HEROINE –
Aug. 26, 2025 – With Dr. Melody Glenn’s new book—Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, And A Modern-Day Crisis—Dr. Marie Nyswander is finally getting her flowers. “Narcotic agents” harassed and threatened Nyswander while she was researching methadone at Rockefeller University. She didn’t back down. Glenn was looking for a woman mentor and found one in Nyswander. She weaves her story of becoming a certified addiction doctor with key moments in Nyswander’s life. As an emergency department physician, she treated numerous patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) and found it extremely frustrating. They never seemed to get well, and Glenn ended up “blaming the victim.” She admits to accepting many of the stigmatizing ideas about people who use drugs, and it bothered her.
When she discovered the work of Nyswander, who had a tremendous amount of respect and empathy for drug users, it was a lightbulb moment. And there was a highly effective and safe OUD medication, methadone, that cut the rate of overdose deaths by over half. Glenn also learned about buprenorphine. In the book there is a powerful passage where she gives a very sick patient buprenorphine, and a few hours later he’s feeling great and wants to leave the hospital. Glenn is elated.
