Boston Medical Center has announced a $25 million gift from billionaire investor John Grayken and his wife, Eilene, to create a center for addiction medicine.

The largest donation in BMC's twenty-year history — and the largest private gift in the United States for addiction treatment and medicine over the last decade — will create the BMC Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine and support the center's efforts to address the nation's addiction crisis. To that end, the center will work to advance multidisciplinary research, transform addiction treatment with groundbreaking clinical care innovations, establish metrics to track outcomes of new approaches to addiction care, help  leaders in the field disseminate best practices, and advise policy makers with respect to the opioid addiction epidemic.

The Graykens told the Boston Globe that although they usually make charitable gifts anonymously, they are publicizing their gift to BMC in part to destigmatize addiction and addiction treatment and encourage other donors to follow their lead.

Michael Botticelli, who worked closely with BMC when he was White House drug czar and head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Abuse Services, told the Globe that because of the shame associated with drug abuse, "we have not seen private philanthropy in the addiction space to the extent we see it in other areas of health care, like cancer."