Precept #2: Addiction is a disease.

No one chooses leukemia, heart disease, or depression. Abusing drugs, however, appears to many to be a choice, and a reckless and selfish one. It’s not.

 (David Sheff, Clean)

 Dr. Vicki Ann Whitacre, Medical Director, Zanesville-Muskingum County Health Department

“It takes about five years for the brain to recover from an addiction,” says Dr. Vicki Ann Whitacre, Medical Director of the Zanesville-Muskingum County Health Department for the last 17 years. Dr. Whitacre endorses David Sheff’s precept that addiction is a disease, not a choice or a behavior.

“Addiction,” she says, “becomes a chronic relapsing disease with the brain not able to make normal decisions and respond in the way it did before the addicting substance took over.”

A person’s response to drugs, Dr. Whitacre says, is due to genetics. “Some people do not experience the overwhelming pleasure feeling from opiates; [they don’t] like the way their body feels from drinking alcohol or using pain pills or opiates. That person can try a drug once and walk away from it.” 

Others, however, respond differently. “Those who get the pleasure feeling, and who like their body’s response to heroin or opiates, will continue to pursue the feeling,” notes Dr. Whitacre.  “As they use, it takes more and more of the addicting substance to get the same, or nearly the same, feeling. This is called tolerance.”

And then it’s not so easy to just stop using drugs. “If the addicting substance is not available, the person’s body experiences withdrawal, which can be very unpleasant.” Withdrawal symptoms, she says, include sweating, trembling, diarrhea, and pain.  “The person knows that the opiates or heroin will provide relief from these physically painful symptoms.”

Is there a cure for addiction? “As with other chronic diseases---diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.,” says Dr. Whitacre, “there is currently no known cure for opiate addiction. It can be controlled with appropriate treatment, but there tend to be relapses, just as there are in any chronic disease.”

The only sure way to avoid addiction is not to take that first hit. “The best way to fight it at this point in time is prevention,” Dr. Whitacre says, “starting with young children.” The education must continue as children grow older, affirms the doctor; young people need to understand the risks of using opiates and heroin so they never try them. 

“Once addicted,” says Dr. Whitacre, “the best way to fight this is with medication-assisted treatment and long term behavioral support and treatment, either at a residential treatment center or in a very intense outpatient treatment.” She adds that treatment for the addict’s family members, and strong support from those family members for their addicted loved one, are vital for recovery.

The Health Department is an active member of a coalition of community forces working to effectively address the opiate epidemic in Muskingum County. “Along with the local hospital, the Mental Health and Recovery Services Board, and many other organizations and community people,” Dr. Whitacre says, “the Health Department is trying to insure our community efforts do not duplicate each other’s, and that we are as effective as possible in helping people suffering from addiction.”

Prevention might prove to be the most effective,--and cost-effective,--result of the coalition’s work. “The Health Department,” says Dr. Whitacre, “is working to find best practice programs for preventing addiction.”

Dr. Whitacre notes that the disease of addiction affects everyone, in one way or another, in our community—and across the country. “We are facing a very complex brain illness where the usual drive for survival with food, water, and reproduction has been replaced with an even stronger drive to obtain a drug or substance that provides pleasure and prevents withdrawal symptoms.  The cost of it,” she says, “not only in dollars, but in the emotional stress of losing a family member to an overdose, or of having an addicted family member or friend, is becoming overwhelming.”

Key to turning the tide of this epidemic is accepting that addiction is a disease. “Realization that addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease and not a choice for those who are addicted,” says Dr. Whitacre, “will bring about an understanding of why an addicted person will lie, cheat, steal, and abandon children to survive to get their drug. That will help do away with the shame and guilt of addiction, and move our community to speaking up and working for treatment and recovery of our addicted family members and friends. A community that works to build compassionate tolerance and acceptance of those afflicted with this disease of addiction will move toward understanding and support of the recovery of their community.

 

“It will take everyone helping in positive, supportive ways that are not enabling addiction for us to make headway in recovering from this epidemic,” says Dr. Whitacre. “Prevention of addiction in the end may be our best investment. Recovery is a lifetime process for those who are addicted; their brains must recover enough to enjoy life again and avoid relapse.”

Before becoming Medical Director at the Muskingum Health Department, Dr. Whitacre had a 25-year career in emergency medicine. A graduate of the Ohio State University’s College of Medicine, Dr. Whitacre completed her residencies in pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington. She also interned for a year at Columbus’s Children’s Hospital.

A member of the planning team that brought author Sam Quinones to Zanesville in 2016, Dr. Whitacre is working with the Mental Health and Recovery Board’s coalition to bring David Sheff to the Secrest Auditorium on September 13, 2017. She is married to Arthur Moose and has three children and three stepchildren. Seven grandchildren round out her wonderful family.