A growing roster of treatments (medications, behavioral therapies, counseling and other supports) have proved just as effective at managing addiction as statins are at managing cholesterol or aspirin is at preventing heart attacks. Experience suggests that many more people would make use of these treatments if only they were easier to access.
Pick your favorite college football team. Imagine them playing in their home stadium (and for our purposes, their home stadium is as big as the University of Michigan's). Every seat is taken, the aerial shot is a sea of blue and maize, or red and white or black and gold. Now imagine every last person in that aerial shot is dead. That's how many people we've lost to drug overdoses — just in the United States, just in the past year. Not every one of those deaths involved someone struggling with addiction; the latest drugs are a slew of poisons that can and that do kill even casual users. But many of them, if not most, did.
It is common in America to meet those deaths with anger and apathy. Why should it be everyone else's responsibility to help, when addiction begins with a choice — to use drugs that everyone knows are bad for you. And what can we as a society possibly do? If addiction is a disease, it is not treatable, and if it is treatable, most "addicts" don't want help anyway. But as I write in this week's Sunday Opinion cover story, a seven-part project with photographs from Damon Winter, those assumptions rest on fallacies. First, there are plenty of self-interested reasons to take the addiction and overdose crisis seriously and to make every effort to address it — not least of which is the cost: The opioid crisis alone contributes to more than a trillion dollars in economic losses every year. Treating addiction would be far cheaper than ignoring or criminalizing it has been. Second, contrary to so much popular thought, addiction is in fact treatable and there are many things we can do to improve and expand access to the best treatments. Finally, many, many people who live with substance use disorders are in fact desperate for help — and many more would gladly accept that help if the system made a more concerted effort to reach them.
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Saturday, December 16, 2023
Opinion Today: How to help the 48 million Americans with addiction
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