A Three Front War on Addiction

Newsweek does a very good job this week with a feature called “The War on Addiction”. It includes some great information on the new medicines being developed to combat addiction by The National Institute of Drug Abuse which is headed up by one of my personal heroes, Dr. Nora Volkow. I really appreciate the way Newsweek did not concentrate just on the science and wow-factor of these new medicines, instead in this week’s addition you will find three different stories each highlighting a different front of this “War on Addiction”. I have provided a link and a quote from each of the stories and highly recommend them for your reading pleasure.

What Addicts Need: So for this new paradigm to take hold, a lot of long-held prejudices will have to change. Doctors (and insurance companies) will have to get used to the idea of medicating their addicted patients, rather than handing them a brochure for AA, which a study published in 2005 in The New England Journal of Medicine found was the most common form of "treatment" offered. "If you have hypertension and it flares up, you go to a specialist," says psychologist Thomas McLellan of the University of Pennsylvania. "The specialist doesn't discharge you to a church basement. If he did, we would call it malpractice."

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Sadly, There is no Magic Bullet: It sounds great. And the new medications will have their place as treatment protocols evolve. In our passion for the prescription quick fix and pharmacological solution, however, we should recognize that drugs alone are not the answer to addiction.

And Now, Back in the Real World…: Between 2000 and 2006, the number of drug offenders in federal prison jumped 26 percent, to 93,751. An additional 250,000 are incarcerated in state facilities and thousands more sit in local jail cells. This year the government has budgeted close to $13 billion for drug control, treatment and prevention. The DEA—whose mission is to stop drug trafficking—is certainly not going soft. But when it comes to the individual user, the addict who just can't quit, law-enforcement officials acknowledge that the old lock-'em-up approach is not only burdensome and expensive, it doesn't solve the problem. Addiction, says John P. Walters, director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, "is not fundamentally about a moral failing, it's about something that really changes the way the brain functions."

Even though I did find some of the points that were stated as facts that I would consider opinion (for one, look for the mention of methadone), overall I give this series high marks and even would go so far as to say they have done a service to the public.