80 “experts” conclude correctly.
Quotes of the month:
“At its core, addiction isn’t just a social problem or a moral problem or a criminal problem. It’s a brain problem whose behaviors manifest in all these other areas.”
So said Dr. Michael Miller, past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), who oversaw the development of a new definition of addiction requiring a four-year process involving more than 80 experts. This, about a decade after one singular amateur refined his redefinition of alcoholism as “A genetic predisposition to biochemically process the drug alcohol in such as a way as to cause that person to act badly some of the time.” Oh, that amateur must have forgotten to explicate where “acting badly” might be relevant: in social, moral and criminal ways. So, it took two decades of advances in neuroscience to convince ASAM that addiction should be redefined by how it affects the brain and for someone to finally say, “Addictive behaviors are a manifestation of the disease, not a cause.” Hmm, I think that amateur said it—much more than a decade ago, in Drunks, Drugs & Debits.