Marc Lewis: The Neuroscientist Who Believes Addiction Is Not a Disease
30th August 2015
For decades the medical profession has largely treated addiction as as a chronic brain disease. The US government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse characterises addicts as compulsive drug seekers and users who continue taking drugs despite harmful and unwanted consequences. “It is considered a brain disease,” the institute says, “because drugs change the brain; they change its structure and how it works.”
Dr Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist – perhaps most famous for detailing his own years of drug addiction and abuse in Memoirs of an Addicted Brain – strongly refutes this conventional disease model of addiction. His new book, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease, argues that considering addiction as a disease is not only wrong, but also harmful. Rather, he argues, addiction is a behavioural problem that requires willpower and motivation to change.
Odd to see this in the Guardian, Voice of the Crust and bastion of ‘progressive’ thought.
August 30th, 2015 at 23:27
60 minutes had an interesting piece a couple years ago about research being done by Leon Trotsky’s daughter. Drugs definitely do change brain chemistry and thus make it very hard to reverse an addiction.
Of course for most people, the addiction is self-inflicted, and thus behavioral in it’s roots.
August 31st, 2015 at 13:06
Addiction is the child of despair.
Those who have hope for their present and future don’t turn to drugs to escape them.