Robert DuPont, MD, was the first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, appointed in 1973, and he spent his career addressing substance use disorders. I first became acquainted with him while watching The Anonymous People, a feature documentary film produced in 2013 about the 23.5 million Americans living in long-term recovery from alcohol and other drug addiction. If you haven’t watched it, you are missing out on a lot.
Then I had the pleasure of seeing Dr. DuPont present, and I was in love. Sure, he’s about twenty-nine years older than I am, but consider it a professional crush. His delivery is no nonsense; he’s brilliant; and I will never forget his response to those who think that legalizing cannabis will make people drink less alcohol: “It’s not a teeter totter!” Right he is, and you’ll know that if you read his book Chemical Slavery.
There are some major takeaways that I wish everyone knew.
First is the message of primary prevention that should be adopted across the nation if not the world: “One Choice: no use of alcohol, tobacco (nicotine), marijuana, or other drugs by youth under the age of twenty-one for health.” It’s simple, right? No one under the age of twenty-one should be using mood-altering substances unless used as prescribed by a doctor. Why on earth is this controversial? It shouldn’t be, but it is. Using substances is considered a moral choice…as in, “It’s not up to me to tell that patient or that student not to use because that’s up to the morality of the family.” I call bullshit. We the people pay for the outcomes of not having a strong primary prevention message.
Which brings me to another of his takeaways: We cannot treat nor incarcerate our way out of the epidemic of addiction in our country. The only way we will get out from under it is to PREVENT it. And the best prevention message is as he states: “One Choice: no use of alcohol, tobacco (nicotine), marijuana, or other drugs by youth under the age of twenty-one for health.”
Treatment works…another of his messages, and “Addiction recovery programs based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are the bedrock of lifelong sobriety.” Just getting through treatment doesn’t solve the problem. He’s got so much to say about this, so many explanations to people’s protests…AA doesn’t work; AA is too God-focused; AA isn’t for me…but the bottom line is that there are certainly exceptions, but the exceptions don’t disprove the rule. The rule is as he states it: “Addiction recovery programs based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are the bedrock of lifelong sobriety.”
Dr. DuPont has a lot to say about language, which, I admit, caused me some consternation. While he acknowledges that older terms of “drug abuse,” “addict,” and “alcoholic” are increasingly perceived to be stigmatizing, he continues to use them in order to “acknowledge the stigma on the addictive use of alcohol and [other] drugs – a stigma that I consider to be justified and needed. To be clear, I am not for stigmatizing addicted people, just their addictive behavior.”
He goes on to explain what I think we in the addiction field battle every single day: “The person with a substance use disorder is responsible for the physical, mental, legal, and social consequences of his or her disorder, and the addicted person has control over the continued use of the substance.” Yes. Yes! YES! In the last two days I had conversations with two different people about this very point…and those conversations were completely contradictory…which is another reason everyone should read Chemical Slavery. Addiction IS a disease, a hard one to recover from, and it’s one that, because of its behavioral aspect, only the person who’s addicted can do anything about. And because it’s hard to recover doesn’t mean that those with addiction should be given a pass for their continued behavior. Get better or don’t, but don’t pretend that you can’t, and don’t blame others for not doing so.
The last takeaway that I want to address here, and there are so many more in the book, is that “drug tests are denial busters, exposing the nonmedical drug user to the healing forces of family and community life and giving good, immediate reasons to say no to illicit drug use.” Dr. DuPont points out that some people disagree with the merits of drug testing, but I’m absolutely with him on this! He asks these questions: “Is the use of currently illegal drugs a more protected privacy right than speeding or driving without a seatbelt? Are drug-using behaviors less likely to cause harm? Is it less intrusive to ask all air travelers to go through a metal detector than to ask all employees or all school children to take a drug test if substance abuse is evident?” Workplaces will be safer; schools will be safer; roads will be safer; communities will be safer if we adopt more – better – drug testing.
Addiction is a disease, but there are ways to mitigate it in our communities. Let’s abolish chemical slavery as we know it!
Guided by Guida 
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