Revolutionary Healing: Ear Acupuncture for Addiction

I bet you weren't expecting to come across the Black Panther Party, armed bank robbery, a staged suicide, or Tupac Shakur in an article about acupunture. But here you are. Tupac's stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, was the acupuncturist responsible in the 1970s for developing and pioneering the NADA protocol -- a 5-point auricular acupuncture treatment that is now a widely used, evidence-informed tool for addiction, trauma, and stress management, applied across clinical, correctional, and disaster-relief settings worldwide.

In collaboration with other acupuncturists and doctors, Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), standardised the five ear points as an addiction protocol and pioneered it in the South Bronx, helping community members address drug dependence without relying solely on methadone. "The history of China taught us that this science was used in the 17th century during the Opium War when 80% of the population was addicted to opium," he explained (1).

Shakur treated patients at the Lincoln Detox program in the Bronx during the early 1970s — a radical, community-run drug treatment and health clinic started by members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. The program was controversial because it put medicine into the hands of the community, as Shakur and his colleagues championed NADA as a treatment approach that replaced conventional methadone programs. Some say that Dr. Richard Taft - a physician working with Shakur to legitimise the protocol and who was found dead in a cupboard, shot up with several doses of heroin - was murdered for his involvement.

Shakur went to prison in 1986 for alleged involvement in the BLA and a New York bank robbery in which two police officers were killed. He spent the rest of his life in prison, granted compassionate release just seven and a half months before his death. His conviction remains politically and legally disputed, particularly among scholars, activists, and former Lincoln Detox colleagues who view it as part of a broader pattern of criminalising Black radical community organisers.

Shakur's kinship with his stepson's godmother, Assata Shakur, was one of shared revolutionary networks. Both members of the BLA and Black Panther party, both believed in the fusion of health, healing, and liberation, Assata writing about psychological and spiritual survival under repression, while Mutulu built community health infrastructure at Lincoln Detox. Their work reflected a shared idea that liberation wasn’t just political — it was medical, cultural, and spiritual.

Mutulu's holistic approach to addiction viewed acupuncture as just one branch of a broader community support system that had to involve activism. As he said:

"Acupuncture only relieves the physical tensions that
promote drug use. The basic social and political realities –-
such as military, government and big business complicity in
drug epidemics –that underlie addiction must be dealt with
by other means."

Today, with technology addiction at an all time high and nicotine addiction on the rise in young people, and "normal" lifestyles often feeling like an assault course for the nervous system, acupuncture is a tiny but meaningful intervention. It's a tiny drop in the ocean of a highly pressurised world we live in today -- but one that creates a resonance of peace in the patient, who then carries that vibration with them on their journey back home, sending out ripples as they go.