UC Berkeley

Worldwide, health professionals from all specialties are encouraging patients to reduce alcohol use if not abstain, and abstinence is clearly encouraged for tobacco. However, for users of substances that meet diagnostic criteria for substance use disorder (addiction), reducing use or abstaining will be difficult without appropriate addiction treatment. Moreover, this group is the most at risk and the most likely to benefit from reducing use. We propose research-based arguments to better combine encouragement to reduce or abstain from alcohol and tobacco to systematic screening for addiction and facilitated access to addiction treatment to make alcohol and tobacco preventable deaths truly preventable.