It’s 2018 and literally people can’t get it in their head that drug addiction is a disease.
It results from a permanently altered brain that isn’t functioning properly. The brain’s reward centers are messed up. There are studies that even show that the person’s DNA is affected. Their personality is affected. Their actions and behavior is affected. It’s a real fucking disease.
Yeah, it’s easy to say “well their choice to do drugs got them there, so why should I care?”
Well, this argument can be used for a lot of diseases. “Well it’s their choice to not get the hpv vaccine so why should I care that they got cervical cancer.” “Well it’s their choice to go hiking so why should I care that a tick bit them and they got lymes disease?” “Well it’s their choice to eat fatty foods so why should I care that they have heart disease?” Etc.
Chances are, we all have done something that is detrimental to our health at some point in their lives. It doesn’t mean if it results in a disease, we are less deserving of help or compassion because we made choices that contributed to the disease.
There are many reasons why people start doing drugs in the first place. Sometimes it’s a coping mechanism, sometimes it’s self medication, and or sometimes it’s out of sheer curiousity. All of these reasons still warrant compassion and aid.
Shaming and vilifying addicts is not the way to help them. If you really truly cared you would be trying to create a world that is better for addicts to thrive (voting and supporting measures for affordable housing, minimum wage increases, better access to education and childcare, better access to mental healthcare, universal healthcare, etc) as well as actively fighting the conditions (poverty, abuse, lack of resources, inaccess to metal healthcare, etc.) that create new addicts.
Absolutely! In addition, substance abuse is very frequently found in people with other mental health issues as well, and people from vulnerable populations. The stereotype that people who use drugs must be lazy and of so-called “poor character” is simply not true, and is incredibly harmful during the current opioid epidemic. When so much stigma is tied to drug use, people from all walks of life are much less likely to pursue treatment and safer consumption methods.
Also, institutionalized racism goes hand in hand with many of these negative attitudes. When you have violence occurring towards particular groups over many generations, it isn’t so difficult to understand why addiction can be more prevalent. To have compassion in this situation is to also examine a social and political system that has created it, and has continually contributed to it.
*climbs up on soap box*
I had an argument the other day with someone who was like “the police in our town stopped their marijuana policy because they were only effecting black people. that’s bullshit. maybe only black people were breaking the law. if white people were breaking the law they wouldn’t do that.” and I said, “I want you to research that, because I bet you a million dollars there’s more to it because as a white person who used to smoke weed with white friends who all smoke or smoked weed in the past whose who all have white friends who smoke or smoked weed – I promise you that is bullshit. And in states where the drug problem is white? They did decriminalize it. It’s what happened with the opioid epidemic. There’s entire books on the subject. When the drug felons started to became the problem Republican constituents, drug courts became a thing. Here are the sources, here’s the drugs warrants I went on with a narcotics LT, here’s my fucking MSW, here’s the peer reviewed sources, and here’s the white states that change their policies when their children and parents started dropping dead.”
The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 is a RACIST policy that was invented to oppress blacks, latinos, and Asian Americans(particularly Chinese Americans) and set the tone for all anti-drug policy to come. I’m just going to go on record and say that it is, by far, the worst pieces of legislation to have been passed in the 20th century.
The Harrison Narcotics Act has had a negative effect on people around the world through the police, the prison industrial complex, the formation of drug stigma, the evolution of gang culture, drug cartel development, drug contamination, the creation of black markets, it has fostered the destruction of American communities, of ALL RACES MINORITY AND WHITE, because of those things and has give the US a reason to interfere in the affairs of foreign nations via the FBI, CIA, DEA, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.
I cannot stress ENOUGH how fucking bad the Harrison Narcotics act of 1914 is because making drugs illegal did so much damage it created underclasses that cannot ever crawl out without Tolstoy’s permanent revolution, the revolution of the self.
End the War On Drugs. It’s a war on the entire world at all levels. It doesnt matter who you are or what you think you’re doing? It effects you and it effects you badly.
Trump and Co thinks that the drug war is a good thing. So, you know Vote Democrat in November.
Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November. Vote Democrat in November.
*climbs off soap box*
So, there’s a lot of good stuff in here, especially at the end, but while I get that “addiction is a disease” is a really good way to get people to cross the line from being total assholes, who are willing to treat their fellow humans like garbage because they don’t approve of their life choices, to being slightly less complete assholes, who are only willing to stop treating their fellow humans like garbage because they think they can’t help it, it’s also frequently a really unhelpful message for people struggling with addiction.
In the 21st century we know that both addiction and mental health issues are likely to come from trauma, especially childhood trauma, instead of or in addition to genetics. The real cutting edge of recovery, especially recovery led by peers (i.e. other people who have done recovery, instead of people who have gone to school to study recovery), has stopped thinking of addiction and mental illness in terms of life-long disease because of the damaging effect that internalizing it has on people, stopped treating 12 step (which is not trauma-informed, among other issues) as the only way, embraced harm reduction, and learned that people need to believe they can actually build meaningful lives to recover (I’ve worked with people – both with substance use histories and without, in a mental health context – who don’t even have any hobbies, let alone meaningful work, social lives that don’t revolve around “illness”, etc., and it’s probably the worst for the ones for whom a lack of hobbies fed into filling up their free time by using, which fed back into not having any hobbies).
That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to recover (it is), or that long-term drug use doesn’t have lasting consequences (it does), or that there aren’t a lot of good points in the various parts of this post (there are), but the disease model of addiction is not a great way for people to think about themselves, and a trauma-informed model can still be used to convince assholes to be less assholey.
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