Seattle Times: Getting it right on addiction

The American Medical Association first recognized addiction as a disease in 1956. But the medical community has only recently seen it as a “chronic, relapsing brain disorder,” according to this week’s Newsweek magazine, which put addiction on the cover.

Among the findings: The addict’s brain is malfunctioning, like the pancreas of someone with diabetes.

At the SAMA luncheon, keynote speaker Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, compared a drug relapse to type 1 diabetes, hypertension or asthma. It simply must be treated like the illness that it is.

“Once it settles in,” Volkow said of addiction, “the consequences can be long-lasting.”