Those involved with treatment say drug addiction is a chronic disease usually requiring a minimum of six months treatment, sometimes much, much longer. Some addicts are in treatment for years.

Experts say addiction treatment is not about checking someone into a hospital. Rather, treatment invariably works better when patients are sleeping in their own beds, going to work every day and receiving daily support from family, friends and church.

That approach is also far cheaper than inpatient hospital stays.

But the current system simply isn't set up to look at the problem that way. State officials estimate 70 percent of addicts could and should be treated in outpatient programs like Project Reality and Discovery House — outpatient programs that fall outside the scope of many medical insurance plans.

Fleming believes Utah's health insurance community can and must come to grips with the addiction epidemic that is infecting every social and economic group in the state. And society simply cannot afford it without the private sector stepping into the treatment void.

"There has to be parity in insurance coverage," Fleming said. "We just can't treat (with government funds) all the people who need it."

Paula never saw herself as an addict. At least not at first.

A mother of three working as a supervisor at University Hospital for the past 20 years, she was just treating a bad case of hemorrhoids. Doctors were more than willing to treat the pain with pills. One even wrote her a prescription to last an entire year.

"It was the day I woke up without pain and still craved the pills I knew I was addicted," she said. "I tried to stop, but I just got so sick I thought I would die."

Over the next several years, Paula scammed pills from doctors and emergency rooms. When that wasn't enough, she took to buying them on the streets at $5 a pill. She mortgaged her house and sold her car, all for a 20-pill-a-day habit.

Paula, now 60, has been clean for 4 1/2 years. Her employer still doesn't know about her addiction. "I can't tell them. They wouldn't understand," she said. "There is an attitude that we did this to ourselves, and we should pay the consequences."

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Tomorrow: Addiction and spirituality.