And yet, people do things that make it more likely they’ll develop cancer, like smoking, drinking, eating meat, becoming obese, or climbing into tanning beds. People diagnosed with Type II diabetes are often judged for their own personal failing regarding diet and exercise.
And yet, some populations are far more likely to develop addictions than others, just as Native Americans are more likely to suffer from alcoholism.
And yet, most diseases, especially those diseases which riddle our modern populations, aren’t caused by one person sneezing on another. You don’t catch heart disease that way. Or Alzheimer’s.
And yet, there are inheritable traits which cause one person to be more susceptible to an addiction than another.
And yet, there are plenty of other diseases, like depression, OCD, and social phobia, whose primary treatment was once being told by others, “well, if you’d just choose to be happy/relaxed/not shy”.
And yet, people who commit suicide were once judged as cowards instead of understood as being in such a state of suffering, killing themselves was the better option.
And yet, there are physical changes in the brains of addicts which make it impossible to maintain emotional and physical homeostasis without either another fix or some heavy duty medical intervention.
The point here is that addiction is far more complicated than “well, if he’d just stood there and hadn’t injected smack in his veins, he wouldn’t be dead”, and that blaming and shaming addicts leads only to worse outcomes. The choice is not between “it’s his own damn fault” and “poor bastard, he had no control over his fate”. Successful treatment doesn’t start with “you asshole, stop doing H”.
Demonizing addicts only leads to more deaths. Please stop doing it.