Editorial Comment 10/22: Contagion Control and National Addiction Treatment Week

Editorial Comment:  Contagion Control and National Addiction Treatment Week

As noted, the interval 21-27 October is National Addiction Treatment Week. Initiated by the American Society of Addiction Medicine in 2017, its aim is to annually rekindle a conversation regarding the origins, characterization, diagnosis, and treatment of addiction disorders (http://treataddictionsavelives.org/about/ ).  The style of such an event is familiar to us all: the effort to bring about a national understanding of an epidemic illness and its human devastation was most recently memorably evident in the AIDS epidemic. The designation of days, weeks, months by a variety of advocacy and research organizations drove the turgid but ultimately effective response of the federal government to the needs of a population both at risk and ill with the virus.  Possibly the last time that such a national effort would have been so effective was at the inception of the 18^th amendment and Prohibition, 90 years ago.

The parallel with the effectiveness of AIDS activism should be evident. The infectious capability of addiction is well understood to anyone who watches the retrograde flow of inmates with drug-associated convictions, whether for distribution itself or for crimes associated with distribution use. While many prevention techniques focus on immunization, in the effort to create a population more resistant to the inception of addiction, it has also worked well for other conventionally “infectious” disorders to arrest the illness in a core population; and in so doing diminish the contagion between that core population and the susceptibles. Seldom could a more obvious example of this exist than in the national prison systems, whose aggregate capacity has multiplied by a factor of 10 since the mid-1980s.  At that time, the war on drugs became a war on people who were already battling drugs. With such an approach those affected become increasingly akin to the population of Syria, beset on several sides and not completely sure that its allies are truly its allies.

Please use this commemorative week as an opportunity to examine the site provided above, give thought to the nature of addiction not merely as a contagion but as a treatable and in many respects preventable disease cluster.