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.

CDC gives cigarettes credit for more than 480,000 deaths a year, in the US alone.

There’s no blood test, no scan to aid diagnosis. Knowing intellectually that one in ten will succumb is very little help; it has no practical value in terms of predicting an individual outcome.

Money is a tool that allows some to delay the inevitable. They construct a protective bubble that minimizes the risk of getting caught and the other consequences that follow addiction.

Isn’t that a bit like the drinker who insists he’s fine except that he just drinks a whole lot more than other people?

There’s no shortage of stories among nurses and doctors about a friend or family member who went through treatment and relapsed, perhaps many times.

That’s the mystery: Not why some people become addicted to certain substances, but why others do not.

Newcomers had a tendency to focus their attention on the drug that brought them to treatment, ignoring others they happened to have been using.

There’s a lag between the onset of an addictive disorder and arrival in treatment.

Clinicians… feel as if they’re always missing at least one extremely important tool that would make all the difference.