He attended Yale University on a fellowship, earning a master's degree in the history of science and medicine in 1961.
Musto earned his medical degree from the University of Washington School of Medicine, which was followed by an internship at Pennsylvania Hospital and a residency in psychiatry at Yale.
Describing the connection between drug prohibition and their use by minority populations, it was written in "a non-polemical tone rare in a field dominated by partisan zealots".
[4] Additional works edited by Musto on the subject include One Hundred Years of Heroin and Drugs In America: A Documentary History.
Musto combined that interest with his vocational expertise in the 1968 article "A Study in Cocaine: Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud", which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.