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This is the kind of snide remark that drives me crazy. Treating addiction as a disease will not fix anything except put more money in the drug companies pocket

This is the kind of snide remark that drives me crazy. Treating addiction as a disease will not fix anything except put more money in the drug companies pockets (which is why they push this narrative). Treating diseases is amazingly more ineffective than preventing the disease. Preventing addiction is not something we like to talk about. Our drug companies and government have been amazingly complicity in pushing pain standards that have killed hundreds of thousands. Similarly we have so called "treatments" for depression, ADHD, and other newly-popular diseases that may in fact be making things worse long term, but the government has done nothing to make sure that long term outcomes are better but has been run by Big Pharma for a long time.

leovailati 8y ago
That is a very good point. When you talk about preventing addiction, are you referring to the war on drugs or providing quality of life improvements that might steer people away from drugs in the first place?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > When you talk about preventing addiction, are you referring to the war on drugs When you talk about preventing systematic racism against blacks, are you talking about the Atlantic slave trade? Because the the relation between the latter pair is about the same as that between the former.
cryoshon 8y ago
treating addiction as a disease has brought us drugs like chantix (varenicline), among others. it is very profitable for them to first create an addiction, then offer the solution. i agree that the drug companies will continue to profit from pitching addiction as a medical problem, and it is very true that preventing addiction is far easier than treating it. regrettably, preventing addiction is not something our society is geared up for. if anything, we are in the mode of causing addictions for the purpose of profit -- whether by social media or by opiates. our society inflicts enormous pains on people and drives them to escapism via drugs as a result. the rat park experiment is very enlightening in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park the treatments for depression are, unfortunately, a way of compensating for the deprived and stressful environment in which we live. it is this environment that i suspect is the root cause of the widespread prevalence of depression, though there is probably a sizable population of people who develop depression regardless of their environment. antidepressants are intended to help the latter group, but are used for both the former and the latter. as we know, the antidepressants don't definitively solve any underlying neurobiological problem, though they may save a few lives and empower some people to change their life's circumstances and ultimately recover. is it better for someone to be reducing their pain using antidepressants rather than street drugs? certainly. you mention ADHD, but i think your angle on it isn't exactly in the same bucket as depression. people with ADHD are at extremely high risk of addiction. i imagine that if we could reliably treat ADHD and increase awareness regarding the disorder's attendant comorbidities, we would be preventing many addictions before they could develop.

leovailati 8y ago

That is a very good point. When you talk about preventing addiction, are you referring to the war on drugs or providing quality of life improvements that might steer people away from drugs in the first place?

dragonwriter 8y ago
> When you talk about preventing addiction, are you referring to the war on drugs When you talk about preventing systematic racism against blacks, are you talking about the Atlantic slave trade? Because the the relation between the latter pair is about the same as that between the former.

cryoshon 8y ago

treating addiction as a disease has brought us drugs like chantix (varenicline), among others. it is very profitable for them to first create an addiction, then offer the solution. i agree that the drug companies will continue to profit from pitching addiction as a medical problem, and it is very true that preventing addiction is far easier than treating it. regrettably, preventing addiction is not something our society is geared up for. if anything, we are in the mode of causing addictions for the purpose of profit -- whether by social media or by opiates. our society inflicts enormous pains on people and drives them to escapism via drugs as a result. the rat park experiment is very enlightening in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park the treatments for depression are, unfortunately, a way of compensating for the deprived and stressful environment in which we live. it is this environment that i suspect is the root cause of the widespread prevalence of depression, though there is probably a sizable population of people who develop depression regardless of their environment. antidepressants are intended to help the latter group, but are used for both the former and the latter. as we know, the antidepressants don't definitively solve any underlying neurobiological problem, though they may save a few lives and empower some people to change their life's circumstances and ultimately recover. is it better for someone to be reducing their pain using antidepressants rather than street drugs? certainly. you mention ADHD, but i think your angle on it isn't exactly in the same bucket as depression. people with ADHD are at extremely high risk of addiction. i imagine that if we could reliably treat ADHD and increase awareness regarding the disorder's attendant comorbidities, we would be preventing many addictions before they could develop.