Methadone Maintenance Ignited America’s Opioid Crisis | Dr Randall Bock

The opioid epidemic, widely believed to be caused by the aggressive marketing of OxyContin and pharmaceutical greed, actually has deeper roots in the medicalization of addiction. The pivotal shift occurred in the 1960s with the introduction of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT), which substituted one narcotic for another, fostering a cycle of dependency. Unlike other addictions treated with sobriety, opioid addiction uniquely embraced the disease model, likening methadone to insulin for diabetics. This paradigm shift ignored successful past strategies focusing on sobriety and societal disapproval. The result has been a significant increase in opioid dependency, highlighting the need to revisit moral and adaptive approaches to addiction, promoting personal responsibility and resilience over perpetual medical maintenance.

Randall Bock MD is a primary care physician practicing in the Boston Massachusetts area. He is a published author, having written the book ‘Overturning Zika’, which brings to light the highly speculative, highly doubtful underpinnings of that pandemic. Randy has also applied such thinking to the Covid 19 pandemic, and early on he wrote on the absurdity of the high levels of Covid testing in areas, or at times, where there we're few symptoms.
Randy hosts a weekly "coronavirus conversation" videocast at his "viral conversation" page on Facebook, and blogs at http://randybock.com

Links:
https://brownstone.org/articles/methadone-maintenance-ignited-americas-opioid-crisis/

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Presentation: 26 June 2024