An addiction scholar argues we might be thinking about it the wrong way.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
More than a decade ago, Carl Erik Fisher, now an addiction physician and bioethicist, was admitted to a psychiatric ward after what he describes as a drinking and Adderall binge. This eventually led to his recovery, as well as his academic study of addiction medicine, which he pursued in large part to understand himself and his family; his parents also struggled with addiction. |
Throughout history, as he shares in his forthcoming book, addiction has been viewed and described in different ways. But no matter what lens you use to view the problem, the addiction crisis remains. Annual U.S. overdose deaths recently topped 100,000, a record for a single year. |
In his guest essay this past weekend, Fisher critiques one of the current ways of thinking around addiction — specifically the argument that addiction is a disease. While he acknowledges the concept works for many people, he argues that it's insufficient and, from his view, potentially harmful. |
"Thinking of addiction as a disease might simply imply that medicine can help, but disease language also oversimplifies the story and leads to the view that medical science is the single best framework for understanding addiction," he writes. "Addiction becomes an individual problem, reduced to the level of biology alone. This narrows the view of a complex problem that requires community support and healing." |
Fisher argues that the problem of addiction goes beyond the individual and that it's critical for society to recognize that. "Not all drug problems are problems of addiction, and drug problems are strongly influenced by health inequities and injustice, like a lack of access to meaningful work, unstable housing and outright oppression," he says. |
As the addiction crisis continues, so will debate over the nature of addiction and how to best treat it. As Fisher writes, the hope is this eventually leads to a fuller picture of addiction that allows for more "nuance, care and compassion." |
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