This week I found my inspiration through another Odyssey piece titled, “Stop Calling Your Drug Addiction A Disease ,” written by a young woman named Brianna Lyman. If you’re guessing that she writes about how addiction is not a disease, you hit the nail on the head.

I appreciate so much that Odyssey lets us, creators, write about pretty much anything. I guess I just can’t wrap my head around why someone would choose to use their platform for something really so ignorant (in my opionon). Before I pick out specific points in her article that were particularly astonishing to me, I want to cover a few things.

First of all, yes, people choose to use drugs. People choose to smoke weed, people choose to snort a line, but after the first couple times someone uses pills, heroine, meth, even coke, it isn’t the person choosing to do the drugs anymore. It’s their addiction choosing it for them. So yes, I agree it is about choices but to call addiction not a “disease” is pretty abhorrent and, in the lightest of terms, misinformed. Nobody cognitively CHOOSES to ruin their own life; they are addicts and their—dare I say it—disease chooses for them. No parent would choose drugs over their kid, but addicted parents do. It’s pretty clear to me Ms. Lyman has never lost a friend or family member to an overdose, or even probably known someone who had an addiction.

Honestly her point is easy to poke holes in from the first paragraph:

“Drug addiction has increasingly become more problematic over the last few years, with the opioid epidemic tearing apart families and leaving communities vulnerable to drug dealers and violence. Addiction treatment has become more widely available, and the stereotypes surrounding addicts have definitely changed. However, one thing remains constant, and that is addicts and enablers labeling drug addiction as a disease”

If it weren’t a disease how and why would there be, from your own words, an epidemic? If it weren’t a disease, why would the public start making addiction treatment widely available? If it really was just up to a series of choices, why wouldn’t the epidemic go away when people choose not to use drugs? If it really were all about choices, why would there need to be treatment for it? Wouldn’t we just look at drug users and say, “hey, make better choices?” Is it because society has become soft or because of the medical advances and studies that show us addiction, is in fact, a disease?

Ms. Lyman then goes onto explain the ways drugs affect the neurotransmitters in your brain. What I really find interesting is that she doesn’t put quotation marks around any of the information regarding what drugs do to your brain and nervous system, only at the end of the paragraph when the research she put in her own article comes to the conclusion your body’s reaction does indeed make it a relapsing disease. This isn’t a new phenomena that people, probably most often medical professionals, say addiction is a disease. Because it is.

Somehow all the science, research, and cold hard facts about brain chemistry was sufficient until that research also refuted her point that addiction is not a disease.

No quotation marks here.

She then writes, for what I’m guessing is supposed to be dramatic affect:

“You chose this.

You chose to smoke the weed.

You chose to shoot up heroin.

You chose to buy prescription pills that you did not need.

You chose this.”

Brianna, I’d argue the point that once someone is trying heroin or really any kind of opiate, they were already addicted to drugs in the first place. So no, the reality of it is, the person probably didn’t choose to shoot up heroin, their addiction probably told them it was a good idea. There are probably very few people in the world who choose to try heroin right off the bat.

In the next paragraph she writes, “I can’t express how much it infuriates me when drug addicts have the audacity to play the ‘oh poor me’ role, blaming their choices on a disease that they brought on themselves” …I’m confused because I thought addiction was not a disease, by your logic, then here you referred to it as such? Please make up your mind.

She then explains that it is unfair to call addiction a disease when there are children (also adults, but that doesn’t quite tug on your heart strings in the same way) who have cancer and who didn’t choose to get cancer. Do you think any person wakes up one day and says, "I think I'm gonna make some choices to ruin my own life today"? No. And it is pretty despicable to compare the two. Also, what about the people who get lung cancer from smoking cigarettes? Should we feel less bad for them? Should they not get treatment? Should we only label certain diseases “diseases” because there are worse ones out there? Should only the really sick people get treatment? Where do you draw the line? I’d imagine people with cancer probably understand the value of life enough to want other sick people, no matter the kind or level of sickness, to get help.

Yes, addicts who have not received help or haven’t reach rock bottom yet will manipulate to get a fix. That’s kind of what is so awful about addiction… Because it isn’t the person you know who is manipulating, their addiction is making them manipulate… What don’t you understand about that? Do we just move them to an open plot of land and let them suffer until they die? Or do we offer the psychological and medical help that we are able to, given the advances in medicine and technology? Because after all, anyone who makes that choice can become an addict? Which also leads me to my next point… If this was all really about a series of choices, how do you explain genetic predisposition to addiction? Or addictive personality types? Do you completely disregard the science behind that too?

At this point I’ve reached the last couple paragraphs of her article. We are now really loving the comparison between an addict and a sick child with cancer. Who would ever even compare the two? But I want to point out one particular line in the second to last paragraph. More so just a portion of that line.

“The reason this bothers me so much isn’t because I watch these addicts throw away their life…”

Throw away their life. Are you sure all addicts do that? Because I know too many young people who overdosed accidentally. They didn’t know they were “throwing away” their life. They’d been to rehab. They didn’t know mixing alcohol and pills made it painfully easy to overdose. They broke down and used after getting out of rehab and tried the same amount of heroin they did when they were using. And after such a tolerance break, it killed them. So don’t give off the notion that addicts know the time they are literally throwing their life away. I’m not talking about another stint in rehab, another time shooting up, I’m talking about the absolute last time they will ever get high. Because it will be the absolute last time they take a breath. The lights go off after that last hit. They didn’t know they were literally throwing their life away.

I’ve personally never seen an addict act like they are as sick as a cancer patient. Actually, I’m pretty sure you are one of the only people that would even compare the two. It was exhausting having to read such a misinformed, rather ignorant article more than once but for the sake of disproving every single point, I took one for the team.

In trying to prove that addiction is a series of choices the addict is responsible for, you opened yourself up for some pretty easily refutable points. This is where I’d like to apologize to the families who have lost a mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, or child to addiction. You shouldn’t have to read this stuff.

Addicts who have hit rock bottom and try to get help understand that their choices put them here. Scrutiny from strangers who clearly don’t understand just how powerful addiction is unfair in my opinion, but I think addicts know their choices put them here. I think if you were to ask one they would take full responsibility. Addiction is a bitch. And I’m sure they know it was the first couple times they chose to use drugs that ruined their life. They know their choices got them here; they know that when they’ll have to start rebuilding their life. Regain the trust of their relative, try to look for a job, get custody of their kids. They’ll know the seriousness of their actions.

All I’m really saying here, with the response to this article, is that it is a lot easier to tear someone down than build them up. Perspective is everything. And addiction is for damn certain a disease.