People Control Their Addictions☆

Epigraph, Free Will in Action: A philosophy professor of my acquaintance who smoked was arguing with someone in a bar in favor of free will. She self-consciously ground out her cigarette and threw the rest of the pack away. (She never smoked again.) “THAT'S free will,” she practically screamed. Theworld, led by the United States, is hell bent on establishing the absence of choice in addiction, as expressed by the defining statement that addiction is a “chronic relapsing brain disease” (my emphasis). The figure most associated with this model, the director of the American National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, claims that addiction vitiates freewill through its effects on the brain. In reality,while by nomeans a simple task, people regularly quit their substance addictions, often by moderating their consumption, usually through mindfulnessmediated processes (Peele, 2007). Ironically, the brain diseasemodel's ascendance in theU.S. correspondswith epidemic rises in opiate addiction, both painkillers (Brady et al., 2016) and heroin (CDC, n.d.), aswell as heroin, painkiller, and tranquilizer poisoning deaths (Rudd et al., 2016). More to the point, the conceptual and treatment goal of eliminating choice in addiction and recovery is not only futile, but iatrogenic. Indeed, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's epidemiological surveys, while finding natural recovery for both drug and alcohol disorders to be typical, has found a decline in natural recovery rates (Dawson et al., 2005) and a sharp increase in AUDs (Grant et al., 2015). © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).