Is Drug Addiction the Only Disease You Get Thrown in Jail for Having It?

As you can quickly see if you review questions on this topic — most of the answers are from people who really don’t know anything about the subject and, therefore, are useless.

Whether “addiction” is a “disease” is subject to real dispute. It is a long story to explain it, but “addiction” never was a really scientific term to begin with, and whether it is happening is often largely a judgment call. In fact, most psychiatric issues suffer from the same kind of unclear definitions. Which psychiatric condition a person has often depends on which doctor you asked. Most of such conditions do not have any clear and definitive markers like tumors that show cancers or x-rays that let you clearly see a broken leg.

The suggested causes for “addiction” range from genetics to simple bad behavior — and all of the people with their respective points of view can make persuasive arguments for their case. Personally, I think that abusive drug use comes from a number of causes in nearly every case. There are genes that can produce compulsive behaviors and — at the other end of the spectrum — there are people who simply need to clean up their personal behavior.

How society makes that assumption is also disputed. Clearly, the criminal approach produces more problems than it solves — whatever you may think the causes of “addiction” may be. That seems to leave the “medical” model of addressing the problem. However, some critics point out that there is no reason to assume that casual drug users have any kind of illness. They also say that the medical model tends to result in the same kind of coercion and imprisonment that we see in the criminal model — people are just being coerced and locked up in a different way.

Of course, most people who try to answer this question will never get that far in their thinking.

If you want a more complete answer to the question, I recommend that you start by reading the Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs at http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cumenu.htm It is a fascinating book and the best written of all the books on the subject. It is the first book to read to understand the real issues and how we got to where we are today.

When you get done with that, you can find a ton of other interesting references at http://druglibrary.org/schaffer