At Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer notes a disturbing double standard:
[T]here’s a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That’s why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I’m seeing politicians complain that research to help other drug addicts quit is a waste of money.
Maybe it’s because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts – probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them. But we should get angry about these cheap shots. A crack addict will die faster than a smoker. A crack addict can rarely hold down a job or be a parent. His/her illegal addiction poses a bigger danger to society than a smoker’s does. Most importantly, a crack addict, like a smoker, can quit. Tobacco is still a significant public health problem, and I want to do all we can to help smokers (like my mom) quit, but crack, meth, etc. utterly destroys families and communities. We should be leveraging scientific research every way we can to help these people – not throwing them away or taking shots at them because they’re “bad,” or because we can’t relate to them. They’re real people. They have families.
You should, as they say, read the whole thing.
Here, I want to pick up on the question of what kind of research the public (or the pundits trying to prod the public one direction or another) have a hard time getting behind. We’ve discussed the general issue before, and even spent a little time talking about the specific issue of research with addict populations. But we haven’t dealt head-on with the kind of objection that a segment of the American public may have, specifically, with putting up public funding to support research on the effects of drugs on people’s bodies, brains, behaviors; on effective ways to treat or manage dependence or addition; on genetic or environmental factors that might make some people more susceptible to dependence or harm.
That objection is described fairly succinctly in one of the comments on BioE’s post:
A very large and vocal swath of America views illegal drug use as a moral failing. These same people nearly always believe that those with moral failings deserve to suffer. In their eyes, anything that reduces the suffering of those with moral failings is evil. …
The problems you have described are a direct result of our culture’s long standing tradition of framing undesirable behaviors as moral failings.
Let’s consider the proposal that resistance to funding scientific research on drugs of abuse or on treatment is, at bottom, motivated by the view that taking drugs is a moral failing.
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