October 2024 SHC Noon Lecture to Feature Dr. Ulrich Koch

Join us this month for a with Dr. Ulrich Koch on methadone maintenance in the early 1970s spurred on by the reports of heroin-using servicemen in Vietnam. This lecture will be held Wednesday, October 16, 2024, at 12pm on Zoom. The SHC Noon Lectures are free and open to anyone interested in the history of the health sciences.

In the summer and fall of 1971 reports of heroin-using servicemen in Vietnam caused a short-lived moral panic. Some estimated that up to 20% of soldiers had used heroin during their deployment, and government officials braced themselves for a worsening of what was increasingly described as a heroin epidemic at home. At the time, it was often assumed that drug addiction spread like a communicable disease. On the other hand, the struggles of servicemen with substance use also evoked more empathy for the plight of addicts. The Nixon administration was able to use this opening to invest in rehabilitation programs, most prominently and controversially methadone maintenance treatment (MMT), which had been introduced half a decade before; while another controversial technical innovation, urinalysis, was deployed on a massive scale to screen veterans before their return to the US, also to discourage drug use. The predicted epidemic among returning soldiers never came, however. Only a slim minority of those who had used opiates during their deployment required long-term treatment to abstain from heroin use. This, in turn, was at odds with how MMT was promoted and justified, namely as a biomedical intervention that targeted a metabolic disorder. Abstinence from drugs became again entrenched as the overarching aim of any rehabilitative effort after methadone pioneers had argued for a decoupling of abstinence and the goal of “social rehabilitation.” I end my talk by discussing the implications of this episode for the public perception of MMT, and for the uses of methadone within therapeutic settings that obscured the drug’s potential as a harm reduction tool.

Ulrich Koch is a psychologist and a historian and philosopher of the medical sciences. He currently is an Associate Professor of Clinical Research and Leadership at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences where he teaches a broad range of courses that offer social science and humanities perspectives on health, illness, and clinical care. Much of Dr. Koch’s scholarship is situated at the intersection of the history of science – with a focus on the psychological disciplines – and bioethics. Current research areas include the history of medication-assisted treatments for opioid use disorder, especially methadone maintenance, and the history of psychotherapy and its popularization. Dr. Koch was a Visiting Research Fellow at University College London’s Health Humanities Centre in 2018, and, before joining GW, a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Humanities Center on a fellowship awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2008, he received a Master of Science degree in psychology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland and, in 2012, his PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Besides holding academic positions, Dr. Koch also has several years of experience as a clinical psychologist working in addiction treatment.

This event is open to the public. Virtual seating is limited and registration is required by Monday, October 14, 2024, at 6 PM to reserve your seat and to receive login information.