IN MY SHOES: How I Became An Addict
Presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) introduced a bill to rename the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction, and the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA) to the National Institute on Alcohol Disorders and Health on the grounds that, "By changing the way we talk about addiction, we change the way people think about addiction, both of which are critical steps in getting past the social stigma too often associated with the disease."
Writing in The Washington Post, Stats.org senior fellow Maia Szalavitz and author of "Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids" (Riverhead) explains how "in three years, I went from being an Ivy League student to a daily IV drug user who weighed 80 pounds" and examines whether recasting addiction as a disease does an addict no favors:
[During] my high school years in the early 1980s … I began using marijuana and psychedelics, then cocaine, in the hope they would relieve my social isolation. My progression from psychedelics to coke was fed by a definition of addiction that still causes widespread misunderstanding. …
Addiction … is a purely physiological process, one that results from drug-induced chemical changes in the brain and body. … Addiction, by this theory, is primarily an attempt to avoid physical withdrawal. …
Today's most widely accepted definition of addiction - used in psychiatry's latest edition of its diagnostic manual, the DSM-IV-TR - recognizes that compulsive use of a substance despite negative consequences is key. …
But the DSM retains a focus on physical aspects of addiction: It calls addiction "substance dependence," suggesting that physical need is critical. …
Genetic research … suggests that certain people are more prone to addiction, particularly those with other mental illnesses such as depression, a condition I also have.
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