SOME SKEPTICAL OF NEW ANTI-DRUG CAMPAIGN MESSAGE

Ads equating addiction with a disease provoke strong response In the
20 years since a woman cracked an egg into a hot skillet while
saying, "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs," science
has made great strides in understanding just how illicit drugs fry
the mind. The nonprofit group responsible for the iconic anti-drug
campaign also has evolved with a provocative message that drug
addiction is a disease worse than cancer, diabetes and AIDS.

"It'd be better if I had cancer, then you wouldn't tell me what I'm
going through is just a phase," says a shirtless man in a new public
service announcement. "You wouldn't see my condition as a lack of
willpower, but the disease that it truly is."

Pilot-tested in Houston and Cincinnati last year, The Partnership for
a Drug-Free America's campaign hopes to help addicts and their loved
ones overcome stigmas to seek treatment, said Ginna Marston, the
group's executive vice president.

"Science, in the last decade, has come through so strongly that we
know the brain chemistry is altered with chronic use," she said. "We
literally know what the brain is like on drugs."

Calling the Houston pilot a success, the group plans to take it to a
national audience. Many in the medical and addiction community
applaud the campaign, but some groups skeptical of the
addiction-as-a-disease paradigm worry the partnership's message uses
pseudoscience to oversimplify the complexities of drug use and addiction.

Psychiatrist Stanton Peele, a skeptic of the disease paradigm,
believes that addiction is a pattern of coping behavior that the vast
majority of people overcome without treatment. He worries that the
disease definition will have negative, long-term effects.

"There are many inappropriate and negative connotations. ... It will
condemn them to having to act that way for the rest of their lives
because disease is a lifetime malady," Peele said. "You also might
find people are not held responsible for their actions."

The campaign, "Hope, Help & Healing: Using the Media to connect
people with help for addiction," came to Houston, in part, because
local media donated $1.8 million in advertising time and space. The
Houston Chronicle did not participate.

Primary Mission

Local partnership ads directed viewers to a phone number and Web
site, www.intervenenow.com, which informed visitors how to seek help
or enroll in drug treatment programs. The site received a total of
228,000 visitors who stayed an average of 12 minutes per visit.
Through focus groups, market research and media participation, the
group found that the public has a denial or lack of understanding
about addiction as a chronic but treatable illness.

Marston said the campaign - a decade in the making and backed by
scientific studies - came as the group recognized that its primary
mission to prevent drug use among children overlooked addicts
desperately in need of treatment.

"There's a universal need for public education because of the stigma
and shame that keeps us in the dark ages at a time when science shows
this is an illness," she said. "This is an intergenerational problem
and, if you don't break that cycle, every new group of kids will
start from scratch."

A Houston-area survey found that 1 in 10 people in the region had
concerns about a loved one's substance abuse.

"The public has a direct experience with the problem," Marston said.

Melissa Kilgore, a spokeswoman for the Council on Alcohol and Drugs
Houston, said the campaign netted 1,000 calls in one year. Callers
were offered clinical assessments and treatment referrals.

"I believe it was effective," she said. "It might have prompted
someone to call for help in taking the first step to get help."

Dr. Donna Yi, interim chief of staff and medical director of The
Menninger Clinic in Houston, said recognizing addiction as disease
doesn't make people unaccountable.

"I think this is targeted to get people out of the idea that this is
a shame-based sort of illness," she said. "The myth that (addiction
is) only a (failure of) willpower and loss of volition still plagues us."

Dr. Wilson Compton, director of epidemiology, services and prevention
research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said research has
shown brain dysfunction and abnormalities with people addicted to
illegal drugs and alcohol.

Addiction, like heart disease and diabetes, can be triggered by
behaviors, like ingesting substances.

Classifying As Disease

Still, critics worry that the message goes too far.

"If we define drug addiction as a disease, does that mean that every
cigarette smoker has a disease?" asked Ethan Nadelmann, executive
director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which seeks to end the war on drugs.

Addiction, Nadelmann said, typically occurs when someone's dependence
on a substance causes problems for themselves and others. The line
between recreational use and addiction is too open for interpretation
in his book.

"Right now some people say one to two drinks a day if you're over 50
is great for the heart," he said. "On the other hand, others say if
you need one to two drinks a day, you're addicted."

Still, he hopes that defining addiction as a disease will
decriminalize drug use.

"You don't incarcerate anyone for diseases like HIV, hepatitis or
cancer," he said.

Drug legalization advocate Dean Becker believes that lifting
prohibition would end the black market for drugs, resulting in an an
end to most crime associated with drugs being illegal.

Labeling addiction as a disease might also make it easier to
stigmatize addicts, Becker said, while also branding recreational use
as addiction.

"If they define somehow what use and abuse and addiction are, then
perhaps it would make some sense," he said. "They can never define
it, so they will continue this jihad that forces people to bend to
their moral mind-set that says all drug use is wrong."

Phillip Lyons, a former Alvin police officer and a criminal justice
professor at Sam Houston State University, thinks the disease model
is too flawed to decriminalize drug use.

"We generally think of disease as something that happens to us over
which we have no control," Lyons said. "Law enforcement, and even the
law more broadly, only work if there is individual responsibility ...
some moral agency involved."