The history of methadone treatment offers a striking example of the benefits and limits of research findings on public attitudes and policies for methadone maintenance treatment. To understand methadone maintenance treatment, it is necessary to appreciate the profound stigma attached to both patients and treatment providers. This establishes the context for understanding how a modality with the most extensive research base in the addiction treatment field nonetheless can engender passionate dispute.

Methadone maintenance as a treatment modality was developed in the mid-1960s by Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander in response to prevailing concerns about epidemic levels of heroin addiction and related health problems, mortality (especially among young people 15 to 35 years old) and high relapse rates. Methadone itself had been synthesized in Germany in World War II as a synthetic analgesic and was studied at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington...