Is It Really A Disease Or, Just A Cop Out?
I’m originally from Akron Ohio where the twelve steps got their start. I come form a long line of addicts and, alcoholics.
I never met my grandmother but, she was definitely an alcoholic. My grandmothers family were actually friends with Dr Bob Smith who co-founded AA with Bill Wilson. When my grandmother was active in her alcoholism Dr Bob attempted to get her to attend AA.
Back then people didn’t talk about their problems the way we do now. There was no Dr Drew’s Celebrity Rehab on television. When I was growing up there were shows like Andy Griffith where “Otis the town drunk” was a funny character who would check himself in and, out of jail so that he had a place to sleep. (“In the 1986 television movie Return to Mayberry, it is revealed that Otis is now completely sober and employed as the town’s ice-cream man, driving a van.”)
So my grandmother decided not to join AA. She stayed home with my Grandfather and, tried to deal with her problem behind closed doors. The result?
Shortly after my mother was born she committed suicide from postpartum depression combined with her alcoholism. Did my grandmother have the power to stop but, chose not to?
Maybe had she taken Dr Bob up on his offer she could have gotten sober. However, my belief and experience is that it would have been impossible for her to do it alone.
About a year ago the Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy released the first-ever Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health. It contains some eye opening statistics.
I’ve taken some quotes below from a great interview Dr Murthy gave to NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition about a year ago.
“In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general released a report on the health impacts of smoking, and it shaped the public and government’s attitudes toward tobacco for years to come. On Thursday, another surgeon general’s report was issued, this time tackling a much broader issue: addiction and the misuse and abuse of chemical substances. The focus isn’t just one drug, but all of them.
Though little in the report is new, it puts impressive numbers to the problem, and some surprising context: More people use prescription opioids than use tobacco. There are more people with substance abuse disorders than people with cancer. One in five Americans binge drink. And substance abuse disorders cost the U.S. more than $420 billion a year.
An estimated 20.8 million people in our country are living with a substance use disorder. This is similar to the number of people who have diabetes, and 1.5 times the number of people who have all cancers combined. This number does not include the millions of people who are misusing substances but may not yet have a full-fledged disorder.
We measure numbers like this for other illnesses, too, and the cost for substance abuse disorders far exceeds the cost of diabetes.
For far too long people have thought about substance abuse disorders as a disease of choice, a character flaw or a moral failing. We underestimated how exposure to addictive substances can lead to full blown addiction.
Now we understand that these disorders actually change the circuitry in your brain. They affect your ability to make decisions, and change your reward system and your stress response. That tells us that addiction is a chronic disease of the brain, and we need to treat it with the same urgency and compassion that we do with any other illness.
In terms of actual cost, we lose the most lives and suffer the most costs from alcohol related disorders and alcohol related addiction. In 2015, about 66 million people reported that they’d engaged in at least one episode of binge drinking in the previous month. And in 2015, roughly 28 million people reported that they had driven under the influence of drugs and alcohol.”
You can listen to the interview over at NPR.
Source: NPR
Leave A Comment