It’s Misleading to Call Addiction a Disease

The New York Times has recently published an opinion piece authored by Dr Carl Fisher, an addiction medicine specialist and bioethicist, titled “It’s misleading to call addiction a disease.” The article draws on his personal experience with a substance problem, which led to his decision to become an addiction specialist. Dr Fisher proposes that perceiving addiction as a disease is an over-simplification, that focuses too much on individual factors reduced to a biological explanation alone. Instead, Dr Fisher points out that alcohol and drug problems are strongly influenced by health inequity - things like poverty, unemployment and poor housing. He proposes that the disease model implies that the individual has no capacity for choice or control, which can lead to a fatalistic view of people with substance problems - a pessimism that damages people’s sense of hope for the future, and impacts on treatment outcomes. 

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