Last week, I saw this article about addiction come up a few times on my Facebook timeline. Each time, someone had something negative to say about it. I don't disagree with those people. The title caught my eye - "Stop Calling Your Drug Addiction A Disease". I instantly got mad. While I'm not an expert (no one really is an "expert" - we're all still learning) in neuroscience, drug addiction or neurological disorders, I can certainly say (with my one semester of Drugs & Behavior knowledge) that addiction is a disease.
In this article, the writer points out that the person chose to take drugs the first time. Yes, that's true. But that's not the whole story. Can you tell me that person chose to get addicted? No. They didn't. Addiction is something that affects neurons (maybe the author doesn't know what those are) and the receptors in the brain. There are so many more factors that go into someone becoming addicted than just, "you chose this".
The other thing that was really bothering me about this article was that she compared addiction as a disease to cancer as a disease. Which - sorry - the two don't correlate. These are completely different diseases that affect completely different parts of the body (OK, besides brain cancer, but you get the idea). This was also interesting as someone recently shared on Facebook a post of someone saying: "If narcan is "free" to addicts because they have a disease, why isn't "chemo" free for cancer patients". Honestly, there's a whole lot wrong with this.
For starters, narcan is used to stop overdose. It's a blessing to have to help those who are addicted to opiates. In 41 states, you can get access to narcan without a prescription -- think of all the lives that have been and will be saved because of this.
Chemotherapy is any drug used to treat disease. Narcan is not treating disease. How are the two correlated at all?
While healthcare in the United States slowly becomes nothing and the opioid epidemic gets worse, I think keeping an open dialogue about opioids and reducing the stigma of addiction is the key to understanding.
People didn't choose to be addicted. It's not their fault.