Treating Addiction

To have a chance at solving the problem of addiction, we first have to begin to re-educate by looking at how America chose its path of recovery and its path of treating addiction.

We have to understand that the United States began by seeing addiction as a criminal issue, which approached the problem as being morally wrong which created the social response that supports the idea that addiction is criminal.

Society portrayed people suffering from addiction as having a moral deficiency, this social judgment created a stigma that forced addicted people to think of themselves with shame and guilt.

Addicted people hid their addiction making it difficult to diagnose and treat. This makes treatment difficult. The United States began by making addiction political by criminalizing addiction which brought about prohibition. Then we made it Ethnic and cultural to affect political and social changes and then we realized the mistake we made.

Still, we had already invested in the criminal system which in turn created a resistance to seeing addiction as it truly is, which is a medical issue.

The United States tried to correct itself, but because of the pluralism of this society, we left out the cultural part of it, which meant the system of education left out the most important part of the solution, which is people learn through their personal experiences. The United States education system taught its perspective to the helping professionals through the only perspective it recognizes, that of the dominant white society.

That narrow lens left a gaping hole in the work of treating addiction.

- George Lewis