Medical Expert Reveals Fiction Vs. Fact About Heroin, Cocaine, Meth and Marijuana
Heroin addiction is largely confined to minority populations in poor, urban areas, right? Not so fast. While that might have been the profile of a heroin user 20 years ago, today’s addict is white, young and living in the affluent ‘burbs.
So says a comprehensive new study called, appropriately, “The Changing Face of Heroine Use In The United States,” published this week by the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
The study also found that contrary to popular belief, most heroin addicts today did not start on their “silk road” to perdition with another illicit drug, such as marijuana. Instead, most first started getting high with prescription painkillers, likely which they either found at home, from a friend or obtained illegally on the street.
Given that the study destroyed two popular beliefs about addiction, we thought it high time (pardon the pun) to explore whether there might be other myths to be busted. Dr. Akikur Mohammad, M.D., a physician specializing in addiction medicine, and an adjunct professor at University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, wasted no time in setting the record straight.
Here are five more myths about drug addiction as answered by Dr. Mohammad, who is also the medical director and founder of Inspire Malibu treatment center in Los Angeles.
Fiction #1: The probability of becoming a heroin addict is extremely high, even if you just use it once.
Fact: Most heroin users – like most users of all drugs – never become addicts. Your probability of becoming dependent is estimated to be 32 percent for tobacco, 23 percent for heroin, 17 percent for cocaine, 15 percent for alcohol, 11 percent for stimulants other than cocaine, 9 percent for cannabis, 9 percent for anxiolytic, sedative, and hypnotic drugs, 8 percent for analgesics, 5 percent for psychedelics, and 4 percent for inhalants. Bottom line: Most people simply stop using their drug of choice before it becomes a real problem.
Before and after- the effects of Meth. Pictured here is meth abuser Andrew at age 18 (left) and age 25. Photo courtesy of CBS News.
Fiction #2: No question, meth and crack are the most dangerous of the popular intoxicants today.
Fact: Actually, it’s alcohol. By any measure, alcohol is far more destructive to the user and society as whole than any other drug. From a physiological perspective, alcohol is particularly pernicious because it doesn’t affect just one or two brain receptors but multiple receptors simultaneously. That makes alcohol extremely difficult to counteract with medications to stop the craving that is the hallmark of all substance addiction. As for society, approximately 88,000 deaths occur annually in the U.S. from alcohol – many times more than the deaths caused by all other drugs combined.
Fiction #3: When it’s all said done, the AA and its 12-step philosophy is still the best way for an addict to kick his (or her) habit.
Fact: Addiction is a chronic disease characterized by anatomical and functional changes in the human brain. This is recognized by all the leading medical organizations in the U.S. and worldwide including the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health and the World Helath Organization. Indeed, with the advent of new diagnostic technology in the Nineties, such as MRIs and CT scans, the anatomical changes could be clearly seen and studied with brain-imaging technology.
For this reason alone, the AA philosophy does not work. People with the chronic disease of addiction can no more stop their disease by sheer willpower than a diabetic can cure his disease. Indeed, by their own admission, AA only works about 5% of the time.
That’s not to say that for some people, AA can’t be part of an overall addiction treatment program, which also includes pharmaceutical medications and lifestyle modifications. But it flies in the face of 21st century science to think of AA alone as an effective treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction.
Shockingly, even today, an estimated 90% of the approximately 14,000 rehab clinics in the U.S. do not use any evidence-based medicine in their treatment programs and, instead, rely entirely for treatment on the AA philosophy–first developed in the 1930s.
Fiction #4: Addicts are born losers who never amount to anything no matter what you do for them.
Fact: Part of that is correct. Addicts are born with a much higher risk of addiction than the population as a whole – about a 50% genetic factor. As for being losers, studies show that addicts actually have a higher I.Q. than the population at large. In any case, hardly anyone would consider to be “losers” these luminaries who were, or are, addicts: Judy Garland, Robert Downey, Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Ray Charles, Keith Urban, Brian Wilson, William F. Buckley, Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, James Baldwin, and yes, Benjamin Franklin.
Courtesy of the NIH – www.drugabuse.gov
Fiction #5: Once an addict relapses, it’s all down hill from there. They really never get better.
Fact: Actually, the relapse rate for addiction is typical of chronic diseases, slightly more than diabetes and less than hypertension and asthma. A relapse is not an occasion to scold, punish or otherwise stigmatize the person. It’s not a moral failure but a symptom. Modern-day diagnostics indicate that most brains eventually return to relatively normal when the drug use stop.
