This popular claim lacks evidence and leads to poor policy.
The notion that drug addiction is a brain disease has become axiomatic. Around the globe aspiring health professionals treating substance abuse are indoctrinated with this belief, especially after the idea became popular in the 1990s. Its popularity extends far beyond the hallowed halls of academia. Both the May 1997 Time and the September 2017 National Geographic magazines were dedicated to the brain science of addiction. Numerous other popular magazines have run similar cover stories over the past two decades.
But after 20 years of research, one of us (Hart) saw that paradigm yielding dismal results. Meanwhile, behavioral research on outcomes after providing both animals and humans with attractive alternatives to drugs has yielded positive results regarding effective treatments, despite the lack of mainstream attention.
Despite this seemingly solid scientific consensus, there are virtually no data in humans indicating that addiction is a disease of the brain in the way that, for instance, Huntington’s or Parkinson’s are diseases of the brain. The existing paradigm is based on intuition and political necessity, not on data and useful clinical results. Yet the diseased-brain perspective has outsized influence on research funding and direction, as well as on how drug use and addiction are viewed around the globe. This situation contributes to unrealistic, costly, and harmful drug policies: If the problem is a person’s neurobiological state after exposure to a drug, then either the drug must be eradicated from society through law enforcement or an individual’s brain must be treated. In such a myopic approach, the socioeconomic and societal factors that contribute to drug addiction are considered a footnote in research, clinical practices, and policy, despite their apparent importance. (see also DRR: Dealing With Addiction)
