In Search of the Neurobiology of Addiction Recovery: A Brief Commentary on Science and StigmaWilliam L. White, MA
August, 2007
In 1997, Dr Alan Leshner, then Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) published a seminal article, “Addiction is a Brain Disease, and It Matters,” in one of the world’s leading scientific journals (Leshner, 1997). That event was the opening salvo in a decade-long research and public education campaign to re-educate the public about the nature of addiction. The focus of this campaign has been to move “addiction is a disease” from the status of an ideological proclamation by policy activists and an organizing metaphor for individuals seeking to resolve alcohol and other drug problems to a science-grounded conclusion. The involvement of scientists was, in part, a response to earlier and continuing anti-disease polemics, e.g., Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Fingarette, 1989), The Diseasing of America (Peele, 1989), The Myth of Addiction (Davies, 1992) and Addiction is a Choice (Schaler, 2000). In the 1990s, the prolonged debate over disease conceptualizations of alcoholism and drug dependency moved from the philosophy departments to the scientific laboratories with the greatest financial investment in history in genetic and neurobiological studies of addiction. The fruits of that research triggered a campaign to re-educate the public and policy makers about the nature of addiction.
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Source: Addiction and Recovery News
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