Last Thursday I attended a seminar on “Understanding addiction.” The Institute for Natural Resources sponsored the one day seminar which was a way for nurses and other medical professionals to collect continuing education credits.
Much of the material was familiar to me and I don’t think I learned that much that was new. One interesting thing is that alcohol, tobacco, and even caffeine are now seen as drugs with psychoactive properties similar to the illegal drugs such as opioids or cocaine. In fact the legal drugs cause more societal problems than the illegal drugs. The seminar handout states that alcohol and tobacco costs the United States over $400 billion a year due to crime, lost work productivity, and healthcare. Costs associated with Illegal drugs are about $181 billion a year.
There is an opioid crisis but the speaker did not spend that much time on it. He made the point that at different times different drugs are in fashion. Unfortunately heroin seems to be in vogue right now. It is clear that the War on Drugs has failed and we need to invest much more money on treatment. We also need to find a balance between maintaining pain medicines for people with chronic pain while reducing the more casual prescribing of opioids.