Topic: addiction

The author correctly observes that the type of treatment offered for addiction will reflect prevailing beliefs about addiction itself– its causes, effects, likely outcome.

We develop habits and routines that seem to have a life of their own– and you’re never more aware of that than when you go to change them.

By the time the family gets around to taking action, conditions in the addict’s life have already reached the point where there’s a certain incentive to change.

It’s the stigma that creates the distinction, not the distinction that creates the stigma.

“If you can’t measure something, you can’t do science with it, and in addictions, we just can’t measure things as well as we need to.”

Some observers have criticized us for orienting treatment methods to more severe cases, but that’s predominantly who we see in many forms of treatment.

We might have been making things more difficult for the patients we wanted to help. This is not unknown in healthcare.

Drug epidemics, like other epidemics, follow a reasonably predictable pattern.

There would presumably be a real advantage to a genetic profile that pinpointed those at special risk for alcoholism

The reality is that if we’d had to rely solely on the healthcare system, a lot of people who are in recovery today would simply never have made it.