Enterhealth, a Dallas-based drug and alcohol addiction treatment company, has come out in support of the new direction Director of National Drug Control Policy Michael Botticelli recently proposed for changing how we address the nation’s drug problem, along with the stigma and language of addiction. Botticelli, who was appointed as the nation’s “Drug Czar” last year, is helping to garner more attention to the scientific fact that addiction is a brain disease that needs to be treated with medical intervention. Enterhealth Chief Medical Strategist Harold Clifton Urschel III, M.D., M.M.A. is a longtime proponent of this approach, which he addressed in his 2009 New York Times bestseller, Healing the Addicted Brain. Dr. Urschel puts this idea into practice at both the Enterhealth Ranch residential treatment facility and Enterhealth Outpatient Center of Excellence in Dallas, Texas.

“The Washington Post recently reported that the mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013. That marks a sharp, and shocking, reversal in decades of progress toward longer lives,” said Dr. Urschel. “The culprit cited by the originating study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was drugs, alcohol and suicide.”

Even as the death rate for all causes of death has declined 43 percent between 1969 and 2013–including strokes, heart disease and cancer–addiction has gained the dubious honor of third leading cause of death in the United States. This is a disease that modern medical science has proven to be a chronic brain disease. However, decades of stigma have forced traditional treatments to fail based on moral precedent.

“There is a tremendous stigma associated with being an addict in our country,” added Dr. Urschel. “These people are struggling with a disease that has damaged their brains, knowing the popular perception is that they have moral failings. But science has unquestionably proven that the proper medically brain-based treatments can improve results by at least three times compared to traditional methods, helping provide addicts with the tool they need most to conquer their disease—hope.”

Since the 1930s, the U.S. alcohol treatment system has relied heavily, and often exclusively, on the 12-step approach. The most popular and traditional treatment is based on the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 12-step program, followed by 90 AA meetings in 90 days, and it has an 80 percent failure rate. While AA and other behavioral treatment approaches can be an essential part of addiction recovery, this “talk therapy only” approach has helped the U.S. reach the point where 120 people per day die from drugs and alcohol–more than by car wrecks or gunshots.

According to Dr. Urschel, scientific research has validated three major discoveries in the field of addiction treatment:

• Addiction is a chronic, medical disease affecting the brain;
• At least fifty percent of those addicted to alcohol or drugs also suffer from co-occurring psychiatric disorders, i.e. a mental illness such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder;
• Scientific research has developed medications to help control cravings and address the healing of a patient’s brain injury that can transform the alcoholic/drug addict’s chances for successful sobriety from 20 percent to upwards of 75-80 percent long-term.

“We often ask the addict, ‘Why?’ when it seems so obvious how damaging their continuing addicted behavior is,” continued Dr. Urschel. “The simple answer is that their brains are broken–injured, impaired, malfunctioning. Could the ever-growing death rate of our loved ones afflicted with this increasingly fatal disease be caused by an outdated model that limits real treatment to the acute level and uses ineffective treatment methods, instead of striving for the most effective medical results? Would we abide by such complacency for victims of other debilitating brain diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s? The sooner we embrace the realities of this disease, like Michael Botticelli has with great effect through his previous programs in Massachusetts, and now through his efforts at the national level, the sooner we can reverse the spiral of addiction to which too many lives are lost.”