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Not sure if it applies in this case, but marketers and influencers have discovered that if they sign up for Harvard extension classes, they can publish blog articles and do email with the harvard.edu domain. I think WBUR did an article on the issue.

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The author appears to be a doctor whose primary area of interest is addiction, including behavioral addiction: https://www.health.harvard.edu/author/peter-grinspoon-md

A doctor at Mass General, which is one of Harvard's teaching hospitals. He's also an instructor at Harvard Med, so his claim to a Harvard affiliation seems about as solid as can be.

And, as an aside, brother to the planetary scientist David Grinspoon.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grinspoon

EDIT: Peter has his own Wikipedia page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Grinspoon

None of which should make them exempt from citing some kind of source, or using fewer superlatives in writing. "We have recently seen some patients who told us they were dopamine fasting..." would have been fine.

Perhaps not but the claim that this article is the work of marketers scamming their way onto the Harvard domain is bogus.

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