An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).
In an interview that Dr. Grinspoon did with the New York Post in 2016, “I was a doctor – and a drug pusher,” he describes making a home visit as a medical student to tend to a stage 4 cancer patient. While there, he steals a dozen of the patient’s morphine pills. He rationalizes his actions, that the patient will be fine and won’t suffer any undue pain because his oncologist will simply order more for him. He argues that he needs the pills and does not feel a bit of guilt. Then he explains that to the world he is a Harvard graduate and a respectable medical student at the Boston University School of Medicine. But this is a facade. He is actually “a hopeless addict and a disgrace to my profession.”
This is lived experience with a bang. Dr. Grinspoon began using Vicodin as a medical student in 1998, pills provided by a girlfriend’s physician father. Quickly addicted, he began getting narcotics from his primary care physician, forging Percocet prescriptions in his wife’s name, rifling through medicine cabinets in friends’ and strangers’ homes, and cutting deals with his patients. In time, he was visited in his office by the police and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He received three felony drug charges, leading to several years of probation and the loss of his medical license for three years. He entered a three-month drug rehabilitation program, then was followed for five years by the physician health program in his state.
Dr. Grinspoon has written a best-selling memoir about his addiction and recovery, Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction, published in 2016, and more recently a second book, Seeing Through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana, published in 2023. He is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. A frequent blogger, he explained why he decided to share his lived-experience narrative so publicly:
To start, I came to believe that it was a question of life or death. There is much more to recovery from addiction than merely not taking drugs. There is a complex, interrelated process of personal growth and neurochemical healing, much of which boils down to the saying, “Secrets make you sick,” and, as a corollary, openness and honesty will set you free. If my entire social network knows about my struggles, they are there to support me, and to notice if I need help long before the wrong neurons start firing, drugs reenter the picture, and I start slipping.
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Secondly, it was just easier for me for everyone to know about my addiction, than to continue coming up with reasons why I didn’t drink alcohol. For a period of five years, I wasn’t allowed to consume alcohol in order to pass the drug tests to regain my medical license. Whoever was offering me a drink, I realized that it was easier to just say, “I’m in recovery,” and I’d usually get “congrats” instead of “Are you sure you don’t want a beer?”
Finally, I was increasingly intolerant of the blatant discrimination directed at my brothers and sisters in recovery. Contrary to popular wisdom, we are people too. Not only that, but we have a lot to teach the rest of society, knowledge forged out of struggle and remorse (and therapy). I thought that with my memoir, Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction, I could make a statement against stigma, by confronting head-on the taboo subject of physicians and addiction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with people who are addicted except the addiction, which is treatable, and the only appropriate responses to this condition are compassion, solidarity, and support.
I spoke to Dr. Grinspoon over Zoom on September 13, 2023. He was at home recovering from a serious motor vehicle accident resulting in two surgeries. I jumped in by asking him about the use of analgesics in someone with pain who is in recovery from opioids. His response was the following:
I’m in a much happier place but I have to be very vigilant about the addiction. The last few times I was on opiates, I was aware of their allure. But pretty easily, I was able to come off them because I had all my recovery tools. And I had a backup plan. If I started gobbling them, I give them to my wife, and she just dispenses them, she could lock them up or hide them, or whatever. And now it is really different, taking two pills when I’m in a lot of pain, physical pain, rather than snorting ten oxycodone when I was in emotional pain, it was just a very different response. And I didn’t have any problem with the Oxy.
I asked Dr. Grinspoon to expand on his reasons for sharing his personal story and writing his memoir:
Well, it’s such a taboo subject. Number one, because it is an addiction, and physicians are particularly susceptible to addiction. And I don’t think the treatment we get is particularly humane, I think that all the institutions we deal with, the boards, the insurance companies, the hospitals, they treat us punitively. And I just thought it was time to make a statement that doctors are people too. We have the same problems everybody else has, we get divorced, we get depressed, we get bipolar, we have sick parents, sick kids. But in addition, we have all the additional stress of caring for everybody. And so, we have a very high rate of not just addiction, but depression, and suicide, and I was really alarmed by the fact that the response to us is so punitive. That’s number one. Number two, addiction is a disease of isolation, of guilt, of shame, of silence, of keeping everything in and keeping everything to yourself. So, I thought it would be a lot more cathartic and helpful to my recovery, to share. When you tell people you have a problem, they can either accept it or not accept it. I thought it was good for all the doctors and nurses and other people who are suffering from addiction and other diseases to be able to say, “We’re allowed to be patients as well as caregivers and you need to treat us humanely and not punish us.” Even the treatment I received was very punitive. Like nobody offered me Suboxone. They say Suboxone is impairing for physicians, so they shouldn’t be on it. There is no data that it’s impairing, and it actually put my life at risk to not give me Suboxone. We have a higher risk of addiction, and they don’t give us the one treatment that’s been proven to have a 50 percent or greater reduction in overdose deaths. I mean, that’s really stigma and ignorance.
Dr. Grinspoon is grateful for the support of his family and uses this insight in his counseling of families and friends of his patients struggling with substance use disorders:
My family never gave up on me. And that’s just a big lesson. I think that’s what kept me alive. I always talk to loved ones of people with addiction, don’t give up on them. They’re still there. They’re just like part of their brain is hijacked by the addictions. Don’t use tough love. Keep nurturing and supporting them and offering them care. And at some point, hopefully, it’s going to take hold. You protect yourself, if they’re stealing, you change your locks, don’t put yourself at risk. But you can’t give up on people. The fact that nobody gave up on me is the reason that we’re here talking today. I can guarantee that.
Michael F. Myers is a professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York, where he previously served as vice-chair of education and director of training in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is internationally recognized for his work on physician mental health, suicide prevention, ethics, and professional identity across the medical lifespan.
Dr. Myers is the author or co-author of ten books, including Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025), Becoming a Doctors’ Doctor, Why Physicians Die by Suicide, and The Physician as Patient, Touched by Suicide, and The Handbook of Physician Health, as well as widely cited works on medical relationships, marriage, and divorce. He has published more than 150 articles on topics including suicide, stigma, boundary crossings, ethics in medical education, sexual assault, AIDS, gender issues in training and practice, and the treatment of medical students and physicians.
Dr. Myers has received multiple awards for excellence in teaching and has served on several medical journal editorial boards, including the Bellevue Literary Review, where he has been a board member since 2021. He is a recent past president of the New York City chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and lectures widely throughout North America and internationally. More information is available at michaelfmyers.com, as well as on LinkedIn and X @downstatedoctor.
