Compassion Not Criminalization: The Chronic Misunderstanding of Drug Addiction
by Madeleine T. Canlis
The opioid crisis is at an all-time high, killing around 250 people each day in the US alone (USA Facts, 2024). While controversy ensues over the most effective strategy to address this national health crisis, most everyone can at least agree that the billions of dollars spent up to this point has not worked. With the infamously unsuccessful War on Drugs anchoring our collective understanding of addiction, we must ask ourselves, is there a better way to address this issue? Drawing from scholarly research, expert opinions, and global examples, I will be contending that we are gravely misunderstanding addiction, and that the solution to this crisis lies not in increased punishment but in compassion and trauma-informed care.
A quick note on language: I will be mostly using the term “PWUD” (people who use drugs) instead of “addicts”. As I discuss the importance of empowering PWUD, I find it appropriate to emphasize the person over the problem. That being said, I know many PWUD who self-select the term “addict”, finding it more accessible and less performative. For that reason, there are a few cases where the term “addict” is used.
If I were to ask someone what they think causes drug addiction, chances are they would answer that when someone tries a drug, especially the stronger ones, they are likely to become addicted to it due to the strong chemical hooks of the drug. Makes sense, right? Well, many case studies throughout history seem to suggest an alternate explanation, leaving us to take a look at the numbers and see that something isn’t adding up. Take, for example, American soldiers during the Vietnam War. A few years into the conflict, a startling statistic was reported to the American public that 20 percent of active soldiers had become heroin addicts in their time deployed. For a country rallying around Nixon’s promise to eradicate drug abuse once and for all, this news was unsettling.
As these soldiers arrived back home, however, something peculiar happened: 95 percent of them quit cold turkey, returning smoothly to the comfort of the lives they had left before the war (Hari, 2015). If addiction was caused principally by the development of a chemical dependency, these men should’ve been addicts for life. What piece are we missing? Well, according to author Johann Hari (2015), we are attributing addiction to all the wrong sources. He teaches that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, but connection. These soldiers were using heroin to survive the hellish conditions of war; when they returned home to their families and places of belonging, there was no need for it anymore. Perhaps even stronger than chemical hooks are social and environmental factors. This realization changes everything.
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Madeleine Canlis is a Grad Student in School of Social Work, University of Washington
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