Last week, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued his department’s first ever report on addiction. It didn’t offer easy answers to the opioid addiction crisis sweeping the country. But it had a crucial message for every American: Addiction is not a personal failing. It is a disease that must be treated in the same way as cancer, diabetes and other chronic illness.
This simple concept must inform decisions about how we treat those struggling with addiction. It means we must show compassion, not contempt. It means those struggling with addiction must have access to effective treatment, not simply face punishment.
“For far too long, too many in our country have viewed addiction as a moral failing,” Murthy wrote in an introduction to the report, which echoed the same message. “This unfortunate stigma has created an added burden of shame that has made people with substance use disorders less likely to come forward and seek help. It has also made it more challenging to marshal the necessary investments in prevention and treatment.
“We must help everyone see that addiction is not a character flaw — it is a chronic illness that we must approach with the same skill and compassion with which we approach heart disease, diabetes and cancer,” he added.
Maine, like many other states, is slow in coming to this realization. The state is on track to have one person die each day, on average, this year from a drug overdose. In the first nine months of this year, 286 people in Maine died of drug overdoses, compared with 272 in all of 2015 and 208 the year before that. Of these deaths, 182 were attributed to manufactured opioid drugs, such as heroin and fentanyl, and 95 were because of pharmaceutical opioids, such as oxycodone, according to the Maine attorney general’s office, which compiles the statistics.
Despite these horrifying numbers, Maine spends less on substance abuse treatment today than it did at the start of the decade.
Maine is the only state in the nation with a limit on the length of time its Medicaid program will fund methadone treatment, and the state government reimburses methadone providers at one of the lowest rates in the nation.
Gov. Paul LePage has erroneously blamed the state’s heroin problem on black and Hispanic drug dealers from out of state. He has emphasized law enforcement over treatment and fought to keep anti-overdose medication Narcan out of the hands of first responders.
Such a response would be unthinkable if cancer or diabetes rates suddenly spiked in Maine. In such scenarios, the response would be based on scientific evidence and medical expertise.
The surgeon general simply — and logically — asks that the same standard be applied to addiction.
“We need more policies and programs that increase access to proven treatment modalities,” he wrote. “We need to invest more in expanding the scientific evidence base for prevention, treatment and recovery. We also need a cultural shift in how we think about addiction.”
The surgeon general’s report is an important call to action that should inform and guide Maine’s response to its ongoing drug addiction crisis.
