Why are we so afraid of addiction?

The old adage of “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” is one view that has some of us believing that we might not be able to learn new things, that somehow we have stopped learning, and just have to live our lives out with the prior skills we’ve learned. Research shows that we do not stop learning, and we are capable of learning new things. We are not dogs, thank goodness.

We have been taught to fear change. To fear what we don’t know. And we don’t know much about addiction.

refer-madness

Lack societal knowledge about what addiction is – history of giving false information about what addiction is. Forty years ago, someone would have been given shock treatment for addiction. We have mixed messages about what addiction is – is it a choice, is it a disease?

The ways we have been treating addiction has become epidemic; imaging using the method of incarceration for people who are fat. We can see fat people .. “get them off the street, they are causing our health insurance to increase, and incarcerate them .. get them on a weight program and change their life.”

We don’t have good treatment options either for those who cannot afford it. Jacques Fobres says “each time a society arrived at a system, they tended to keep that system…” “majority of people today are unsane .. i.e., they have been exposed to methods that have long been rendered obsolete.” So we continue under the guidelines of what insurance dictates. Which comes first, crime or drug use? They both go together. We will not see a change in crime if we do not address the drug use problem adequately.

We as a society need to learn new tricks to keep our society “As long as you have crime, wars, police, poverty, (addiction), you are in the early stages of civilization. Civilization implies that it has been obtained.”