Treatment for addicts is starting to change

A call for change is afoot in the difficult and often heartbreaking world of addiction treatment.

For decades, 12-step programs and a medication-free approach have dominated the recovery industry. But now doctors and scientists and the leader of the National Institute on Drug Abuse are pushing for broad recognition of addiction as a disease and more medical approaches to therapy.

In the last couple of years, a top addiction society officially declared addiction a "brain disorder." A specialty substance-abuse training program for doctors has been ushered into medical schools. The federal government has announced the creation of new resources to help guide patients, families and doctors toward science-based addiction treatment, and more drugs to treat addiction are entering the pipeline.

In June, Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and President Obama's top advisor on drug policy, declared in a speech at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage that addiction "is not a moral failing on the part of the individual. It's a chronic disease of the brain that can be treated."

About 21 million Americans have a substance-abuse disorder for which they need specialty treatment, according to 2010 statistics from the government-funded National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Deaths from drug overdoses now exceed traffic fatalities.

Experts are pushing for a truly medical approach to treating addiction as a disease rather than relying solely on longtime unproven therapies like 12-step programs

Nine out of 10 people addicted to drugs other than nicotine receive no treatment, and most of those who do get it are put through unproven programs run by people without medical training, according to a 500-plus-page report released by Columbia University in June. Solid data on effectiveness of the most popular recovery approach - 12-step programs - are lacking, the report said.

Much of the reason for the disconnect is rooted in the recovery movement's history: Addicts, shunned by the medical establishment, received their help from those outside of it, a trend that continues to this day.

"Drug abuse treatment developed outside mainstream medicine," said Dr. Walter Ling, a leading addiction specialist at UCLA. "We're still suffering from that."

And yet decades of basic laboratory science has revealed that addiction is a bone fide medical problem involving profound brain alterations. Alcohol, opiates, cocaine and other substances increase levels of the chemical dopamine in the reward pathway of the brain. With repeated use, baseline dopamine levels wane to compensate and a drug becomes less pleasurable, requiring ever-larger doses.

Even when people are weaned from a drug, their brains don't return to normal. So they remain vulnerable to its draw, suffering mood swings and profound urges to use again.