(© Alan Cleaver flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/4104954991)

A new review article published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine highlights the importance of treatment of addiction as a medical disease and calls for a change in public health policy towards addiction. Written by several leaders in the addiction field including Nora Volkow, MD, the director of NIDA, and George Koob, PhD, the director of NIAAA, the article does a superb job at outlining the underlying biology of addiction and clearly explains why addiction is a disease of the brain that needs to be treated medically.

Read the full article here.

In fact, I also covered most of the points made in the article in my own post for Addiction Blog on “Why Addiction is a Brain Disease?”

However, when it comes to public health policy towards addiction, this is where the article fell short. While treatments for opioid addiction such as methadone and buprenorphine were briefly mentioned in the article, there was no call for a national effort to be made to increase access to these vital medications. The authors had a potential to increase awareness of the opioid epidemic and the treatments already on hand to fight it but failed to make a stronger case for this critical improvement.

Nevertheless, the article is well written and a great introduction to the neuroscience of addiction and why it is a disease of the brain.