Joseph Lee, MD, Medical director for youth Services, Betty Ford Hazelden Foundation, was invited to address the Congressional Forum on Addiction in Washington DC, April 29, 2015.
Lee shared from his vast experience working with youth addicts: “At Hazelden, we’ve had a 300 percent increase in the number of young people coming in for opioid addiction in the past five of six years.
“We found that young people who had opiate addictions had to choose between clinics that gave them medications and no therapy, or therapeutic communities that gave them the therapy they needed and no medications. And we vowed to give them both.

“Most people get addicted between their mid-teens and early adulthood. Addiction is a developmental disorder.” Lee says that we need to treat substance abuse as such, and focus efforts on risk identification, early intervention, as well as treatment and recovery. “The reason I love the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act is because of the holistic lifespan approach.”

“We have a lot of data on risk ractors. My colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a tool called the transmission liability index. This tool—while not perfect—can predict, starting at the age of ten, which kids are at high risk for addiction, by asking less than fifty questions, usually no more than fifteen. And guess what? None of the questions are about drugs.”

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