Dr. Herbert David Kleber, an American psychiatrist and substance abuse researcher, dedicated more than 50 years of his life to treating drug addiction and developing therapies to nullify the effects of withdrawal.
To pay tribute to the famous American psychiatrist and his dedication to save countless lives, Google has dedicated its Doodle to Dr. Kleber for being elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a nonprofit organization that offers health and medical advice, on the same day in 1996.
In the United States, substance abuse was not a major topic of research for the medical fraternity when Dr. Kleber began his career. He started taking a keen interest in drug addiction when he was working with the Public Health Service Prison Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where convicts were getting treated for substance abuse.
He noticed that majority of the patients were prone to relapse after release. He then developed the treatment based on scientific evidence, which treated drug addiction as any other medical condition rather than a moral failure.
Unlike many physicians of his time, Dr. Kleber considered drug addiction a medical condition and not a moral failure. He stressed on the important of treating addiction through research, medication and therapy in order to prevent relapses.
Dr. Kleber, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 19 June 1934, passed away on October 5, 2018, at the age of 84.
He attended Dartmouth College where he studied medicine and then discovered his passion in psychology.
In 1968, Dr. Kleber founded the Drug Dependence Unit at Yale University School of Psychiatry. He served as the Deputy Director for Demand Reduction at the National Drug Control Policy in the White House for more than two years.
He wrote more than 250 articles and papers on drug addiction and its treatment. He was also the co-editor of the American Psychiatric Press Textbook of Substance Abuse Treatment.
According to Columbia University, “Dr. Kleber implemented policies that led to a decreased demand for illegal drugs through programs in prevention, education and treatment.”
In 1992, Dr. Kleber, along with his wife, Marian Fischman, co-founded the Substance Abuse Division, which is the leading center in the nation for the treatment of drug addiction, within the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. The addiction psychologist was considered one of the “Best Doctors in America” and “Best Doctors in New York.”
