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 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Deftly weaving together interviews, media coverage, and historical documents, Glenn recovers Nyswander’s important legacy and reveals how the forces of racism, fearmongering politicians, and misinformation colluded to set us back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.

Melody Glenn, MD, is a practicing addiction and emergency physician and assistant professor of psychiatry and emergency medicine at The University of Arizona. Her addiction research has been published in medical journals and presented nationally.