HOW WE GOT HERE The Pharmaceutical History Behind the Opioid Crisis

Bio-electrode Therapy: Treating Complex Pain and Addictions

By Les Moncrieff

Registered Acupuncturist (Ret.)

Retired Addiction Services Clinician, Province of British Columbia

Developer, Bio-electrode Therapy

2026

Foreword

Imagine, for a moment, that you could be free.

Free from the slavery of addiction. Free from the impossible agony of withdrawal and its endless side effects. Free from the physical and emotional pain that brought you to prescribed drug dependence in the first place. Free from a system that was never fully designed for your liberation.

That freedom is possible. I have witnessed it, across four decades of working at the front of the addiction crisis. I have seen people walk out of withdrawal supported by simple, natural therapies, sleeping through the night, their pain addressed, their craving gone without a new prescription and without a new dependency.

The history and politics of addiction matter, and this document tells them plainly. I believe that when you understand how you came to be where you are — who invented the substances in your body, why, and who profits from your remaining dependent on them — you will find the courage and the strength to seek another way.

Your addiction was not an accident. You are not responsible for how the system was built or for what it did to you. But you are responsible for your recovery. You are responsible for your freedom. And you are more capable of both than the system has ever told you.

There are simple, natural therapies that you can learn to apply yourself — for your own body, and for the people around you. I offer them freely. They cost almost nothing. They cannot be patented. They belong to you.

This document will appear extreme to some. It will be called controversial. The truth often is. But recovery becomes a joy when you understand what you are recovering from, and when you have the tools to do it. Step by step.

By getting free yourself, you will have the strength, the skills, and perhaps a path and purpose to share your freedom with others. We can address and end this addiction plague together.

— Les Moncrieff, R.Ac. (Ret.)

Vancouver, British Columbia, 2026

Endorsements

Les, in his unrelenting commitment to the alleviation of people's suffering and driven by his natural curiosity and scholarship, has, after a long professional life of deep practice and study, discovered his non-pharmacological, astonishingly effective Bio-electrode Therapy. Herein he explains the basis for this simple technique, which addresses some of the most devastating health challenges of our time. The reader will be astounded, as am I, at the basic simplicity of this therapy, which he outlines herein in a cogent, usable format.

— E.L. Haskell, R.N., B.Sc.N., M.D., FRCP(C) Psychiatry, I.S.A.M. Diplomat

Over the past twenty-five years of my professional and private life, Les has patiently demonstrated the effective application of Chinese Medicine's principles and protocols. He has adapted these fundamentals in a unique and benign approach for the treatment of pain and addiction. In a world awash in potent opioids, flaming an international crisis, the time to explore safe alternatives for pain and addiction management has never been more urgent. The information and instructions in this book offer such an alternative.

— Dr. Garth McIver, MD, Medical Director (ret.), Vancouver Health Authority Addiction Services

Two years ago, I was introduced to Bio-electrode Therapy, a system of healing which I have found to be effective for a wide variety of my patients' complaints. Bio-electrode Therapy is a non-invasive, safe, affordable, and efficacious form of therapy that combines the ancient practice of acupuncture with the modern understanding of bio-electrical microcurrents. Of particular interest is its profound effects on symptoms related to drug withdrawal, and the role it might play to alleviate suffering in the current opioid crisis. I believe that, if utilized widely, this form of treatment has the potential to ease the suffering of millions.

— Dr. Henry Dent, DTCM

A Note Before You Read This

This document was not written to be comfortable. It was written because thirty years of working inside government addiction services taught me that the most important things are rarely said out loud — not in clinical meetings, not in policy briefings, not in the conversations between physicians and the patients they are managing. They are not said because saying them carries professional risk. They are not said because the system that benefits from silence is also the system that signs the paycheques.

I am no longer on that payroll. So I am going to say them.

If you are reading this because you or someone you love is caught in the opioid crisis — on methadone, on Suboxone, on Sublocade, on fentanyl, or somewhere in the brutal geography between them — this document is first and foremost for you. You deserve to know the history of the substances your body has been given. You deserve to know who invented them, why, who profited from them, and what that profit required of you. You deserve to know that the difficulty you have experienced getting free is not a personal failure. It was engineered.

If you are a healthcare worker who has felt the gap between what you were trained to do and what you see happening to the people in your care — this document is for you too. You are not alone in what you suspect. What follows is the documented history behind your instinct.

If you are a policy maker, a politician, a bureaucrat, or anyone with institutional power over how addiction is treated and funded — read this and understand that inaction is a choice. It is a choice with a body count. On the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, that count is visible on the street. In every small city and rural town across North America, it is less visible but no less real.

Overdose is often not an accident. It is the final expression of despair so complete that a person has decided, consciously or not, that painlessness is only available in death. The system that produced that despair is still operating. It is still profitable. And it is still called treatment.

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Part One: Where It Began

War, Profit, and the Birth of Synthetic Dependency

The German Origins: Methamphetamine and the Blitzkrieg

The story of the modern opioid crisis does not begin in an American suburb in the 1990s. It begins in Germany in the 1930s, in the laboratories of one of the most powerful industrial-military conglomerates in history, under a government preparing the world for war.

In 1938, the Berlin-based Temmler Pharmaceutical company introduced methamphetamine to the German civilian market under the brand name Pervitin. It was marketed as a remedy for fatigue, depression, and low mood. It could be purchased over the counter. It was briefly available in chocolate bars. Within months, it was endemic among the German population.

Military doctor Otto Ranke tested Pervitin on ninety university students and concluded it could help Nazi Germany win the war. Between April and July 1940, German servicemen received more than 35 million methamphetamine tablets. The drug was dispensed to pilots as Fliegerschokolade, flyer’s chocolate and to tank crews as Panzerschokolade, tanker’s chocolate. Under its influence, Wehrmacht troops fought and marched for ten days straight, covering an average of twenty-two miles per day. Medical historian Peter Steinkamp has written plainly: “Blitzkrieg was guided by methamphetamine.”

The Japanese military had independently developed their own methamphetamine program, having first synthesised the compound in the late nineteenth century. It was distributed to Japanese soldiers and factory workers under the name Philopon throughout the war.

The military quickly discovered the consequences. Soldiers became violent, attacked officers, committed crimes against civilians. Severe withdrawal left them incapacitated for days — unable to function, described by commanders as looking “more like zombies than warriors.” The army cut back use sharply by 1941 and restricted it to prescription only. The addiction potential had been known from the beginning. It had been set aside because the military advantage appeared to justify it.

This is the first instance of a pattern that would repeat across the next ninety years: a substance is developed or deployed for non-medical purposes; its addictive and destructive properties are known and suppressed; the human cost is deemed acceptable by those who do not bear it.

Hitler’s Personal Dependency and the Doctor Who Enabled It

Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, administered an estimated 800 injections to Hitler over the course of the war. Morell’s own records document frequent doses of Eukodal — the German brand name for oxycodone — as well as a pharmacological cocktail that included amphetamines, barbiturates, and numerous other substances. By the spring of 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Berlin, historians have concluded that Hitler was likely experiencing severe withdrawal as Morell could no longer source drugs in the devastated city.

The leader who prosecuted the most destructive war in human history was, in the final months, a man in the grip of pharmaceutical dependency — managed by a physician whose primary function had become the maintenance of his patient’s chemical functioning. The parallel to the modern OAT model is not subtle.

Methadone: The Compound That Outlasted the Reich

In 1937, two chemists working for IG Farbenindustrie in Frankfurt, Germany — Max Bockmühl and Gustav Ehrhart — synthesised a compound they numbered Va 10820. They were not trying to help people in pain. They were solving a military supply problem.

Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Four-Year Plan had set Germany on a course toward economic self-sufficiency — Autarkie — in preparation for war. Germany imported nearly all of its opium from Asia and the Middle East. If supply lines were cut, there would be no morphine for battlefield casualties. The assignment was to produce a synthetic replacement, manufactured domestically, independent of foreign supply. Va 10820 was that solution. It would eventually be known as methadone.

It was patented in 1941. Early clinical trials showed it produced dependency as readily as morphine, caused euphoria, and was toxic at the doses being tested. The researchers noted it had high addiction potential. These findings were classified. When the compound was marketed, it was advertised as having “little risk for addiction.” The first lie in methadone’s history was recorded before the war had ended.

IG Farbenindustrie: The Corporation Behind the Compound

IG Farbenindustrie was not simply a pharmaceutical company. It was the most powerful industrial conglomerate in Germany — a combine of chemical, pharmaceutical, and industrial manufacturers that produced explosives, synthetic rubber, synthetic fuel, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals for the Nazi war machine.

It produced Zyklon B — the gas used in the Nazi death camps. It operated factories using slave labour drawn directly from Auschwitz; its subsidiary at Monowitz used approximately thirty thousand concentration camp prisoners, of whom an estimated ten thousand died. At the Nuremberg trials, twenty-four IG Farben executives were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Twelve were convicted. Most served sentences of only a few years before being released and quietly returning to senior positions in West German industry.

The same corporation that produced methadone also produced the industrial infrastructure of the Holocaust. This is not an aside. It is the context in which the compound was created — the values, the priorities, and the relationship between profit, power, and human life that governed its development.

Operation Paperclip: How Germany’s Science Became America’s Medicine

When Allied forces moved through Germany in 1945, specialised intelligence units followed behind the combat troops with a specific mission: collect. Scientific papers, research records, patents, laboratory equipment, and the scientists themselves. At the Hoechst laboratories, they found the methadone formula and all associated documentation. These were seized as war reparations — intellectual property stripped from a defeated enemy and transferred to the United States Department of Commerce Intelligence Division.

Operation Paperclip — a secret U.S. government program — brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States between 1945 and 1959. The program’s stated value was estimated at over ten billion dollars in patents and industrial processes. Roughly half of the early Paperclip specialists had been members of the Nazi Party. Their records were reviewed with what the program’s administrators called “only the most cursory scrutiny” — a paperclip on the folder indicated the candidate was of interest and should not be examined too closely.

Some Paperclip scientists had worked on medical experiments in Nazi Germany. They were quietly reassigned to American laboratories and pharmaceutical firms. The knowledge they carried — about synthetic opioids, about human physiological response to chemical compounds, about the boundaries between medicine and weaponization — entered American science without accountability for how it had been acquired.

By 1947, the methadone formula had been acquired by Eli Lilly and Company, renamed Dolophine, and launched as an American analgesic. A myth later circulated that Dolophine was named after Adolf Hitler — “Adolphine” — invented by New York street linguists in the 1970s as a way to discredit methadone treatment. The etymology is false; the name derived from the Latin dolor (pain) and finis (end). But the emotional truth of the myth was more accurate than its etymology. The drug was a Nazi invention, transferred to American commerce, rebranded, and sold as medicine. No one told the patients.

Part Two: The Management of the Poor

Methadone Maintenance and the Architecture of Retained Dependency

For nearly two decades after its American introduction, methadone was used primarily as a painkiller. Its transformation into the foundation of North American addiction treatment happened in New York City in the 1960s, and the context of that transformation matters as much as the science.

By the early 1960s, heroin use had become concentrated in Black and Latino communities in American cities. The associated crime was a political problem. The question being asked in city halls and government offices was not genuinely how do we help these people recover. It was: how do we manage this population and reduce the disruption it causes.

In 1964, Drs. Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander at the Rockefeller Institute began their methadone maintenance studies. Dole was a metabolic diseases specialist. His framework was explicitly medical: addiction, he argued, was a permanent metabolic disease requiring permanent pharmacological management — the same way diabetes requires insulin. This was not a neutral scientific position. It carried a profound implication: addiction was not recoverable. The goal of treatment was not liberation. The goal was stabilization. The patient would be maintained, indefinitely, on a controlled substance.

The results showed reduced heroin use and reduced crime among maintained patients. City administrators were immediately interested — not because patients were healing, but because they were more compliant, less criminal, less visible. The program expanded rapidly. By 1971 the FDA approved methadone for addiction treatment. By 1976 there were 38,000 patients on methadone in New York City alone.

What Was Not Discussed

Methadone has a half-life of 24 to 36 hours. Withdrawal from it is slower, more protracted, and in many clinical respects more debilitating than heroin withdrawal. Patients who attempted to taper found the process could stretch across months or years, with persistent physical and psychological symptoms. Many found it effectively impossible without intensive support the system never provided.

Here is the clinical reality that the maintenance model has never been required to answer for: heroin withdrawal, in most cases, resolves within four to seven days. The acute physical syndrome — the nausea, the muscle cramps, the insomnia, the sweating — is intensely uncomfortable. It is not, for most people, medically dangerous. With adequate symptomatic support, hydration, and human care, a person dependent on heroin can be through the worst of their physical withdrawal and physiologically stable within a week.

Heroin itself, in terms of direct pharmacological toxicity, causes remarkably little organ damage. The deaths, the infections, the cardiovascular destruction associated with heroin use are products of the illegal supply chain — the unknown concentrations, the adulterants, the unsterile equipment — not the molecule. In a controlled clinical context, the drug itself does not destroy the liver, the kidneys, or the heart the way that alcohol or methamphetamine does.

Hold that clinical reality against what the maintenance model offers: a lifetime prescription for a synthetic opioid whose withdrawal syndrome lasts not days but months. In the case of methadone, the protracted withdrawal syndrome can persist for weeks and months, dominated particularly by severe and relentless insomnia. Tapering from methadone is, in clinical experience, harder than tapering from heroin. The drug that is officially the treatment produces harder withdrawal than the drug it was designed to treat. Every experienced addiction clinician knows this. It does not appear in pharmaceutical marketing materials or clinical guidelines.

The maintenance model had no meaningful exit built into it. It was not designed to end. It was designed to continue.

The Business Model

Privately owned methadone clinics proliferated in lower-income communities across North America. Patients paid per dose or through public insurance. The financial incentive for clinic operators was retention — keeping patients coming back as long as possible. The metrics used to evaluate success measured exactly what sustained the business: retention rates and reduced illicit drug use. They did not measure whether patients ever became free.

Some patients remained on methadone for thirty or forty years. The medical literature called this successful treatment.

The Vietnam Evidence: What Recovery Actually Requires

In 1974, researcher Lee Robins published findings from a landmark study of American veterans returning from Vietnam. Approximately 20% of returning soldiers had been addicted to heroin during their service. What Robins found challenged every assumption the maintenance model was built upon: roughly 88% of those veterans simply stopped using after returning home — without treatment, without methadone, without clinical intervention of any kind.

The study was profoundly threatening to the addiction establishment. It demonstrated that the context of use — the environment, the meaning, the availability of alternative sources of connection and purpose — mattered more than the pharmacological grip of the substance. It suggested that addiction was not the permanent metabolic disease that Dole and the maintenance model required it to be.

The study was largely set aside by the field. Its implications were incompatible with the maintenance business model. If most addicted people could recover when their environment and circumstances changed, there was no clinical justification for lifetime pharmacological management. There was only a financial one.

The Robins findings are referenced in the clinical literature of Bio-electrode Therapy precisely because they point toward what genuine recovery requires: not a better pharmaceutical, but the restoration of connection, meaning, and purpose — the things that the Barefoot Doctor model, the Recovery Café community, and peer-supported healing are built to provide.

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Part Three: How It Was Sold

The OxyContin Campaign and the Corruption of Medical Education

The second wave of the opioid crisis — the prescription opioid epidemic of the 1990s and 2000s — was not an accident of inadequate regulation or unforeseen consequences. It was the result of a deliberate, documented, and systematically executed marketing campaign by Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, with the assistance of consulting firms including McKinsey & Company and marketing agencies including Public Health.

When Purdue introduced OxyContin in 1996, sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion by 2000. By 2001, the company was spending $200 million annually on marketing. Over OxyContin’s first six years, Purdue spent six to twelve times more on promotion than it had spent on its previous flagship product, or than competitors spent on comparable drugs.

The Central Lie

At the centre of Purdue’s physician marketing was a single sentence in OxyContin’s original FDA label: “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” Purdue’s sales force was trained to use this sentence to assure physicians that OxyContin was less addictive than other opioids. The company did not conduct the clinical trials that would have been required to support that claim before launch. It marketed the drug as less abusable anyway.

In 2007, Purdue and three top executives pleaded guilty to federal charges, admitting that the company, “with the intent to defraud and mislead,” had marketed OxyContin as less addictive and less abusable. The company paid $600 million in fines. The sentence remained on the label for more than five years before the FDA removed it. By that point, the epidemic it had seeded was self-sustaining.

Purdue has made over $35 billion in total sales from OxyContin since 1996.

Opiophobia: Manufacturing Medical Consent

Purdue coined the concept of “opiophobia” to describe what it characterized as the unreasonable fear that medical professionals had about prescribing opioids. This framing was deployed systematically to neutralize physician resistance. It positioned clinical caution about highly addictive substances as a form of medical ignorance — a prejudice to be overcome through education.

That “education” was delivered through more than 40 national pain-management conferences at resort destinations, attended by over 5,000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses at Purdue’s expense, where they were recruited to Purdue’s national speaker bureau. Prescriber profiling data was used to identify the highest-volume opioid prescribers, who were then targeted with the most intensive sales attention.

By 2012, the concept of opiophobia had been adopted into WHO official guidelines, framing physician caution about opioids as an unreasonable barrier to patient care. The pharmaceutical industry had successfully lobbied its way into the architecture of international medical guidance.

Purdue’s promotion of OxyContin for non-cancer chronic pain led to a tenfold increase in prescriptions for less serious pain conditions — from approximately 670,000 in 1997 to about 6.2 million in 2002.

When the Crackdown Came: The Predictable Next Wave

When regulators finally moved against the prescription flood — tightening guidelines, closing pill mills, reformulating OxyContin as an abuse-deterrent — the millions of people who were now dependent did not recover. They found heroin, which was cheaper and more available. Purdue’s own internal documents acknowledge that the reformulation of OxyContin in 2009 drove many patients to street heroin. The company knew. The transition happened anyway.

This is the iron logic of the system: tighten the legal supply, and the dependent population moves to the illegal supply. The crisis does not end. It migrates. And at each migration, it becomes more lethal.

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Part Four: The Upgrade That Wasn’t

Suboxone, Sublocade, and the Patent Cycle

When buprenorphine — marketed first as Subutex, then combined with naloxone as Suboxone — was approved for addiction treatment in 2002, it was positioned as an advancement over methadone. It could be prescribed by office-based physicians. It was a partial opioid agonist, theoretically safer in overdose. It was described as more flexible, more humane, and more recovery-oriented.

What it was, commercially, was a patent-protected replacement in a market that methadone — now generic — could no longer monetize effectively. Reckitt Benckiser, later restructured as Indivior, held the patents and generated billions in annual revenue.

When those patents began to expire and generic competitors threatened market share, Indivior reformulated Suboxone as a film rather than a tablet, secured new patents, and litigated aggressively against generic manufacturers. In 2019, Indivior was fined $1.4 billion by the U.S. Department of Justice — not for harming patients, but for illegally maintaining its monopoly and making false safety claims about generic versions. The company survived and continued.

The cycle was identical to what had happened with OxyContin: aggressive marketing, patent manipulation, suppression of competition, prioritization of market share over patient welfare. This time, the product was the treatment for the crisis the previous cycle had created.

Sublocade: The Patient as a Durable Growth Asset

Sublocade — extended-release injectable buprenorphine manufactured by Indivior — is the current iteration. In Indivior’s own investor presentations, it is described as a “durable growth asset” with patent protection extending to 2031–2038. The company reports 23% compound annual revenue growth and is actively expanding its market into the criminal justice system — jails and prisons — as a new revenue channel.

The recommended dosage is 300 mg monthly for the first two months, then 100 mg monthly for maintenance, at a submitted price of approximately $550 per dose — a minimum of $6,600 per year per patient, in perpetuity, with the manufacturer’s stated aim being long-term retention.

Sublocade creates a depot in the subcutaneous tissue that continues releasing buprenorphine for weeks after the last injection. A patient who decides to discontinue cannot even begin the withdrawal process until the drug has fully cleared — a process that can take twelve weeks or more after the final dose. The patient cannot leave when they choose to. The drug will not permit it.

Broader retention data tells a further story: Sublocade retention rates fall to 13.5% at the six-month mark across the United States. The manufacturer’s own clinical trial, conducted in Vancouver, was unable to recruit its desired sample size even after researchers eased participation criteria. Among adult participants who did enrol, only 32% completed the full six-month study. The system calls this a treatment. The patients, with their feet, are calling it something else.

The language used for patients in Indivior’s investor documents is the language of market penetration, prescriber uptake, and retention metrics. The language of recovery — of freedom, of restored function, of a person returning to a full life — does not appear.

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Part Five: The Drug They Made to Replace the Drugs They Made

Fentanyl and the Flood

The opioid crisis did not become a fentanyl crisis by accident. It became a fentanyl crisis because fentanyl is the logical endpoint of a supply chain optimised for profit and shaped by prohibition.

Fentanyl was synthesised in 1959 by Belgian chemist Paul Janssen at Janssen Pharmaceutica. It is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. It entered medical use as an intravenous anaesthetic in the 1960s and was used safely in surgical and cancer pain settings for decades. The fentanyl crisis is not a story about a bad drug. It is a story about what happens when an extremely potent compound enters an illegal supply chain that was created by the failure and deliberate dismantling of the legal one.

The Three Waves

The opioid crisis has moved in three distinct and sequential waves, each produced by the conditions of the one before it.

The first wave was driven by prescription opioids — OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin — aggressively marketed to physicians treating chronic non-cancer pain through the mechanisms described in Part Three. Millions of people became dependent on legal prescriptions.

The second wave began when those prescriptions were tightened. The millions of dependent people did not recover — they migrated to heroin, which was cheaper and more available than diverted prescription opioids. Heroin overdose deaths tripled between 2010 and 2015.

The third wave — the current and most lethal phase — began when fentanyl entered the illegal supply chain. From a trafficking perspective, fentanyl is objectively superior to heroin in every dimension that matters to a supplier: it is synthetic, requiring no agricultural cultivation; it can be purchased from producers for a fraction of the cost of heroin; it can be shipped in quantities small enough to pass through postal systems; and because of its extreme potency, a small amount produces the same effect as a much larger quantity of heroin, dramatically improving profit margins per unit.

The transition was supply-led, not demand-led. Most people did not choose fentanyl. It was mixed into their heroin — and later into counterfeit prescription pills, cocaine, and methamphetamine — without their knowledge. Drug checking services in British Columbia have found that heroin is now detectable in only 4% of opioid samples, while fentanyl and its analogues are present in 88%. The drug people believed they were buying no longer exists in the supply. What replaced it is many times more lethal and provides no meaningful warning before overdose.

The Death Toll

By 2022, synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl — were responsible for over 80,000 overdose deaths in the United States in a single year. In Canada, over 7,500 people died of overdose in 2022. In British Columbia, overdose has been the leading cause of unnatural death for years. By 2017, fentanyl was present in more than 50% of opioid-related overdose deaths in the United States. By 2022, it was present in approximately 90%.

These numbers are not tragedies in the sense of being unforeseeable. They were foreseeable at every stage. The decisions that produced them were made anyway, because the financial returns justified the human cost to those making the decisions — who were not the ones dying.

Despair as a Cause of Death

There is something that must be said plainly, that the epidemiological language of overdose statistics does not say: many of these deaths are not accidents.

Overdose — particularly in someone who knows the risk, who has survived overdoses before, who understands what a lethal dose of fentanyl means — is often a choice. It is the choice available to a person in sufficient despair, for whom the calculus of continued existence has become insupportable. Fentanyl provides a death that feels like sleep. For someone living on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in winter — or in a rural town with no services, no housing, no pathway forward visible from where they stand — that calculus is not irrational. It is the rational response to a situation that the system created and continues to maintain.

The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is famous. Journalists come to photograph it. Politicians come to tour it. Researchers come to study it. And people come to die there — quietly, in doorways and alleys, in the way that fentanyl allows, which looks like sleep. It is not a unique place. It is the most concentrated and visible expression of what exists in every city and town on this continent. The people there are not failures. They are the most honest reflection of what a profit-driven approach to human suffering produces when it runs to its logical conclusion.

Treating this as a pharmacological problem — adjustable with better naloxone distribution, safer supply, and updated OAT protocols — is like treating a broken leg with better pain medication. The fracture remains. The suffering continues. The business model is preserved.

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Part Six: What the System Suppresses

Complementary Therapies, Institutional Hostility, and the Economics of Silence

Complementary and alternative approaches to addiction treatment have existed for decades. The National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) protocol — auricular acupuncture for withdrawal support and craving reduction — has been used in addiction settings since the 1970s and has accumulated substantial evidence base for its effectiveness. EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) has a growing research literature on trauma, anxiety, and craving reduction. Bioelectric approaches, trauma-informed care, peer support, and community-based healing models have each demonstrated clinical value.

None of them can be patented. None of them generate recurring pharmaceutical revenue. None of them are in the financial interest of the entities that fund clinical guidelines, sponsor medical education, and lobby regulatory bodies.

They are classified as “complementary” — meaning supplementary, secondary, non-essential. In publicly funded addiction services, they are contracted rather than integrated: the first budget line eliminated when funding is reduced. The practitioners who deliver them are typically non-unionised, making them the easiest workforce to remove without institutional consequence. When times are difficult, they disappear. The pharmaceutical model does not.

The Pattern of Institutional Hostility

When practitioners within publicly funded systems advocate too visibly for non-pharmaceutical approaches, they encounter what the system calls restructuring. Roles are eliminated. Contracts are not renewed. Reasons are provided obliquely or not at all, because clear reasons would be professionally indefensible — it is difficult to articulate, in writing, that an employee was removed for demonstrating that the pharmaceutical model is unnecessary. The message is delivered through bureaucratic ambiguity: you are welcome here as long as you stay within the model.

This pattern is not unique to any one institution or jurisdiction. It is the predictable response of any system to evidence that threatens its foundational assumptions — and its revenue base.

A Personal Account: Forty-Two Years, One Drive to Portland, and What Followed

I write the following, not to centre my own experience, but because it is directly relevant to what readers of this document need to understand about how change actually happens, and about how the system responds when it does.

I entered government addiction services in 1984. The model I encountered was abstinence-based in the harshest sense of that term. The prevailing attitude toward people with addiction was judgmental, condescending, and frequently punitive. The culture of treatment was, in the language of the time, “our way or the highway” — zero tolerance, strict penalties for relapse, and a moral framework that regarded addiction as a character failing rather than a condition deserving of care. Alcohol was the dominant crisis of the era. The standard response was the 28-day residential program. Alcoholics Anonymous and inpatient treatment were not merely the primary options — they were the only options. The suffering of the people in these programs was compounded, regularly, by the contempt of the system purporting to treat them.

I was curious by nature, and increasingly uncomfortable with what I was witnessing. I had heard that a program in Portland, Oregon was using acupuncture as part of its addiction treatment — something virtually unheard of in Canadian addiction services at the time. In 1989, a colleague and I drove to Portland to see it for ourselves. What I encountered there changed the direction of my life.

The program was based at Hooper Detox Center, managed by David Eisen. The welcome was warm. The atmosphere was unlike anything I had experienced in Vancouver. The attitude toward people with addiction was respectful, non-judgmental, and grounded in a genuine belief in human dignity. David Eisen introduced me to a concept I had not previously encountered: Harm Reduction — the understanding that meeting people where they are, reducing the immediate dangers of drug use, and building trust and connection, produced better outcomes than demanding abstinence as the price of care.

The Portland model was operating on principles that Vancouver had not yet imagined. They had drug courts. They had wet, damp, and dry housing — a continuum of options that recognised different levels of readiness and different stages of a person’s journey, rather than requiring complete sobriety as the condition of having a roof. They had a van they called the Cheers van that cruised the city finding people who were using and connecting them to services without judgment and without conditions. Their success with addiction treatment was substantially greater than anything I had witnessed in Vancouver.

And they had acupuncture. I received my first NADA-style auricular acupuncture treatment at Hooper Detox. The experience was unlike anything in my clinical training. I understood immediately that I was encountering something with genuine therapeutic power. I returned to Vancouver with a mission and a purpose I had not had before.

What followed was years of advocacy — quiet, strategic, persistent, and deliberately calibrated to what the institution could absorb at each stage. I promoted the Harm Reduction model to anyone who would listen. Gradually, then rapidly, the idea gained traction. Caravans of addiction services managers, directors, city councillors, journalists, and Vancouver City Police began making the trip to Portland to see what I had seen. The Portland program eventually wearied of the steady stream of Canadian visitors — and responded by sending their own leadership to Vancouver. David Eisen came to Vancouver to formally introduce Harm Reduction and the acudetox model directly to our services.

The institutional conditions for change were created by people with the courage to act on what they knew was right. Denise Bradshaw, Vancouver Detox Manager and later manager of the Heartwood Treatment Center for Women, was instrumental in driving the transformation of addiction services culture — progressive, principled, and willing to advocate for change from within the health authority. Dr. Garth McIver, Medical Director of Addiction Services, was fully supportive from the beginning, believing that the previous approach to treatment required serious review and fundamental change. Without his medical authority behind these initiatives, many of them would not have survived institutional scrutiny.

Change within institutions is never easy. The progressive transformation of addiction services in Vancouver was made possible not by policy alone, but by specific individuals who had the courage and the heart to act on what they knew was right, against the resistance of a system that profits from the status quo. I honour their courage in the face of a systemic evil. Without them, none of what followed would have been possible.

A government-funded NADA research pilot project was established at multiple locations in the Downtown Eastside. Dr. Elizabeth Whynot led the pilot project. Mary Waterson, president of the BC Acupuncture Association, was actively involved in the administrative process from the Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective. Louise Demorest was the lead acupuncturist and supervised the various projects across sites. That pilot was subsequently published in peer-reviewed literature: Janssen, Demorest, and Whynot, Journal of Urban Health, 2005 — documenting 2,755 client visits over three months at two Downtown Eastside community agencies, with statistically significant reductions in overall substance use and in the intensity of withdrawal symptoms including insomnia, muscle aches, nausea, sweating, stomach cramps, and feeling suicidal. The authors concluded that acupuncture offered in a community-based harm reduction context held genuine promise as an adjunct therapy. This was the formal introduction of acupuncture within Ministry of Health addiction settings. Acupuncture was legalised in British Columbia in 1996.

As a unionised government employee of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and the Provincial Health Services Authority, I was granted educational leaves of absence over more than a decade to conduct annual international study tours — visiting hospitals in China to observe addiction treatment programs firsthand, learning from practitioners working at the intersection of Traditional Chinese Medicine and addiction care for generations. I apprenticed locally. I trained formally. I became a Registered Acupuncturist and a NADA Acudetox Specialist. Over the following two decades, I developed and refined Bio-electrode Therapy — building on everything those forty-two years had taught me. Its results in withdrawal management, pain relief, craving reduction, and sleep restoration have been documented in clinical observation and approximately 150 handwritten client testimonials. It has been endorsed by senior psychiatrists, medical directors, and physicians. It costs almost nothing to administer and can be taught to non-clinical practitioners.

The end of my formal career came not through confrontation but through administrative machinery. During the amalgamation of health professions within the health authority, I fell two weeks behind in paying my professional registration dues. I had not received the usual official notifications. Two weeks — after forty-two years of licensed practice. No explanation was given. No person was willing to discuss the matter. The recertification pathway presented to me at age 74 was demanding, bewildering, and effectively prohibitive — requiring examinations and penalties that served no clinical purpose for a practitioner with my documented record. Whether this sequence was deliberately engineered or merely institutionally convenient, the outcome was the same: I was removed from licensed acupuncture practice within the provincial system.

I choose to read this as liberation rather than loss. One door closes, and another opens. Outside the institutional system, I am free to practice and develop Bio-electrode Therapy and other non-invasive, non-needle therapies — approaches I have found to be even more effective than what the licensed clinical setting permitted. I am free to promote them without restriction, to teach them to peer support workers and community members, to write this document, and to launch the Barefoot Doctor program that the provincial government institutional setting would not have tolerated.

I have spent forty-two years as a change maker within a system that ultimately could not contain what I was building. I carry a reputation for that work, and it opens doors the institution cannot close. The allopathic pharmaceutical maintenance model will not welcome what is described in this document. It represents a genuine threat to a multi-billion dollar system built on profit rather than on the Hippocratic principle that has always been medicine’s foundational commitment: first, do no harm. That system has done enormous harm. It continues to do so. The people suffering within it deserve to know its history, to understand its logic, and to know that alternatives exist — developed, tested, and offered freely by practitioners who chose the patient over the system.

I am sharing this not as grievance but as testimony. What happened to me happens to others. It will continue to happen until the system is held accountable for what it is and what it does. This document is one form of that accountability.

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Part Seven: The Alternative Exists

Bio-electrode Therapy and the Barefoot Doctor Model

What follows is not theoretical. It is observed across hundreds of clinical encounters over forty-two years of practice at the front of the addiction crisis.

The Clinical Reality of Supported Withdrawal

The Jing-Well protocol — small conductive electrodes secured to the fingertips and toes at the terminal points of all twelve meridians — is the most effective BeT protocol for acute opioid withdrawal management. These points represent the entry and exit locations of the body’s meridian circuits, the sites of most rapid neurological discharge and response.

Administration is straightforward. Skin is cleaned with an alcohol swab. Electrodes are secured with polyurethane tape — the same pimple patches available in any pharmacy — and fixed with Skin Tac adhesive to maintain contact through the sweating that withdrawal inevitably produces. When sweating loosens the electrodes, they are replaced. The person in withdrawal, or a family member or peer, can do this themselves. No clinical training is required. No prescription. No clinic.

The electrodes are maintained continuously throughout the withdrawal period — not as a one-hour clinical session, but as an uninterrupted therapeutic presence. Sleep is restored. Not approximated — restored. The nervous system, receiving the galvanic micro-current through the appropriate meridian circuits, finds its way back to the regulation that opioids had been substituting for. The hyperarousal of withdrawal — the insomnia, the restless legs, the racing thoughts, the crawling skin sensation — subsides.

Pain is addressed directly and immediately. The original physical pain that drove the first prescription — the back injury, the chronic joint condition, the neuropathy — responds to the local meridian and microsystem protocols. For many people, this is the first time they have experienced effective pain management without an opioid. It changes the withdrawal experience fundamentally, because it removes the most powerful driver of relapse: the return of the pain that started everything.

Craving, anxiety, and withdrawal depression are substantially reduced. Not masked — reduced. The constitutional Source Point protocol works at the level of fundamental nervous system regulation, restoring the bioelectric balance that opioid dependency has disrupted. EFT addresses the emotional and trauma layers beneath the physical — the grief, the shame, the unresolved experiences that the substances were mediating. When both are present, the person is not simply enduring withdrawal. They are beginning to heal.

Electrolyte replenishment — through a good electrolyte beverage, consistently maintained — addresses the mineral depletion that opioid dependency produces and that contributes directly to cramping, insomnia, and dysphoria. Sunshine and natural light restore circadian rhythm, support vitamin D synthesis, and provide the most fundamental neurological regulation available to a human being. These cost almost nothing. They require no prescription.

Even methadone withdrawal — the withdrawal the system describes as requiring indefinite pharmaceutical management — becomes manageable with this approach, maintained properly over the duration. The severity and duration of synthetic opioid withdrawal, which the system uses to justify permanent maintenance, is substantially reduced when the body is simultaneously receiving bioelectric regulation, nutritional support, trauma processing, and adequate sleep. The impossible becomes difficult. The difficult becomes endurable. The endurable becomes the path to freedom.

What the Testimonials Say

Approximately 150 handwritten testimonials from people who have experienced BeT withdrawal support document this consistently. These are not research subjects — they are people who came in suffering and left with evidence, from their own bodies, that freedom was possible without a new prescription. Their words carry a weight that clinical metrics cannot replicate. Several representative accounts:

"I have tried several of Les’ techniques and they have helped me immensely. The ‘Blood Letting’ has left me peaceful and serene, the acupuncture has helped me with problems regarding addiction, and the ‘Bio-Electrode Therapy’ has worked wonders on withdrawal. My favourite by far is the ‘Emotional Freedom Technique’ (Tapping Therapy) — it has indeed freed me from many of an emotional prison. Thank you, Les, for all your help."

— Client testimonial, August 2024

"You have always been the most important part of my days. You helped me with my ankle injury, my nightmares, and somehow — incredibly — with my eating disorder. I always leave feeling relaxed, relieved, and refreshed with the ability to see my truth, my worth, and my ability to feel love for myself again. My soul is filled with healing, light, and love for all that you do here at Heartwood and for all us women in recovery."

— F., Heartwood Treatment Centre

"Les, what can I say… I came in broken and I’m leaving fixed. Your healing heart and caring hands have helped me to heal. Not just physically, but emotionally as well. Your kindness and respect for your clients is evident."

— Client testimonial, August 2024

"I have only been seeing you for two weeks so far and have felt the best that I have in over 35 years! I find your bio-electrode therapy absolutely amazing and the science behind it intriguing. I am so thankful that I met you and feel privileged to be your client."

— Client testimonial, August 2024

"Thank you so much for your services. I’m sleeping better, also the tapping treatment allowed me to actually let go of some anger and resentment, which surprised me for sure. Thanks for coming into Heartwood and helping all us crazies."

— Client testimonial, Heartwood, July 2020

"Thank you so much for your sensitive tone and knowledge of Eastern practices. You’ve helped me tremendously."

— R., December 2020

"I am definitely a convert for your services. I am sleeping so much better and have been able to decrease my pain meds."

— Client testimonial, December 2019

The Barefoot Doctor Model: Democratising Healing

Bio-electrode Therapy is designed to be taught, not gate-kept. The Barefoot Doctor approach — named for the tradition of community health workers trained to deliver essential care directly within their communities, without requiring clinical licensure — means that these skills can be learned quickly by people without formal medical training.

A trained peer, a family member, a community health worker can administer BeT effectively after a relatively brief training period. The person in withdrawal can learn to apply their own electrodes. Their family can be actively involved in their care rather than excluded from it by clinical gatekeeping. The community becomes the treatment environment rather than the institution.

This is not a marginal improvement on the existing model. It is a different model entirely — one in which the person in withdrawal is an active participant in their own healing, supported by their community, equipped with tools rather than dependencies.

The Recovery Café: Where It Begins

In April 2026, Bio-electrode Therapy received its first formal invitation to be taught as a peer support program at a Recovery Café — a community-based recovery space whose members are in various stages of their own healing journeys. This is the beginning of the Barefoot Doctor BeT project.

The members of a Recovery Café are not passive recipients of treatment. They are people who have survived the crisis the pharmaceutical model created, who understand it from the inside in ways that no clinician can replicate, and who are uniquely positioned to offer genuine peer support — not the managed empathy of a clinical encounter, but the recognition of one survivor by another.

When these individuals learn BeT and bring it to the people around them, they are not just delivering a therapy. They are demonstrating, by their own presence and their own recovery, that the system’s foundational narrative — that dependency is permanent and can only be managed, never resolved — is false.

This is how change actually happens. Not from the top of the institutional hierarchy downward. From within communities outward, until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.

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Part Eight: What Can Be Done

Three Calls to Action

If You Are Currently Dependent on Opioids or Opioid Agonist Therapy

You were not failed by your own weakness. You were placed in a system designed to retain you, not to free you. The history in this document is the history of your situation — it did not begin with your first use. It began in a German laboratory in 1937 and has been refined for profit ever since. That history does not determine your future.

Non-pharmaceutical approaches to withdrawal, craving, and pain management exist, and they are accessible. Bio-electrode Therapy, auricular acupuncture, EFT, and trauma-informed care have helped people in circumstances as serious as yours. They will not be offered to you by the system. You will need to reach for them.

Do not discontinue prescribed medication without support. But begin to ask the questions the system would prefer you not ask: What does actual recovery — genuine freedom — look like for me? Who benefits financially from my staying on this medication indefinitely? What alternatives exist that my prescriber has not mentioned? These are not hostile questions. They are the questions of someone who has decided to be a participant in their own healing rather than a patient in someone else’s business model.

You are not a durable growth asset. You are a human being whose freedom matters.

If You Are a Healthcare Worker

You went into this work because you wanted to help people. Most of you have felt, at some point, the gap between that intention and what the system allows you to do. The history in this document is the history of that gap. It was not created by your inadequacy. It was created by financial incentives that predate your career and will outlast it unless something changes.

You do not have to sacrifice your employment to be part of that change. You can refer patients to complementary practitioners. You can ask, in clinical meetings, what the evidence is for long-term OAT as a path to recovery versus a path to retention. You can document what you observe. You can support colleagues who are able to speak more publicly than you currently can.

And when you are in a position to do so — protected by seniority, by union membership, by retirement, or simply by having reached the point where silence is no longer something you can sustain — say what you know. The patients in your care are counting on someone in the system to act as if their freedom matters more than the model’s continuity.

Whistleblower protections exist in British Columbia and across Canada for healthcare workers who report practices that harm patients. The professional organizations most likely to support alternative approaches include the NADA Canada network, the Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors, and integrative medicine associations in your province. You are not as alone in this as the institutional silence suggests.

If You Are a Policy Maker

The evidence in this document is not fringe. It is sourced from peer-reviewed research, court documents, pharmaceutical company investor reports, and historical records from the Nuremberg trials. The system you are funding — through public insurance, through addiction services contracts, through healthcare budgets — was not designed to end addiction. It was designed to manage it. These are not the same thing, and the difference has a body count.

Specific actions that the evidence demands:

Integrate complementary therapies as primary, not supplementary, treatment options. NADA auricular acupuncture, Bio-electrode Therapy, EFT, and trauma-informed approaches have evidence bases and cost structures that make them highly suitable for broad implementation. The barrier to their integration is not clinical — it is financial. Removing that barrier requires policy decisions, not clinical trials.

Require that outcome metrics for addiction treatment include meaningful recovery — defined as freedom from all opioids, return to full function, and subjective wellbeing — not merely retention in treatment. A system that measures success by keeping people in the system is measuring the wrong thing.

Protect healthcare workers who advocate for non-pharmaceutical approaches from the institutional retaliation that currently silences them. The people most likely to drive genuine change in addiction treatment are the clinicians closest to patients — and they are the most vulnerable to removal.

Investigate the financial relationships between pharmaceutical companies, the organizations that set clinical guidelines, and the government bodies that fund treatment. These relationships are not incidental to the crisis. They are its architecture.

Inaction is a policy decision. It has consequences measured in overdose deaths per month in your jurisdiction. Those deaths have names. They have families. They have a history that leads directly back to choices made by institutions and the people who lead them.

The system will not reform itself. It is working exactly as designed. Reform requires people with power to choose something different — and to choose it with the urgency that the death toll demands.

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A Final Word

The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is famous. Journalists come to photograph it. Politicians come to tour it. Researchers come to study it. And people come to die there — quietly, in doorways and alleys, in the way that fentanyl allows, which looks like sleep.

It is not a unique place. It is the most concentrated and visible expression of what exists in every city and town on this continent. The people there are not failures. They are the most honest reflection of what a profit-driven approach to human suffering produces when it runs to its logical conclusion.

There is another way. There has always been another way. It does not require a patent, a monthly injection, or a business model. It requires the willingness to treat a human being as someone whose freedom matters — not as a revenue stream to be retained.

That willingness is the beginning of everything.

The work of Bio-electrode Therapy — its clinical manual, its Barefoot Doctor training program, its community of practitioners and peer supporters — is offered freely. It has not been patented. It cannot be monetised by the system that produced the crisis it is designed to address. It belongs to anyone willing to learn it and anyone willing to use it.

Beginning is enough.

— Les Moncrieff, R.Ac.

Registered Acupuncturist(Ret.)

Retired Addiction Services Clinician, Province of British Columbia

Developer, Bio-electrode Therapy

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2026

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A Note on Sources

Every factual claim in this document is supported by peer-reviewed research, court records, government documents, pharmaceutical company investor presentations, or established historical scholarship. Key sources include:

On the German pharmaceutical origins of methamphetamine and methadone: Wikipedia, Drug Policy of Nazi Germany; Ohler, Norman, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Mariner Books, 2018); INDRO e.V., The History of Methadone; PubMed, Methamphetamine for Hitler’s Germany 1937–1945.

On Operation Paperclip: Britannica, Project Paperclip; National Air and Space Museum; Wikipedia, Operation Paperclip.

On the OxyContin campaign: American Journal of Public Health, The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin; STAT News, The History of OxyContin Told Through Purdue Pharma Documents; University of Washington study, Strategic Management Journal, 2023.

On the fentanyl crisis: Council on Foreign Relations, Fentanyl and the U.S. Opioid Epidemic; Yale Medicine; British Columbia drug checking service data, ScienceDirect, 2025; Congress.gov, The Fentanyl Crisis in America.

On Sublocade and OAT economics: Indivior investor presentations, SEC filings, 2024–2026; CADTH pharmacoeconomic review, Buprenorphine Extended-Release Injection, 2019; The Mainlander, December 2025.

On the Vietnam veteran study: Robins, L.N. et al., Drug Use by U.S. Army Enlisted Men in Vietnam, American Journal of Epidemiology, 1974.

Full citations are available upon request from the author.