The Recovery Revolution

Recent attention to a reemerging opioid ‘crisis’ has placed the issue of drug addiction at the forefront of national policy debates. Claire D. Clark's The Recovery Revolution is a timely intervention that historicizes these conversations. The book combines political, policy, and medical histories, tracing shifts in treatment strategies between the 1960s and the 1990s. At the center of the story is the emergence of therapeutic communities (TCs), which utilized a participant-observer method to treat drug addiction. Unlike earlier treatments (such as federally run “narcotics farms”) TCs relied on what they framed as patient-driven methods, utilizing former users to guide treatment. Divided into three parts (“Revolution,” “Co-optation,” and “Industrialization”), the book provides a chronological assessment of how the TC method was received by politicians, medical experts, and users. As the book's section titles suggest, Clark explores how patient-driven programs shifted from a fringe approach in the late 1960s to attain varying levels of legitimacy as the war on drugs expanded through the 1980s

Addiction · Addiction treatment · Battle · Criminology · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · History · Law · Medicine · Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare · Psychology · Public Administration