Addiction a disease, not a choice, speaker says

Most people don't use, let alone become addicted to, alcohol and other drugs, but most of them have an addiction that's as serious and as hard to break as a heroin habit, according to an addiction specialist. They suffer from the mindset that substance abusers are weak-minded, badly behaved little criminals who need to be punished out of existence.

Society holds dear its perceptions that drugs are inherently evil and users and addicts are evildoers who ought to be jailed, or worse, said Dr. Kevin McCauley, an addiction researcher and treatment specialist in a speech Friday in Salt Lake City.

"It's been that way for more than 100 years, and it's not likely to change," he said.

Addicts often behave badly, and alcohol or other drugs are often linked to the bad behavior that comes under the purview of the criminal justice system, McCauley said.

Society's constant yet never-satisfied craving to control ever more substances and to criminalize those who use or abuse them has given the U.S. the dubious distinction among its wealthy nation counterparts worldwide of having the highest percentage of its population incarcerated.

People like to think that the get-tougher approach with substances and addicts is working, McCauley said after showing his 70-minute video "Pleasure Unwoven" (pleasureunwoven.com; instituteforaddictionstudy.com) at a lunch Friday sponsored by the Salt Lake City Mayor's Coalition on Alcohol, Tobacco and other Drugs.

The main effect of this approach has been to give a lot of people criminal records just for being sick and to supply revenue for more police officers to catch more drug offenders to expand jail space that is filled faster than it can be built, McCauley said.

The former U.S. Navy flight surgeon isn't against the system, but he's shaking things up by combining the facts of abuse with recent advances in neuroscience, advocating a drug policy for a new century, not keeping one built from the one before last.

Medicine at the turn of the century made the mistake of regarding bad or anti-social behavior in people as a problem of race or ethnicity or background or morals, rather than as a symptom of a disease, he said.