A Proven Answer to the Opioid Crisis: Meet the "Doctor of Addictions"
“I would have been dead,” the voice told me confidently across the phone. Virtually every testimony from former patients contains that line. “If it weren’t for him, I would have been dead.”
In this case, the voice belonged to Jay Lafauci, a former fire lieutenant in Melrose, Massachusetts, a middle-class community north of Boston. Like millions of victims of the opioid epidemic, Jay’s trouble resulted after a personal injury. He hurt his back. A doctor prescribed him opioid painkillers—Percocet® and Oxycontin®. Like so many others in the 1990s, his doctor overprescribed these addictive drugs. “You got cancer?” his pharmacist quipped, goggling the size of the order. But it was just back pain. Like many others, Jay would get hooked. When his prescriptions ran out, he could not quit. In what is a tragically common story now, Jay found what he wanted on the street.
He knew he needed to quit. Over the following years, like most others, Jay checked into rehab “like 20 times,” he said. But detox is only a seven-day stint—not long enough, not comprehensive enough for sobriety. “Spin dry,” Jay called it. Once out, patients cannot hold out long. Most inevitably return to substance abuse.
Inevitably, Jay got busted. “If you do something illegal long enough,” he confessed, allowing me to fill in the blank. He had to resign his job with the fire department. He was broke. He lost nearly everything. Eventually, detox itself was no longer an option. Insurance companies will quit paying it. But there was still one other option. Insurance said it would still pay for primary care, and there was an outlier in the Boston area treating addiction as outpatient primary care. Jay’s insurance company told him to go to this guy.
“But it’s a Saturday night?” Jay thought, “What doctor is open at these hours?” He called anyway. It turned out, that doctor took calls and in fact took patients almost any time. His name is Punyamurtula Kishore (rhymes with “sea-shore”), and he is known to many of his patients and friends as “The Doctor of Addictions.”
Thanks to Dr. Kishore’s pioneering genius and tireless efforts, Jay achieved a lasting sobriety. Today, he has been sober for 16 years, and works as a bus driver. “If it were not for him,” Jay said, “I would have been dead. I am thankful to this day.”[1]
You can hear the confession, “I would have been dead were it not for him,” repeated on the lips of many of Kishore’s former patients. One posted in a forum with the same story of having failed after detox multiple times, never lasting longer than 12 days. After Kishore’s treatments, however, he was transformed. He wanted to share his story with the world: “As far as I’m concerned, this man is a genius! . . . I owe my life to him!”[2]
Kerri Hume, the office manager of Kishore’s Weymouth clinic stated, “So many were getting their lives back on track, getting good jobs, able to go back to their families.”[3] Staff nurse Luz Thomas recalled one occasion when a former patient’s wife brought a cake into the clinic to celebrate two years of sobriety. Luz said, “This man had been on Methadone for 20 years of his life and he was free, completely free from everything, and he was living just such a marvelous life and they were celebrating.” Another former patient named Gena said, “When I was 19, I couldn’t get sober for more than . . . I think three weeks was the longest I had gone in years. . . . I honestly don’t think I’d be alive to see my son right now. . . .”
Union presence is powerful in Massachusetts, and unions rely on workers. But the middle-class, blue-collar workforce was being decimated by the opioid epidemic. One top official, however, learned of Kishore’s success, and he became a top fan. Former state senator Steven Tolman is president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. He speaks highly of the Doctor of Addictions: “When I had the cases where nothing was working, I would call Dr. Kishore, and he would say, send them right over. I’ll see him. . . . He would never say no. He would always see the patient and he would talk to the patient in his gentle manner and he would explain to them that ‘you can beat this. You don’t have to be on dangerous drugs. You can get off this. You might be sick for a while, but you can beat this.’”
With the opioid crisis spiraling into a well-publicized epidemic, you would think Kishore’s name and his unique, powerful methods would be a household name—like “AA” or the standard mass-produced answer of methadone clinics. During his most active years, he treated hundreds of thousands of addicted patients in Massachusetts and achieved sobriety rates unheard-of among the now-traditional narcotic models, which Kishore refers to as “legal dope.” The model he developed after decades of research, education, and practice, rises as a beacon of hope amidst our epidemic today. It is time to look beyond the obviously failed detox and meth-clinic paradigms and pay attention to a proven better way.
***
When I finally met Dr. Kishore in person, I was unprepared for one of the gentlest, kindest, and most humble men ever to enter my 45 years of experience. I had spoken with him on the phone, corresponded with him, read about his practice and his case, and written articles about him. I knew he was professional, rigorous, scientific, and in command of the rare and difficult medical specialty of addiction treatment. When we met in person, I anticipated something of a commanding expert shaped by decades of working with addictions, drug dealers, prisoners, business regulators, medical boards, insurance companies, lawyers, politicians, and other cutthroats—the kind of experience that can leave one not only seasoned but hardened, even cynical. Yet across from me sat a warm, gentle man with soft eyes, graceful manners, and a consistent, calm, humble voice. I kept reminding myself that this man almost singlehandedly pioneered a revolution in a medical field. His advances in addiction treatment produced sobriety rates unseen anywhere else before or since.
For about thirty minutes, Kishore engaged me with descriptions of medical details that would probably have been boring had anyone else related them; but a love for his practice, like the devotion of a missionary, exuded through his ever-calm voice with such passion that I could not stop listening.
The relationship that developed that day led to an admiration. The more I studied the man, his life, his practice, and his story, the more I realized what a rare opportunity this was in so many ways. Not many men of this character and caliber come along. You are about to read about a man who survived from his very birth through a miracle, grew into a star pupil in India, became a doctor, came to the U.S., landed by the hand of providence in an addiction care hospital, studied further at Harvard University, worked with world-renowned physicians and professors, became a medical director of multiple hospitals and medical programs, directed the medical care of a whole state’s correctional institutions, opened his own private practice, revolutionized addiction treatment, attained unheard-of sobriety rates, grew his business from a single office into 52 clinics with 370 employees and $20 million in revenue, donated 30 percent of his own salary to an educational charity he created, treated over a quarter of a million addicted individuals and their families, was honored with awards from all kinds of hospitals, professional groups, professional sports teams, and much more, and . . .
. . . there he sat speaking to me as if I were his peer, on his level, a casual friend.
I can honestly say I have rarely if ever met such genius, grit, gentleness, accomplishment, and humility in a single individual.
Kishore’s rise from humble beginnings in India to some of the most prestigious medical establishments in Boston (or the world, for that matter) constitutes a realization of the American dream extended to an international level. It is an idyllic path, not only as a personal success, but even more so when we consider the long record of personalized and effective care focused on patients. It is the American dream and the moral ideal of putting others first, of actually serving people, rolled into one. As one of those things that helps “restore faith in humanity,” you cannot ask for much more.
It comes in shocking contrast, then, to picture this same Dr. Kishore at 10:45 p.m. one Tuesday night, jolted by an all-out SWAT raid bursting through his door. One simply cannot imagine armies of black vehicles lining and barricading his street, police surrounding his house, a circling helicopter loudly clapping overhead, and a full act of rudeness inside as Mrs. Kishore was ordered around while the doctor was jostled, handcuffed, stuffed away, and hustled off to jail.
But this is exactly what happened to this man—the man who has done more for the addiction epidemic in America than any other single individual, and would do more still if he could.
What could warrant this treatment? Sure, SWAT raids are indeed overused these days—multiple times per day, and sometimes for things as routine as basic search warrants. But even these are a minority. Was the doctor leading a human trafficking operation? Did he deal in child pornography? Were there ties to organized crime? Did he have a trail of bodies? Was he running illegal narcotics through his operations?
Nothing like these were the case. Nothing. The crime for which Dr. Kishore was later charged? Allegedly running a “kickback scheme”—a charge that was not only was never substantiated, but was easily disproven. Nevertheless, the state would use the charge, and a long line of dirty tricks, to destroy Kishore’s practice.
But why? Others had actually settled such charges with mere fines and gone back to work. Someone for some reason wanted something more from Kishore. They wanted him gone—gone as a rival, gone as a thorn in their side, gone as a threat to something they coveted. Or so it seems.
What was it? Something did not add up, and perhaps that is the best phrase to use: numbers not adding up. Numbers, that is, as in cash flow. Kishore’s radical success in actually sobering-up addicted patients, and without addictive medications, meant several powerful forces were losing out on streams of potential revenue.
This brief biography lays out just a bit of that story and some of the understanding behind it. We will get a glimpse how so many powerful forces get filthy rich from the addiction industry, why such an industry has a powerful interest in keeping millions of people addicted to “treatment” prescription drugs, and why actually doing something to solve the opioid epidemic, as well as other addictions, is actually perceived as a threat by some entities.
It is my hope that my meager contribution may have several beneficial effects. First, it will complement the work of others on Kishore’s case. There is a set of more detailed articles prepared by the Chalcedon Foundation, and a documentary coming soon on the same subject: the reader can see my recommended resources in the back. Second, I hope that those affected by addiction will learn there is a better way than trading one addiction for another, and that the aspiration of many addicted individuals for actual sobriety can indeed be a reality, and very effectively so through the methods Kishore pioneered and refined over decades. Third, I hope to augment the growing realization that while health industry lobbies and centralized government are each proper enough objects of criticism as they are, they make for an even more toxic combination. The results have been an increase in addictions, debt, prisoners, and probationers while the epidemic still spirals out of control. Finally, I hope that highlighting these realities will inspire some policymakers and politicians to speak the truth and do the right thing—which will very likely be an act of political self-immolation. Nevertheless, our country and her 20 million addicted individuals plea for voices that will brave the flames. . . .
The Doctor of Addictions: Dr. Kishore’s Breakthrough in Addiction Treatment and the Tragic Story of How the Deep State Destroyed It is available on Amazon in paperack and Kindle. It is Free on KindleUnlimited.