[light3]

You propose the article is wrong in that abstinence should be the best treatment, further you propose that

'What we're missing now are programs that take an addict's natural tendencies and channel them in such a way that it benefits them.'

Which seems to be the million dollar question, since everybody has different personalities and beliefs, is there a common strategy to apply here?

[bpatrianakos]

I don't know. That's probably best answered by people much smarter than me. It's kind of a catch-22 situation because before an addiction is obvious those personality traits are hard to identify and even if they are identified do they mean the person is likely to become an addict if exposed to a substance? If you catch these personality traits in a non-addict it's easy to assume they'll learn to apply them on their own and there's no reason to believe an otherwise healthy person won't learn good coping skills. But then if that person does become an addict you have to treat the disease and on top of that help them funnel those tendencies for good. It's an uphill battle once full on addiction takes hold. Sadly, most addicts do not recover and are just lost to us. It's sad because a lot of them have incredible, above average potential. While I do think we need to take treatment a step further like I mentioned before, I actually feel more strongly about prevention. It's much easier to keep a person off drugs to begin with than it is to stop them once they've started. Both have pretty awful success rates but the former still has a better success rate than the latter long term.