NEWSWEEK Cover: The Hunt for an Addicti...(or five more years to see how [Vivitrol]...),Health

Date:2/24/2008

or five more years to see how [Vivitrol] does," says staff psychiatrist Garrett O'Conner at the Betty Ford Center, in Rancho Mirage, Calif., about the medication that prevents patients from drinking alcohol by obliterating its ability to intoxicate. "And we need to be very cautious, because a failed treatment will set a person back." The Ford Center and the Hazelden Foundation, in Minnesota, use drugs sparingly, and mostly just in the first days or weeks of recovery, the "detox" phase. "Hazelden will never turn its back on pharmaceutical solutions, but a pill all by itself is not the cure," says William Moyers, Hazelden's vice president of external affairs. "We're afraid that people are seeking a medical route that says treatment is the end, not the beginning."

Also in the cover package, Mitchell S. Rosenthal, M.D., the founder of Phoenix House and the executive director of the Rosenthal Center for Clinical and Policy Studies at Phoenix House, writes that although the vaccines sound great and the new medications will have their place as treatment protocols evolve, "In our passion for the prescription quick fix and pharmacological solution, however, we should recognize that drugs alone are not the answer to addiction. The law of unintended consequences warns us that there's a downside to just about every advance. So discovering that addiction involves profound changes in the brain has led to a widespread assumption that addicts are powerless over their condition-that drugs have hijacked their brains. This, in essence, rules out free will and the possibility that some addictive behavior may be voluntary. It is a seductive proposition, for it suggests that the addict is incapable of self-control, and hence cannot be responsible for his or her behavior."

(Read cover story at http://www.Newsweek.com)

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SOURCE Newsweek Copyright©2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

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