SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - An important step to curing alcohol and drug abuse in society may involve changing the way people think about addiction.

Many medical professionals, treatment clinicians and addicts themselves have long accepted the definition of alcoholism as a disease.

Gene Heyman: Addicts have a choice to not abuse substances.

Now, a Harvard University psychologist is telling them they've got it all wrong.

In his new book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene Heyman points to research that shows addiction is not a disease but a personal choice - addicts choose to abuse substances and they can choose to quit, he says. He's studied the subject for more than 10 years and currently teaches classes on addiction at Harvard. Much of Heyman's research focuses on studies that show 70 to 85 per cent of people who once met the criteria for substance abuse no longer do by the time they reach age 30, on average.

"People have the capacity to choose to stop taking drugs - that's what we have learned," Heyman said from his office at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. "Will that influence people and bring addiction to an end more quickly or perhaps prevent it from happening in the first place? I don't know the answer to that question, but it certainly seems like that is a possibility."

He said many addicts decide to get clean because of lifestyle pressures that don't support drug or alcohol abuse, such as family, finances, employment or an individual sense of losing control. According to his research, the most effective treatment programs are those that combat addictions with incompatible alternatives to substance abuse, such as rewarding recovering addicts who don't relapse with vouchers for drug-free activities.

Though many treatment programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, may refer to alcoholism as a disease, they don't actually treat alcoholism the way they would treat a disease, he said.

"The kinds of things that work with addicts are not the sorts of procedures that work with, let's say, Alzheimer's disease. No one is going to get their memory back by giving them a voucher for remembering. But you can get them to stop taking drugs with a voucher," Heyman said. "Maybe one of the things that keeps people taking drugs longer might be the fact that they believe that they can't change. So the belief that you can change - and I mean, it's not a false belief, that's what I'm emphasizing - may have a salutary effect."

Kristine Vannebo-Suwala, executive director of Hay River's Nats'ejee K'eh Treatment Centre, the only residential treatment centre in NWT, believes it doesn't matter whether addicts consider their addictions diseases or personal choices as long as they are on the path to recovery.

"There's many different philosophies and theories about addiction, and there always has been and I think there will always continue to be," she said.

"Whether they believe that their addiction is a disease or not comes from the person. But that's what treatment is all about. Treatment allows for that person to get some education and some knowledge and to develop skills to decide that for themselves."

More than 77 per cent of NWT residents drink alcohol, according to 2006 data from the NWT Bureau of Statistics. Of those, about 36 per cent usually consume five or more drinks on any given occasion and 29 per cent drink more than once a week. People who belong to all three of those categories are classified as heavy drinkers.

Many of the people who seek help at the treatment centre also have mental health issues, Vannebo-Suwala said, so the centre takes a complete "physical, mental, emotional and spiritual" approach to healing, often incorporating traditional aboriginal methods.

"That's the difference that would captivate the Northwest Territories, in terms of learning that mental health issues go in partnership with an addiction. The addiction is not separate from mental health - it's an integrated problem," she said. "Research has proven that to go through an addiction and a mental health issue, you need to treat both together instead of separate, the same as you need to look at all components of a human being."

A large part of the centre's treatment program is allowing individuals time to reflect on their lifestyles and open their minds to change, Vannebo-Suwala said.

"As you learn more about you, as you become more aware of your thoughts, your behaviour, your feelings about those behaviours, the more that you can be aware - self-aware - to change. And that's with alcohol and drug abuse, that's with any lifestyle choice," she said, adding that, as Heyman mentioned, addicts who have compelling reasons to stay drug-free are generally more successful at kicking their bad habits.

"If people come to the centre here and they have a supportive network, they have a home to live in, they have finances to feed themselves and their families, they're going to fare a lot better than people that have nothing to go back to," she said. "Generally, I think all people in the Northwest Territories need to question whether or not an addiction is getting in the way of their life and what they want to see their life to be."