MedCity News January 19, 2026
It reduced cravings, dulled alcohol’s “buzz,” and carried no risk of addiction. By every measure, naltrexone should have immediately become a major triumph. Instead, it flopped because the institutions charged with treating addiction refused to use it. Now considered a gold standard, it survived because patients and communities kept it alive.
Alcohol use disorder kills more Americans than opioids or car crashes. Yet for decades, medicine ignored an FDA-approved pill that significantly reduces relapse risk and heavy-drinking days.
That pill, naltrexone, survived not because doctors prescribed it, but because patients and communities kept it alive.
Most medical innovations follow a familiar arc: scientists develop a drug, doctors prescribe it, patients’ lives improve. Naltrexone tells the opposite story.
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