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Published on: March 23, 2022
Revisiting Preaddiction
Shannon C Miller1, Sharon Levy, Andrew J Saxon
1From the Mental Health Service, VA Medical Center, Dayton/Middletown, OH (SCM); Departments of Psychiatry & Population and Public Health Sciences, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, Dayton, OH (SCM); Division of Addiction Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA (SL); Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (SL); Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA (AJS); Center of Excellence in Substance Addiction Treatment and Education, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle, WA (AJS); Program in Addiction Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT (JMT); Division of Addiction Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY (RNR); Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (SW); Program in Substance Use and Addiction Services, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA (SW); and Friends Research Institute, Baltimore, MD (FV).
Abstract:
The directors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism have proposed new efforts to enable earlier identification and intervention for harmful substance use and its consequences. As editors of The ASAM Principles of Addiction Medicine, we fully support this goal. The word "preaddiction" has been suggested as a diagnostic label to describe individuals who would be targeted for early intervention. In this commentary, we offer that "unhealthy substance use" would be a better descriptor than "preaddiction" and review several potential barriers to be addressed in order to maximize the impact of introducing this new paradigm.
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