We Live With Addiction. This Is The 1 Thing We Want People To Know.

Addiction hits closer to home than many of us might realize. According to the 2023 United States National Survey on Drug Use and Health , 48.5 million Americans over the age of 12 — that is, about 1 in 6 — had a substance use disorder in the past year alone.

The destructive effects of addiction are real; they can include anything from infectious disease transmission to legal issues, family problems and suicide. And the stigma surrounding addiction and treatment can jeopardize treatment outcomes, research, policies and societies as a whole . It helps nobody, and it hurts all of us — especially the people it’s aimed at.

For people who have no personal experience with addiction, it’s easy to get a distorted idea of what the disease is actually like. But there’s no better way to correct these misconceptions than to talk to the people who know the subject firsthand. We asked some people whose lives have been touched by addiction to share the single most important message they want everyone to understand.

People with addiction don’t always look or live like you might expect. When addiction is depicted in the media, it’s often in the context of news stories or TV shows where unhoused folks are stealing money for drugs. Or there’s the other extreme, where we see substance use glamorized .

But such stories are simply not representative of the entire community. “The image you see when you imagine a person who suffers from substance use disorder (SUD) is far from who.