Treating Addiction as a Disease Is Wrong and Harmful, Says Leading Neuroscientist
18th November 2015
The author of Memoirs of an Addicted Brain and The Biology of Desire, Dr Lewis became addicted to opiates when he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.
He faced “serious personal and legal troubles resulting from his addiction,” his website explains.
“I know what scientists are looking at when they say addiction is a disease. I don’t dispute the findings, but I dispute the interpretation of them,” he told The Huffington Post.
He went on to argue that addiction is a “developmental process” and that while the brain changes, addiction is not “chronic” because people “continue to change when they recover.”
Dr Lewis said that the label also makes recovery more difficult because it means that patients can be exploited by expensive programmes with low success rates, and ultimately dehumanises addicts.
Cue the attacks by Social Justice Warriors. What this poor guy fails to notice is that (a) classifying it as a disease means you can force insurance to cover ‘treatment’ costs; (b) classifying it as a disease means you can push for government-funded ‘treatment’ programs; (c) classifying it as a disease means It’s Not Your Fault and pushes the Narrative that nobody is responsible for what he does, that Society Is To Blame for everything bad, and that we all ought to surrender to Big Brother, who will kiss it and make it all better.
Well, he did to to Berkeley, so I guess that explains it.