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 considered as monumental as the discovery of penicillin. Yet, it still carries a stigma today.
Deftly weaving together interviews, media coverage, and historical documents, Glenn recovers Nyswander’s important legacy and reveals how the forces of racism, fearmongering politicians, and misinformation colluded to set us back decades in our understandings of opioids.
With Nyswander as her guide, Glenn also shares her journey through addiction medicine as she confronts her own personal and philosophical quandaries around bias, ambition, and saviorism in the medical field.
As the US continues to struggle with opioid and fentanyl use in communities, Mother of Methadone is a powerful reminder of the ways biases have prevented doctors from saving countless lives.
“In this captivating, deeply researched book, Melody Glenn delivers a gripping dual narrative that unfolds like an adventure story, all the while offering profoundly useful insights about addiction treatment. Mother of Methadone is an important chronicle of how stigma, inertia, and ignorance hamper our mental health system—a vital read for understanding both the history and the future of addiction care at a pivotal moment for our nation’s health.”
—Carl Erik Fisher, MD, author of The Urge: Our Story of Addiction
“How exciting to discover a new hero! Dr. Marie Nyswander was a renegade with a blazing focus on how to ease suffering. Melody Glenn intertwines Nyswander’s story with her own journey of discovery, producing a manifesto for compassionate, efficacious treatment of patients at their most vulnerable.”
—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
“It is precisely what Dr. Melody Glenn sought and found in the story of Dr. Marie Nyswander that she generously offers to the reader: affirmation, companionship, and reclamation. As she honors the contributions that carved the path for her, it was a thrill to follow Glenn’s relentless pursuit of truth and belonging, not only for herself and Dr. Nyswander but also for people who are in pain, people in recovery, and people who use drugs. Through the intricate and expertly braided stories of two astonishing doctors, a conversation emerges between two women who couldn't walk away—one we all need to hear.”
—Jessica Hoppe, author of First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
“A fascinating, hidden story of the woman behind the medication that, even now, is the best treatment we have for opioid addiction—and why, despite the fact that this drug cuts the death rate by 50 percent or more, it is still so difficult to get.”
—Maia Szalavitz, author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction
“A sweeping, narrative approach to a question that has plagued modern medicine and society: when people become addicted to drugs, how can we help them? Through exhaustive historical research, Dr. Glenn trains her diagnostician’s eye on the problem at hand—and on the solution that she poses, both within the pages of the book and in her work as an addiction medicine physician. Mother of Methadone is a bold work of nonfiction from someone who has seen, up close, the wreckage of addiction and has a clear stance on what we can do about it. The book is political and personal at once, tracking the evolution of Glenn’s own impressions of people who use drugs and offering for the reader a model for how to update their own assumptions toward a new paradigm of care.”
—Margo Steines, author of Brutalities: A Love Story