Opiates may have helped them endure a war’s alternating bouts of boredom and terror, but stateside, civilian life took precedence. Once they were home, heroin lost its appeal. Almost all the soldiers who were detained passed the test on their second try ( 4). As word of the new directive spread, most GIs stopped using narcotics. Operation Golden Flow, as the military called it, succeeded. Those who failed could attend an army-sponsored detoxification program ( 3). No one could board a plane home until he had passed a urine test. Fearful that the newly discharged veterans would join the ranks of junkies already bedeviling inner cities, President Richard Nixon commanded the military to begin drug testing. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam” ( 2). In May 1971, the crisis reached the front page of the New York Times: “G.I. Army enlisted men serving there had tried opium or heroin, and between 10 and 25% of them were addicted. Military physicians in Vietnam estimated that nearly half of all U.S. In 1970, high-grade heroin and opium flooded Southeast Asia.
Thankfully, addicts can choose to recover and are not helpless victims of their own “hijacked brains.” The latter becomes obvious when patients become abstinent yet still struggle to assume rewarding lives in the realm of work and relationships. In short, the brain-disease model obscures the dimension of choice in addiction, the capacity to respond to incentives, and also the essential fact people use drugs for reasons (as consistent with a self-medication hypothesis). This paper will explain the limits of over-medicalizing – while acknowledging a legitimate place for medication in the therapeutic repertoire – and why a broader perspective on the problems of the addicted person is essential to understanding addiction and to providing optimal care. The brain-disease model implies erroneously that the brain is necessarily the most important and useful level of analysis for understanding and treating addiction. The notion that addiction is a “brain disease” has become widespread and rarely challenged.
Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. 2Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USAįrom Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld, copyright © 2013.1Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.
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