Read the full article at Vox.

The American opioid epidemic claimed 63,600 lives in 2016 alone. While the public policy challenge is daunting, the problem isn’t that we lack any effective treatment options. The data shows that we could save many lives by expanding medication-assisted treatments and adopting harm reduction policies like needle exchange programs. Yet neither of these policies has been widely embraced.

Why? Because these treatments are seen as indulging an addict’s weakness rather than “curing” it. Methadone and buprenorphine, the most effective medication-assisted treatments, are “crutches,” in the words of felony treatment court judge Frank Gulotta Jr.; they are “just substituting one opioid for another,” according to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

We tend to view addiction as a moral failure because we are in the grip of a simple but misleading answer to one of the oldest questions of philosophy: Do people always do what they think is best? In other words, do our actions always reflect our beliefs and values? When someone with addiction chooses to take drugs, does this show us what she truly cares about — or might something more complicated be going on?

These questions are not merely academic: Lives depend on where we come down. The stigma against addiction owes its stubborn tenacity to a specific, and flawed, philosophical view of the mind, a misconception so seductive that it ensnared Socrates in the fifth century BC.


The “self” is not a single, unitary thing

This “divided mind” view has become popular in both philosophy and psychology over the past 50 years. In psychology, we see it in the rise of “dual process” theories of the mind, the most famous of which comes from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who divides the mind into a part that makes judgments quickly, intuitively, and unconsciously (“System I”) and a part that thinks more slowly, rationally, and consciously (“System II”).

More pertinent for our purposes is research on what University of Michigan neuroscientist Kent Berridge calls the “wanting system,” which regulates our cravings for things like food, sex, and drugs using signals based in the neurotransmitter dopamine. The wanting system has powerful control over behavior, and its cravings are insensitive to long-term consequences.

Berridge’s research indicates that addictive drugs can “hijack” the wanting system, manipulating dopamine directly to generate cravings that are far stronger than those the rest of us experience. The result is that the conscious part of a person’s mind might want one thing (say, to pick his kids up from school) but be overruled by the wanting system’s desire for something else (to get high).