Time Magazine’s article on addiction, July 16, 2007
I wrote a letter to the editor of Time:
Dear Editor,
Overall excellent piece on addiction. At the risk of seeming overly critical, however, it perpetuates several destructive myths. The first is Fracella's definition of addiction, which requires "the desire to continue using something you know is bad for you." Due to euphoric recall, the distortion every addict experiences that causes early-stage addicts to view practically everything they do or say through self-favoring lenses, they have great difficulty in seeing that it is "bad" for them. Most early-stage alcoholics are, in fact, utterly incapable of self-diagnosis.
The second includes two myths in one: Volkow's assertion that "everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol." First, the correct ...
