by Ben Frayser

Created on: April 27, 2010

We spend too many resources on drug and alcohol addiction in the health care system. Far, far too many. Addiction cannot be cured from without.

Alcoholics Anonymous and Narc Anon have as high a success rate as any Betty Ford upscale prep ranch. The recidivism rate is virtually equal between skyview dude ranch and glory sanatorium and a basement vomit encrusted meeting hall. Why? Because the addict doesn't want to stop! All the expensive health care we can give them will do nothing but tag them.

Tag kids who have already been branded. It's a corporate money maker, not a cure. Education is the cure. These people have to either learn where the bottom is for them, or be allowed to find that bottom. There is no other way.

Expensive drugs? Counseling? Let's see. The recidivism rate for anabuse is greater than 80%. Most people drink on it. Same with Methadone. The drug companies will tout all these statistics about how effective their medications are in trials, but in the real world, they fail. Why? No one is going to pay for a study that shows the subject is useless. All the trials are manufactured to exhibit the drug's success. In the real world, test subjects often have no intention of stopping. As for counseling, the psychiatrists who work with these kids are often, bizarrely, foreign. A distinctly high rate of TOEFL takers move into psychiatric and behavioral specialties. What do they know about the average American teenager? The counselors that truly understand these kid's problems are at risk of going into remission daily and are often more of a showcase for why these kids would rather drop out and drug than they are exhibition of success.

Do you want true proof? Read the ones who say no and see if their reasoning isn't more the angst of being unable to help or of being unhelped (read not wanting to do it theirselves) and less the reality of working in the field. Those of us who work in the field and have never had these addictions to bounce around in feel for the kids just starting out. We see the truth of their older selves everyday. We hurt for them, but recognize there is nothing we really can do about it. We'll throw money at them. We'll throw pills and care and nurture, but the smart ones of us will keep our distance and know how manipulative and decadent they truly are. The fact that they are addicts and thus will lie, cheat and steal at every turn, that they will drag anyone and everyone they can down with them will be ever present in our minds.

Until the person steps forward without excuse or place to hide and agrees and desires to move away from the addictions, there is no hope and no help and we should put our resources into places that need them and will get good from them.

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