Making Long-Term Recovery the Expected Outcome of Treatment

With overdose becoming the No. 1 cause of death for Americans ages 50 and under, and life expectancy in the U.S. dropping over a three-year period for the first time since 1918 with the opioid epidemic being a root cause, Robert DuPont, MD, founding president of the Institute for Behavior and Health, is ready for addiction treatment to be viewed through a new lens.

“Healthcare needs to recognize that this is a lifelong, chronic disorder,” says DuPont. “It needs to handle it like it handles diabetes, hypertension or all sorts of other serious chronic conditions. That means organizing around prevention, treatment and interventions. It means monitoring people for their lifetimes to deal with the problems of relapse.

“What’s happened instead is addiction treatment is siloed outside of healthcare, and many of the addicted people are highly ambivalent about giving up the addiction so that relapse becomes the expected outcome of treatment. We need to change that so that recovery becomes the expected outcome of treatment.”

DuPont, the first director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (1973-78) and second White House drug chief (1973-77), says treatment of physicians with addiction provides a model for making recovery the expected outcome of treatment for all patients rather than relapse. He will expound on this concept at the Midwest Opioid Summit: An NCAD Meeting, which is scheduled for March 4-5 in Chicago.

“Everybody can’t get well from diabetes or hypertension, but everybody has the potential to get into recovery,” DuPont says. “There is too much pessimism right now about that. The first thing is treatment. We need to focus on how we get long-term, stable recovery. We know it’s possible. We have 25 million people in recovery.”

Second, DuPont says, messaging around prevention also needs to be recalibrated to emphasize a need for abstinence from alcohol, nicotine and other illicit substances because of the unique vulnerability of the adolescent brain.

“Whatever we think about adults using drugs, that’s another issue. We can get together on the idea that the health goal for young people is to grow up not using drugs,” DuPont says. “We’re clear that every young person should wear a seatbelt every time. We don’t talk about people experimenting with whether wearing seatbelts helps or not. We know some do and some don’t. But they all know that the health goal is wearing seatbelts all the time. We need to adopt exactly that approach in talking about drug use in this country.”

The Midwest Opioid Summit, March 4-5 in Chicago, brings together influential researchers and clinical leaders to make a difference, implement real change and transform lives. Learn more at midwestopioidsummit.com