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A physician likely born around 1850-1860, Pettey was controversial in his time for criticizing substances like heroin and opium in all its forms as addictive, regardless of the method of ingestion. He also proposed a now-discarded theory of addiction that relied on toxins and internal medicine over psychology or neurology. Pettey’s motivations were personal and social. From his 1913 book, The…
“I need a lot of cocaine…” Sigmund Freud is a character. It’s hard to find someone else who occupies the space in our culture that he does. Highly influential, incredibly wrong, amusingly absurd. Freud loved coke. He tried treating his friend’s morphine addiction with it, who unsurprisingly said taking coke allowed him to take less morphine. His first major scientific publication was “Uber…
A long time member of the American Medical Association (AMA), Bobby Mukkamala served a tenure as AMA President until June 2026. He now leads the AMA’s substance use task force.
Mitch Rosenthal founded the Phoenix House in
“I think we should be outraged every single time someone dies from any condition that has treatment available that someone isn’t getting. We would not allow, as a society, people with heart attacks to come to a hospital and not get appropriate treatment. This is as serious as that” “Much of what I do is scream back at that. Many who ultimately die from their illness have had significant contacts…
In a 1985 book, Satoru argued that a person with alcoholism was in some sense reborn as part of an underlying family problem, and the stress of a birth that isn’t seen as a family affair can exacerbate problems. This included addressing family dynamics that could be dysfunctional, since an alcoholic simply resuming their past role while being sober could lead to someone else developing a mental…
Cesare Lombroso is both considered a founder of modern criminology and one of the most prolific eugenicists we’ve seen. Rather than seeing crimes and sin as part of human nature, he believed some people were born with a criminal aptitude, which he theorized was indicative of some reversion of humanity to primitive primates. He thought these natural-born criminals could be identified through…
J.E. Dhunjibhoy pioneering Indian psychiatrist whose work as superintendent at the Ranchi Indian Mental Hospital is still celebrated for achieving one of the lowest mortality rates among mental hospitals and publishing research on drug consumption patterns.
He wrote Tratado teórico-práctico de freno-patología o Estudio de las enfermedades mentales (Theoretical-Practical Treatise on Phreno-Pathology or The Study of Mental Illnesses) 1876.