October 8

What Is Addiction Treatment?

 

How is addiction treated in this country? There’s no single answer. There isn’t even a standard for what makes treatment successful. Some measure years of abstinence. Some seek moderation, but don’t consider abstinence to be part of recovery. Others seek temporary reduction in use through incarceration, or simply a reduction in socially unacceptable behavior.

One reason for this is confusion about the nature of substance abuse. Science recognizes three categories: the risky user, the physically dependent person, and the addict who returns to the substance repeatedly even after being separated from it. Medicine, on the other hand, used to recognize the first two categories. But the DSM-V, the latest version, combines all substance abuse under the single label, “Substance Use Disorder.”

Another reason is the disconnect between science and medicine on the one hand, and public policy on the other. For example, the largest single “treatment” provider for drug users is the prison system. More than half a million nonviolent drug offenders are incarcerated, at a cost to the taxpayers of around $15 billion per year. While there are some drug treatment programs in some prisons, the majority of inmates do not receive drug treatment. The National Institute of Health cites public desire for retribution rather than rehabilitation as a major barrier to drug treatment in prisons.

The amount spent on incarceration pales in comparison to the $30 billion or more spent annually on treatment facilities. In 2017, over 4 million Americans received treatment in a variety of settings. Of these, 2.5 million attended a treatment facility, residential or outpatient. Others may have received help from doctors, psychologists, or Twelve Step programs. Of the treatment facilities, 53% received government funding, meaning they are prohibited from using any spiritual or religious approach, including the Twelve Steps.

A more startling statistic is that of the 20 million Americans who needed treatment in 2017, only 12% received it at a treatment facility. Another 7% received treatment at non-specialty facilities. Still, 81% of those who needed treatment didn’t get it. The most common reason, cited by 41%, was lack of insurance coverage.

Some 10% of treatment facilities provided Medication Assisted Therapy (MAT), in which physical dependence on heroin or other opiods are treated with methadone or buprenorphine– long-acting opioids that are much harder to quit after long-term use. Of these, 95% still offered methadone, while 65% offered a choice between the two substitutes. There was no indication of how many facilities used these replacements for detoxification only, and how many used ongoing maintenance. (I’ll post another time about the nightmare of “methadone maintenance.”)

So what does all this tell us? First, most Americans who need help for substance abuse don’t get it.

Second, there’s a wide variety of approaches to treatment. Some, like prison, embrace the belief that if you punish someone enough, they will somehow magically change. Others, like substitution therapy, seek to reduce the criminal and health effects of addiction, but do not seek to actually treat addiction. Still others seek to return the sufferer to “social” use. Those that do seek abstinence measure it in various ways: abstinence for the duration of the program, or at 90 days, or at a year, or at 5 years.

A study of veterans in Twelve Step programs found that 70% of those who participated for a period of months were still abstinent at 16 years. In contrast, some treatment facilities that don’t use the Steps have abstinence rates around 10% at one year.

The most successful treatment approaches, at least for those who suffer from true addiction, seek total abstinence and a changes way of living. As noted in my previous post, it’s not enough to just get someone off drugs. Addiction is a way of life, a purpose for living, and a moral framework. For treatment to be successful, these old ways of being have to be replaced with new ways of being.

To be successful, treatment does not focus on moving away from drugs, but toward a suitable new way of life.

October 3

The Mystery of Addiction

It’s no secret that addiction is a problem in our society. It’s also no secret that, despite some advances in science, it’s not easy to treat. This is because the nature of addiction remains elusive. We can see this in the argument between those who insist it’s a disease, and those who insist it’s a choice. Some psychologists now argue that it’s both.

I don’t disagree. There are biological factors. And addicts make bad choices. I contend that, while addiction displays characteristics of both disease and choice, neither category is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

Let me be clear that I’m referring here not to the occasional, risky user, nor to the person who becomes physically dependent on a substance but is able to abstain once separated from it. Addiction refers to those seemingly bizarre cases, now numbering in the millions, in which people return to the substance over and over, even after physical dependence has ceased.

Here’s the issue: if a person is miserable enough to want to quit, and if they have been separated from the biological need to use the substance, it makes absolutely no sense for them to return to the drug that made them miserable– unless there’s something else going on.

Enter Kent Dunnington. In his book, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice, he argues that addiction is a habit in the classic sense expressed by Aristotle and Augustine. The behaviors of an addict are preconscious decisions habituated (programmed) by past reward/punishment experiences. I find flaws in Dunnington’s case for addiction as only a habit. But this introduces a third category to consider, and offers another dimension of options for understanding and treatment of addiction. The Twelve Steps, for example, can be described as a method of rehabituation.

Yet Dunnington goes further. We are habituated to our behaviors based on our view of the purpose of life. If, for example, we believe that the goal is to be wealthy, we’ll work hard and accumulate money. If it’s to seek thrills, all our efforts will point toward that goal. If it’s to follow Jesus, we’ll put our efforts into the behaviors that the Gospel describes (none of which include accumulating wealth). Indeed, James K. A. Smith argues that we can tell what we love much more reliably by what we do than by what we say we love.

Dunnington describes how addiction fills a need for transcendental experience, moral certainty, and purpose for life that are lacking in our secular society. In other words, it plays the role of a religion. Dunnington, a Christian, describes addiction as false worship. Yet he recognizes the diligence with which addicts undertake this worship, arguing that the Church could learn something about commitment from the “prophetic challenge” addicts present. Anyone who knows an addicted person can attest that we will sacrifice anything for our god, even our lives. The god may be false, but it’s the one to which we have willingly or unwillingly devoted ourselves.

If addiction is a religion adopted in response to the unsatisfying “spirituality” of secular materialism, this has implications for addiction treatment. To put it simply, the goal of treatment is not to get people off drugs– it is to replace one religion and way of life with another. This is where the disease model fails: medicine is not equipped to address the spiritual and moral nature of addiction.

Obviously, if addiction can play the role of a religion, a replacement is not limited to the Big Five: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. For example, in the same ways that addiction serves as a religion, the Twelve Step programs do also. But, with thousands of years of practice and tradition, the established religions do have much to recommend them. I’ve found the healing power of Christ to be unique among them, but I do recognize that adherence is a choice.

From an objective perspective, my point is that it’s not enough to get a person off drugs and tell him or her to go get a job. The question that has to be answered in order for an addict to stay clean is this: “What’s the point?” Only when we can provide an answer for that question do we begin to offer hope to those mired in substance addiction.