Thinking About Addiction

Too many doctors worry about “those people” showing up in the waiting room. They don’t particularly want to be known as a resource for the addicted.

It’s great for headlines but I hope we don’t dance too far down that particular garden path.

Of course, if you work in addiction treatment, you probably see some of these same meds being abused by young adults, often beginning in college or grad school.

There’s an ongoing search among users for ways to either improve the high (which escalating tolerance threatens to steal away) or suppress the withdrawal symptoms.

I think at this point, most law enforcement personnel would agree. They’ve concluded that, as the saying goes, this is one of those problems we “can’t arrest our way out of.”

It isn’t PhDs in the white lab coats who show up at your doctor’s office to provide false or misleading information about drug safety.

We may be stuck relying on the soft stuff– therapy, support, behavior change, even spiritual growth– all those icky-squicky things that neuroscientists struggle to quantify.

…if this type of strategy didn’t succeed 30 years ago, what makes us think it’ll be a success this time around?

When they get sick with diseases related to substance use, they’ll avoid going to the doctor or hospital, until their illness is advanced and more extensive and expensive care is involved.

It’s the result of a problem in medicine that’s been going on since before I ever started working in the field. The drugs have changed, but the results haven’t.