You focus on the actual problem rather than the previous false causes of addiction. In the past, we've blamed the addict's moral character and will power and, more recently, we've tried to look at addiction through a purely physiological lens where we believed we only needed to break the dependence. Guess what happened...most people relapsed or fell into some other self-destructive behavior. Human beings are just not able to live in a mostly-detached state.

Our improved understanding recognizes the need for human-to-human connection. We're realizing that substances are serving as substitutes for people who are lacking that genuine connection in their lives. Just removing the substance will create a void that will quickly get refilled, either by a relapse, another substance or something else that isn't productive.

And it's a mistake to think of this as solely a substance abuse problem. There are many other ways that people self-medicate. Television, the Internet and smartphones are all "relationships" that we lean on when we're not getting enough of the genuine kind that we crave. We like to blame this opioid epidemic on overprescription of these drugs, but we're making a huge mistake if we ignore everything about our society that has created so many human beings who are so detached from each other that they become addicted to these things.