Eliahu Goldratt was an Israeli physicist who died a few years ago. Well, he wrote 10 books in his lifetime, and his teaching on the system he developed, called Theory of Constraints, is still taught in every business school in America. He helped thousands of companies go from the verge of bankruptcy to become leaders in their field, and he did it with very little money and very little time.

Why should you care? Well, if we’re going to create a new addiction treatment system that produces recovering people faster than new cases of addiction can arise, then we’re going to need a logical framework like TOC. It’s what I’ve used and how I’ve practiced. I don’t know of anyone else who has used TOC in clinical medicine, but I can tell you that it makes clinical medicine a whole lot better.

Dr Goldratt didn’t just want to help businesses. His real goal was to teach people that the thinking processes of the exact sciences were useful in the social sciences and in life. He chose to work in business because there were quantitative outcomes there that were clear and measurable. If you go out of business, that’s clear. If you make a lot of money, you can measure how much.

In medicine too, our outcomes are clear and measurable. In addiction treatment however, we haven’t been using measurable outcomes. Consequently we don’t look at TOC and think, “Wow, this will really help.” But we could. I did, and it worked. We can do it again. It will work. We can create a system that gets people faster than new cases become ill.

So this is just a slight introduction to Eli Goldratt and TOC. I want to close with the last words of his last book. These can be found on his grave in Israel and they are pictured above. These are six statements that taken together can sound so positive as to be pollyannish. But they’re not. They are actually a practical roadmap to getting to our goal, whatever that goal is. I’m going to take the next six episodes to lay each on out so that you can see the power of these ideas and how we can use them to end addiction as a problem in American life in just a short time.