Vincent Dole was an American doctor, who, along with his wife Dr Marie Nyswander, pioneered the practice of substituting the synthetic narcotic agonist methadone to treat heroin addiction. Drs. Dole & Nyswander, in establishing Methadone maintenance treatment, revolutionized addiction medicine which for a century had been based on the conventional and widely held view that narcotic addiction was the result of an intractable moral defect. His work resulted in the partial re-legalization of opioid maintenance in the United States. For this contribution he was a recipient of the prestigious Lasker Award for Medicine, sometimes referred to as "America's Nobel Prize".
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