Orthodox Medicine's 19th Century War Against Effective Addiction Treatment

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the American Associate for the Cure of Inebriates, the only professional addiction treatment organization in the United States, waged a war to incarcerate people with addictions in asylums much like insane asylums and lobbied that those who continued to use intoxicants after treatment should be incarcerated for life. The American Associate for the Cure of Inebriates was also bitterly opposed to any pharmaceutical treatments for addictions. When a reasonably effective form of aversion therapy for alcohol addiction which utilized strychnine injections was discovered in Russia in 1886, it was ignored by the American Associate for the Cure of Inebriates, although it was widely publicized in other English language medical journals. Thus, the strychnine treatment was taken over by entrepreneurs like Dr. Leslie Keeley, who dubbed it the "Gold Cure," and who made millions of dollars while providing a reasonably effect treatment for addiction to alcohol. The movement to incarcerate inebriates in asylums proved to be a total failure, whereas the commercialized "Gold Cure" was a huge success. However, the advocates of inebriate asylums continued to wage a war against the "Gold Cure" and other pharmaceutical treatments for addiction throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the story of that ideological battle.