Baclofen turns basic ideas about the treatment of alcoholism on their head.

There were some new and radical concepts emerging:

1.Maybe it’s not that alcoholism is really hard to treat, rather that we didn’t have effective enough treatment for it.
2.Maybe alcoholism isn’t inevitably a chronic, relapsing disease with a poor prognosis. Maybe if we treated alcohol dependence earlier with more effective treatments, we would see a radical change in the natural history.

That’s the root of the problem. It’s a new paradigm and in a fundamentally conservative profession like medicine, new ideas often take a long time from invention to adoption, around 10-15 years on average. This is not all bad. The first principal of medicine is “first do no harm”. But can also create long delays in important new treatments becoming widely available.