Addiction is a health issue

It’s past time to treat addiction as a health issue, not a stigma, not an opportunity to shame others and feel superior to their “weakness”, not a socio-economic issue that places addiction in poor, inner-city neighborhoods, not a criminal problem, not a skid row problem — addiction is a health issue.

It’s really amazing that in the Information Age people still whisper about addiction as if it’s a nasty sin too vile to speak out loud. It’s also amazing that many people place addiction as a problem affecting poor people, mostly in inner cities. While it might be true that many addicts suffer financially, it’s usually because financial deterioration is a consequence of addiction. Most people whose addiction advanced quickly never got far in life because of the craziness of addiction which led to behaviors that aren’t amenable to climbing economic ladders.

This is certainly not true of all alcoholics or drug addicts, or not even most. Most alcoholics become relatively successful, or at least financially secure, before the addiction progresses to the point it begins interfering with their occupation. Many addicts are wealthy and will never lose all their wealth, no matter how bad the problem gets — they might lose their family, their self-respect, their reputation, their minds or their lives, but they won’t likely lose their wealth, although many have lost fortunes.. I’ve written about this lately because I continue to hear people talk about addiction in ways that confound me. The various explanations of addiction are mind-blowing.

As much information as there is from scientific studies, it would seem that more people would have a good understanding of addiction and not fear the word, but this is not the case. Even many doctors and healthcare professionals still have mindsets regarding addiction that date back to the 1920s. It’s either that extreme, very old ideas, or another extreme, new ideas that avoid addiction just as thoroughly. Whether addiction is seen as a moral weakness, a failure of will power, or whether addiction is seen as a symptom of a mental disorder that only requires talking therapy and positive support, the facts about addiction are largely ignored.

The reason this is important is because when the facts of addiction are ignored, society’s response to addiction is counter-productive. The legal/law enforcement system has filled prisons with addicts — hospitals have sent addicts away with band aids and pills — churches have shamed addicts — companies have fired addicts, only to hire someone from the labor pool who’s as much an addict as the one fired — therapists have under-treated and mis-treated addicts — insurance companies have blocked addicts from decent coverage — government declared a War on Drugs and it has done nothing but hurt those in society who have the least power to lobby for themselves, while rich, international drug dealers thrive. Most efforts to “fight” the drug/addiction problem have failed. There are no national standards of treatment that are consistently applied. One addict might go to a therapist who advertises addiction counseling but has no direct training in addiction treatment, and the another might go to a psychiatrist who hands the addict a prescription and that’s all, and another might go to treatment facility that’s under-staffed and under-funded and burnt-out. One form of addiction treatment might be regulated, requiring a license, while another form of addiction treatment might go unregulated requiring no state licensure.

Addiction treatment works, but it takes a strong, specialized, quality effort. As long as people are afraid to even talk about the problem, or as long as they are ignorant of the problem even when it’s affecting them, or as long as there’s no coordinated healthcare effort to treat addiction like other diseases, then America’s addiction problem will continue to waste lives and resources, break up families, and needlessly imprison men and women who can easily contribute to society with the right treatment. If you search “recovery from addiction” on Google, you’ll see a side of addiction you might not have seen before — recovery happens all the time. It can happen much more often if the facts of addiction win out over ignorance. Addiction is a health issue and must be treated as such.