The Saturday morning after St. Patrick’s Day, 22 patients are locked up in a nondescript detox facility on the outskirts of a Midwestern suburb. A couple of the men and women checked themselves in; a few more arrived in a police car; the rest were brought here by a worried friend, partner, or parent.
A trio of volunteers from a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous has just arrived to hold a meeting. Those willing to join the circle recite the Serenity Prayer, listen to someone read "How it Works" from AA’s 575-page Big Book, and share their stories. (In accordance with AA’s promise of anonymity, the names of the participants have been changed.)
Robert is 19. He started drinking daily when he was 12. At 17, he left his belt-wielding father to crash with friends. He started blackout drinking a year ago to stave off sleeplessness, and then quickly turned to cheap speed when the alarm went off. After a nine-day binge smoking methamphetamine, he tried to commit suicide.
Anita is 36. Her blackout drinking began over a decade ago. She left her "latest abusive boyfriend" a week after Valentine’s Day. Diagnosed as bipolar, she usually washes down prescription drugs like clonazepam with high-octane vodka. At 10:30 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day she was pulled over for drunk driving.
Theo is 52, but looks 20 years older. He’s been in and out of treatment a dozen times, has sometimes stayed sober for months at a time, and can quote from the Big Book like a preacher cites Scripture. He was picked up by police after passing out under a highway overpass.
Go to any detox facility, rehab center, or substance-abuse support-group meeting in the United States, and you’ll hear similar tales. A 2013 survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse indicated that an estimated 22.7 million Americans needed treatment for problems related to drugs or alcohol. The institute also determined that the "total overall costs of substance abuse in the United States, including productivity and health- and crime-related costs, exceed $600 billion annually."
Today, as the nation’s opiate epidemic makes headlines and policy makers grapple with the question of whether to legalize marijuana, academics from a variety of disciplines are trying to understand addiction and find successful treatments for people like Robert, Anita, and Theo. Last summer, for instance, neuroscientists at the University of Texas at Austin conducted experiments on mice that led them to conclude that a medicine already approved by the FDA to treat high blood pressure could eventually help erase the unconscious memories and cues that can lead recovering addicts to relapse. Scholars like Carl Hart, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, and the Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case are conducting increasingly sophisticated data-driven studies to determine how a person’s race, class, and age can predict risky behavior.
[For more of this story, written by David Schimke, go to http://chronicle.com/article/W...tion-Is-Not-a/237383]
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