Pubdate: Wed, 04 Feb 2015
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2015 Albuquerque Journal
Contact:  http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune

OUR ADDICTION PROBLEM NEEDS TO BECOME A PRIORITY

If we weren't such a nation of addicts, maybe hordes of drug 
smugglers wouldn't crash our borders to feed our habit.

Maybe drug cartels wouldn't terrorize Mexico and Central America - 
our gift to our southern neighbors.

Maybe drunks wouldn't kill so many on our highways, or our 
health-care system wouldn't be so overwhelmed and costly. Maybe not 
so many families would fall apart and our cities wouldn't be 
bloodstained by gang wars - or so many adolescent lives wasted before 
they could even get started.

Time to face it: We've become a nation of addicts. So many addictions 
it's hard to list them all. Alcohol. Tobacco, nicotine and vaping on 
electronic cigarettes. Sugar, fat, junk food. Sex and pornography, 
the addictions of the mind, body and soul.

Gambling, the Internet, video games. Prescription drugs, including 
sedatives, hypnotics, sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Street drugs, 
cocaine, cannabis, meth, PCP. Compulsive aggression, kleptomania and 
pyromania. Chocolates? Don't tempt me.

The National Institute of Drug Abuse calculates that the cost of 
illicit drug use alone amounts to $181 billion annually in health 
care, productivity loss, crime, incarceration and drug enforcement. 
Add alcohol and tobacco addictions and we ring up $554 billion a 
year. If we include all those other addictions, the cost is 
incalculable. Could it be $1 trillion? Think of what only a slice of 
that could do for improving education and for combating hunger, 
poverty and homelessness.

It's worsening. Overdose deaths are increasing, the Institute 
reported. It calculated that almost 24 million Americans, or 9.2 
percent of the population, had used an illicit drug or abused a pain 
reliever or similar medication in a single month in 2012. That's up 
from 8.3 percent in 2002. Most of the increase was attributed to 
marijuana use, the nation's most common illicit drug.

Well, we know how to take care of that, don't we? We legalize 
marijuana and the percentage of illicit drug users will drop through 
the floor - which is the direction that we're going, based on the 
increasing number of states that have legalized "medical" use of weed 
and the breakthrough statewide legalization of "recreational" 
marijuana in Washington and Colorado.

Ending the "crime of self-medication," as illegal pot use is 
euphemistically called, will empty the jails of those innocents who 
use or sell this supposedly harmless, even beneficial, substance, 
we're told - even though the science absolving marijuana of any harm 
is not settled.

What are we running from that we're so compelled to search for, 
create and overdose on so many props? Do we have it so tough that we 
have to risk addiction to ease the pain and find calm? Or excitement? 
Some might blame our hectic, overworked lives. Others might accuse 
our unraveling culture. Or growing tolerance of self-destructive 
behavior as a libertarian sort of right.

This is no moral diatribe about how "if only we had the willpower" we 
wouldn't be in such a mess.

Addiction is a disease, a chronic one, in which actual physiological 
and chemical changes take over our brains and bodies. It begins in a 
search for escape, pleasure and relief. It ends in dependence and, 
sometimes, death. Rightfully, an entire industry has been created in 
which brave, smart and compassionate people love and care for the 
addicted. We need more of that. A lot more.

But first we must acknowledge our addictions, so many of which now 
fly under a cultural camouflage that some addictions aren't harmful 
or dehumanizing. In this we're not entirely consistent. Being hooked 
on smoking is very bad, unless you're smoking weed. Crack is 
destructive but not pornography. Hard work is a virtue; being a 
workaholic is sort of easy to ignore, at least at the office where it 
is sometimes rewarded.

We now hear about "recreational" marijuana and how getting high is 
"self-medication." Next step is to call it recreational addiction.

We ignore addiction as if it weren't a national scourge. Gallup finds 
that it's not even listed among America's top 20 social issues. 
Public opinion needs to confront the reality. Only then will the 
science of addiction and its treatment be given the jolt it needs to 
match its seriousness.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom