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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Description: How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of patients.
Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult...