Addiction
Addressing housing needs is just one pillar in reentry along with jobs and addressing behavioral health issues including addiction. I would ask that you find some humility, put aside any prejudices and forget everything you think you know about addiction. Our doctors, scientists, and public health officials struggle to define causes and treatments and even to find the language to describe the phenomenon. I’ve been told it’s a disease, but with no pill or medical procedure available. I’ve been told it’s a choice by professionals who then turned to say that “will power was not enough”. I’ve been told to “surrender”, but to whom? Other researchers and theorists see it as a leftover from evolution — a predisposition once useful to survival, but now a trait hijacked by a toxic society. Others see it as an unavoidable part of the human condition, a disability which is protected under national and some state fair housing legislation where a just society should make reasonable accommodations. The truth is, addiction theory has been debated since Aristotle and Augustine.
Maia Szalavitz writes in The Rehab Industry Needs to Clean Up its Act:
"What we simply need is a nice bulldozer, so that we could level the entire industry and start from scratch," says Dr. Mark Willenbring, former director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the founder of Alltyr, a center in St. Paul, Minnesota offering evidence-based alternatives to the mainstream model. "Another approach is that you could use dynamite," he deadpans.
But he's serious about the need for radical change. "There's no such thing as an evidence-based rehab," he says. "That's because no matter what you do, the whole concept of rehab is flawed and unsupported by evidence."
Hope exists but the solutions to treating addiction are as myriad as the causes. Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology, and as someone who has opened up about his own addiction, discusses the nuance and heterogeneity of the problem in Addiction Doesn't Exist, But It is Bad for You. For a detailed history on addiction, its part in the human condition, and its complexity, I recommend The Urge: Our History of Addiction by Carl Erik Fisher, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. Dr. Fisher traces his own account as a psychiatrist in training fresh from medical school coming face-to-face with an addiction crisis that nearly cost him everything.
