March of Folly: Harvard's Dr. John Kelly on the War on Drugs and the Way Forward

For over 50 years, America’s “war on drugs” has been a war with unintended consequences. Framed as a battle to be won, it reshaped addiction not as a public health crisis but as a moral and criminal one. This rhetoric didn’t just stigmatize millions — it fundamentally altered the course of treatment and recovery for decades.

We sit down with Dr. John F. Kelly, Harvard Medical School’s first endowed professor in addiction medicine and Director of the Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Kelly takes us deep into how the language of war derailed our response to addiction, and how we’ve fought to course-correct since. From the abandonment of outdated treatment models to the rise of evidence-based care, he breaks down the evolving science of recovery and the hard-won insights that are reshaping policy, public perception, and patient outcomes.

Dr. Kelly also shares what the latest research tells us about recovery support services, how we’re finally tilting the scales from criminal justice to public health, and what we must do next to meet the challenges of the opioid epidemic and beyond.

This is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand how far we've come in treating substance use disorder, and how far we still have to go.