Addiction Specialist: The Real Cause of the Opioid Crisis

In an attempt to fix the stigma, my field started overpathologizing normality in an unconscious attempt to make everybody feel more empathy towards people who are mentally ill.

Recent announcements on how President Donald Trump plans to tackle the opioid epidemic leave some cheering and others dismayed. There is no question that something needs to be done, as more than 115 Americans are dying of opioid overdoses every day. Will capital punishment or public health initiatives solve the opioid crisis?

On March 19th, Merion West’s Erich Prince spoke with Louisiana-based addiction treatment specialist Dr. Howard Wetsman on what causes addiction, how to treat it, and how the public’s perception of addicts leaves them with limited options.

Good morning, Dr. Wetsman, thank you for joining us. To start, can you give us an overview of your professional background, your medical work, and how you see the intersection of your work with the national conversation on drug use and addiction?

I’m a board-certified psychiatrist, but I don’t practice psychiatry anymore. I went full-time in addiction medicine twelve to fifteen years ago, though I had been primarily treating addiction before that. This was after Hurricane Katrina. I eventually developed a new way to treat addiction.

My goal is to end addiction as a problem in American life, so treating it is only part of how we need to do that. There needs to be a rapid, highly accessible, cheap and effective treatment for addiction because it affects ten to twenty percent of the population. I’m not just talking about drug addiction. You can describe obesity and many other things as forms of addiction.