We've been looking at columnists all wrong.
Or, so it would certainly seem to readers who trudged through Andrea Peyser's bumptious tribute to the role of all-American grit in drug and alcohol addiction in the New York Post. The outspoken columnist, best remembered for once sizing President Obama up as a "hormone-ravaged frat boy on a road trip to a strip bar," waived aside our conception of substance abuse and suggested that addicts, like the recently deceased Philip Seymour Hoffman, should pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps. "'Disease,'" Ms. Peyser wrote in reference to addiction, is "a word I reject like Ebola." Readers with a modicum of scientific understanding were undoubtedly quick to see that the virus rarely proffers its victims a choice in the matter.
Ms. Peyser's preferred brand of boostrap is St. Jude Retreats, which claims the Orwellian "Addiction is not a Disease" and "Treatment Doesn't Work" as taglines (not quite as pithy as "Ignorance is Strength," but let's let that slide). Program participants receive the titles of "guest" rather than "patient," and according to Steven Slate, the St. Jude employee quoted in the column, are never told they're sick. Through Cognitive Behavioral Education, program users learn that "people aren't addicted to substances, they chose to use substances because they like how they feel when using them." The straight-talk express translation: "During a six-week residential program, the goal is for guests to find new hobbies."
The emphasis on choice and agency rather than a passive acceptance of one's circumstances is par for the course for conservative columnists, and in a broader context, certainly holds water. Helplessness in the face of difficult circumstances allows others to step in and offer their services, as many outfits -- specializing in everything from filing income taxes to personal training -- successfully do. Nevertheless, creating a false dichotomy between absolute self-reliance, on one hand, and self-infantilization, on the other, is a puerile conceit; broadcasting so for all to hear is reprehensible.
The media are our collective looking glass to a larger, out-of-reach world, albeit one whose lens corrupts the view. Journalists have no choice but to simplify their stories for their audience. Readers, viewers, and listeners receive neatly digested stories for ready consumption, and reporters are tasked with using their expertise to both gather the facts, and arrange them in ways to reflect some truth about reality. Beat experience is crucial, because it imparts some expertise; expertise, in turn, allows journalists to make better judgment calls on the information they learn before transmitting stories to the public.
Anthony Lewis, the multi-Pulitzer Prize-winning forefather of American legal journalism and longtime New York Times columnist, had spent a year studying law at Harvard to cement his understanding of jurisprudence; this is a far cry from the rickety soapboxes atop which many columnists broadcast their uninformed and uninspired opinions.
So what of Ms. Peyser's pronouncements on the disease model of addiction and her eager championing of St Jude Retreats in hercolumns? Amid the mosaic of "Better Business Bureau Rating: A+" banners and photographs of helpful telephone operators that are plastered on its site (which sports the reassuringly jaunty URL of soberforever.net) one struggles to find links to published research behind its claims.
Peer-reviewed papers in established academic journals which rigorously assess the St. Jude program efficacy -- studies which form the bedrock of scientific and evidence-based inquiry -- are non-existent. The Baldwin Institute, whose various papers comprise the scaffolding for St. Jude's professed treatment, has yet to publish its findings in a credible academic forum. In fact, authors of a 1991 report proudly state, "the most important credential the authors have is being recovered alcoholics and drug addicts. The second most important credential is that none are psychologists, therapists or counsellors. The authors do not offer this work as a research paper." To be sure, no one who has conducted thorough research with addicts would flippantly compare their nearly Sisyphean attempts to stop using with forgoing the daily morning cup of coffee, as another ostensible expert did on the St. Jude website.
Substance use disorder is considered to be a grave and urgent condition by clinicians and researchers alike, and hinges on the willpower of those in its grasp. Treatment is insidiously difficult and relapses are frequent, but the obstacles should not herd those looking for help to poorly-researched alternatives. Having a column does not a medical expert make, and we would be wise to keep abreast of our ignorance -- both as journalists and news consumers. Addiction does not care whether you take to its labels or not. It may not give you a choice.
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