Addiction: Easier to Beat Than Its Reputation

Great drug reporter and commentator (and Reason
contributor) Maia Szalavitz speaks some obvious but too
often ignored truths about “addiction,”
over at
Alternet:

According to the American Society of Addiction
Medicine, addiction is
“a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and
related circuitry.” However, that’s not what the epidemiology of
the disorder suggests. By age 35, half of all
people who qualified for active alcoholism or addiction diagnoses
during their teens and 20s no longer
do, according to a study of over 42,000 Americans in a sample
designed to represent the adult population.

The average cocaine addiction lasts four years, the average
marijuana addiction lasts six years, and the average alcohol
addiction is resolved within
15 years. Heroin addictions tend to last as long as alcoholism, but
prescription opioid problems, on average, last five years.
In these large samples, which are drawn from the general
population, only a
quarter of people who recover have ever sought assistance
in doing so (including via 12-step
programs). This actually makes addictions the psychiatric
disorder with the highest
odds of recovery.

The hype machine of addiction, especially from industries
dedicated to trying to manage it, helps hide this fact.

Moreover, if addiction were truly a progressive disease,
the data should show that the odds of quitting get worse over time.
In fact, they remain the same on an annual basis, which means that
as people get older, a higher and higher percentage wind up in
recovery. If your addiction really is “doing push-ups” while you
sit in AA meetings, it should get harder, not easier, to quit over
time….

So why do so many people still see addiction as hopeless? One
reason is a phenomenon known as “the clinician’s error,” which
could also be known as the “journalist’s error” because it is so
frequently replicated in reporting on drugs. That is, journalists
and rehabs tend to see the extremes: Given the expensive and often
harsh nature of treatment, if you can quit on your own you probably
will. And it will be hard for journalists or treatment providers to
find you.

That’s why it always helps, when people are hyping legal
“solutions” to the allegedly insuperable problem of “drug
addiction” that “recovery” is likely even without legal or
psychiatric interventions (often the same).