by Greg W.

I sat down with a couple reporters from a local TV station the other day to give an interview on prescription drug abuse hoping this time might be different. As I started to tell my abbreviated story for the camera, the reporter quickly tried to push me past the disease concept where I was explaining how alcohol and drugs had a different effect on me when ingested, than others who were using at my age. He wanted drug names, and fear-instilling war stories so they could go back and cut out three sensational sound bites to package together in an uninformed news story to scare parents. Their intentions are good and I don’t fault them for that. It is just this continuing generalized misinformation in the mainstream public about addiction that frustrates me. It has been over twenty years since the American Medical Association classified any drug dependency as a disease, and yet society as a whole still has not accepted addiction as a disease. It reminds me of the 1^st step…I said I was an alcoholic/addict long before I was able to “fully concede to my innermost self” that I was. People acknowledge the truth that addiction is a disease, but so many non-addicted people I have encountered don’t accept or understand what that means.

It was like talking to a newcomer as I sat there explaining to these reporters how when I ingest a chemical into my body I have a different reaction to it than the average social user. Their eyes lit up in surprise, as it was something they had never heard before. This explanation although seemingly simple, made complete sense to them. Immediately their “icy intellectual mountain” melted realizing that they were not interviewing me because I had bad parents, grew up in a bad home, or I was simply just a bad person. They were interviewing me because my chemical makeup was different than a non-addict, just as someone with diabetes or cancer.

Even armed with this information the questioning still went down the typical path to my hardest question that I have never been able to adequately answer: What can you tell parents? I always struggle with this question, because the person asking never prefaces it with “if a person is addicted, what can the parents do?” They ask with the urgency that there is some magic formula or a secret to prevent their child from becoming addicted. I look back to my experience and realize I was addicted possibly even before I picked up that first drink, long before the symptom of drinking and drugging manifested itself into a problem. My parents couldn’t have done anything, D.A.R.E couldn’t have done anything, and I couldn’t have done anything. It is a DISEASE that nobody had any control over. I don’t mean to imply that education and prevention efforts are hopeless, maybe just misguided. When is our society going to start not just saying addiction is a disease, but going to start accepting addiction as a disease? Only then can we properly refocus our efforts to combat this disease by educating, treating, and recovering with a true acceptance that addiction is a disease. I see it sort of like my own recovery; until we start acting like addiction is disease, and not just saying it is, we won’t see much improvement in the overall perception of addiction and those afflicted by addiction.