Drugs for tackling substance abuse are incredible useful for harm reduction and often underutilized. thelancet.com/journals/…
But drugs aren’t sufficient. There is a lot of research funding for proposals consistent with “addiction is only a brain disorder”. Often scientists who don’t really agree with this do it anyway, because methodological reductionism. But there is often little funding for more nuanced takes from scientists who study addiction and have first person accounts on recovering from addiction like Carl Hart, Carl Fisher, Marc Lewis, Hanna Pickard, etc…
I would personally like more scientists to study the neurobiology of shame, the role of interventions to increase hope on reward/motivational circuitry, increasing a sense of agency, etc.. Such interventions do change the biological substrate and we know very little about creating more synergistic treatment combinations. Hopefully this is changing
