Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

by Maia Szalavitz

And that group, which tends to have a significant history of childhood trauma and/or preexisting mental illness, will usually find some way of compulsively self-medicating, no matter how much we crack down on one substance or another.

Although you might get people to use more or less harmful substances while in the grips of their compulsions, you aren’t addressing the real problem.

Second, given that addiction is a learning disorder, it isn’t necessarily a lifelong problem that demands chronic treatment and the acceptance of a stigmatized identity:

studies find that the majority of cocaine, alcohol, prescription drug, and cannabis addictions end before people are in their mid-...