Public attitudes toward drug addiction

It’s hard to believe, but a significant portion of the public, and even some in the medical profession, still view drug addiction as a moral failing and not a chronic brain disease that needs treatment. Public attitudes toward drug addiction have changed, but not much. The judgment is that people choose to use drugs knowing they can be dangerous, so they get what they deserve. When it’s a family member, like a 20 year old daughter on cocaine, or an elderly aunt hooked on pain medication illegally seeking prescriptions from multiple sources, most people take a different view, but I’m not sure it changes their attitude in general unless they receive education. This is an excerpt from a John Hopkins article:

“While drug addiction and mental illness are both chronic, treatable health conditions, the American public is more likely to think of addiction as a moral failing than a medical condition,” says study leader Colleen L. Barry, PhD, MPP, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “In recent years, it has become more socially acceptable to talk publicly about one’s struggles with mental illness. But with addiction, the feeling is that the addict is a bad or weak person, especially because much drug use is illegal.”

There are many reasons people start using drugs — peer pressure, experimentation, thrill-seeking, self-medicating depression, to feel loose in social situations. No one starts out to become a drug addict — it’s not really a life-goal that people choose. We all make bad decisions somewhere along the line. For some, there’s a susceptibility to addiction, so when they begin using drugs recreationally a dependence develops characterized by a mental obsession to continue using the drug until they are dependent on the drug and experience withdrawal symptoms when they try to quit. The addict is compelled to use the drug even when there are negative consequences.

I suppose this doesn’t matter to those who say the addicted person shouldn’t have started using drugs to start with. Shaming people who become addicted is useless, and, at some point, it doesn’t matter how a person started using drugs, in the medical and helping professions we take the person where they are and help them recover. No one is obligated to learn about addiction and develop a full understanding, but it helps when society has compassion for those who need help. As someone once said, let those without sin cast the first stone.