I read the Facing Addiction in America, the Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs and Health with a combination of enthusiastic appreciation and dismay. Those impressions were further reinforced recently on hearing the SG, Rear Admiral Vivek Murthy in person, at the Patrick Kennedy Forum on addiction in Chicago.
I see the report as a major step—a diagonal one. It moves us significantly forward, but it is also a movement sideways. It both fulfills and fails short of its humane intention to articulate an approach to addiction that is science-based and compassionate at the same time.
The impact is overwhelmingly positive. The report represents the first attempt by anyone in any U.S. administration to approach substance use and addiction not as an ethical issue or a matter of criminality, but as a human experience to be understood, as a human dilemma calling for a humane response. “Once viewed largely as a moral failing or character flaw,” the report says, addictions are “now understood to be chronic illnesses characterized by clinically significant impairments in health, social function, and voluntary control over substance use.” It sees addiction as a chronic illness, to be treated as other medical conditions such as diabetes or asthma.
[For more of this story, written by Maria Pallas, go to http://drgabormate.com/dr-gabo...g-addiction-america/]
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