ADDICTS ARTICLE ELICITS CRITICISM AND PRAISE (1 of 4)

As a psychologist working with people with addiction problems for many
years, I found Alicia Priest's article on middle-class addiction
unsatisfying ["Middle Class Addicts", November 13-20].

She attempts to cover too broad a topic and does not distinguish between
substances.

To criticize the 12-step approach, she cites two academics, the kinds who
build careers on criticizing successful, creative ideas of others,
apparently lacking any themselves. Yet toward the end of the article she
describes most of the people she interviewed as having relied on 12-step
programs in their recovery.

I find it offensive to see the 12-step approach subjected to the kind of
attack she describes coming from her sources. A claim that the spontaneous
remission of some cases of alcoholism is "a dirty little secret that AA
doesn't want you to hear about" is empty rhetoric arising from ignorance. I
have seen people avoid attending 12-step programs because of having Stanton
Peele's arguments parroted to them--unfortunate, given that addiction
destroys families, often kills the addict, and causes harm to the community
in a variety of ways.

Another point that I found curious was Priest's argument that expelling
students from school for using drugs is an example of those taking a
position for abstinence versus harm reduction. Intoxication in school and
whether addicted people should abstain or moderate their use of addictive
substances are unrelated topics.

Political issues were considered in the article, but superficially. There
are two issues at the political level that require attention in this
province. One is the question as to why the development of an adequate
system of care for addictive disorders has been consistently undermined
over the years.

Alberta has had a good-quality system of care for several decades, while
Washington state has had one of the better systems of care in the U.S. for
several decades. With consistently higher rates of alcoholism and addiction
to illicit drugs, our services have been consistently inadequate.

The second question is why we have so many drugs in this province in the
first place. When I worked for the Alcohol and Drug Commission years ago,
the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit had just been created. The heroin
trade was almost completely wiped out. That didn't last for long, and
Vancouver soon came back to, and even surpassed, its former glory as the
major port of entry for drugs into North America.

Why has the political will to deal with the drug trade not been there?

As Priest noted, 10 percent of the population has an active addiction
problem at any given time. I suggest you break the topic down into
manageable subtopics and write a series giving addiction the attention it
requires.

Eroca Shaler
Vancouver