The season for holiday festivities brought with it that time of year when a childhood memory floats to the surface of my subconscious like the froth on an eggnog.

My parents are at a Christmas party. My father is pouting and gesturing at my mother who is across the room, smoking her annual cigarette by the fireplace.  The cigarette, invariably lifted from an aunt or uncle who had yet to quit, and my mother’s annual smoke are driving my father insanely jealous.

“If I had just one cigarette, I’d knock off a gas station on the way home for a carton of Lucky Strikes,” my father says to anyone who will listen. “She’s unbelievable. She can smoke one cigarette a year and never think about it again.”

It took my father six years to quit his two-pack-a-day habit in the late 1980s. He tried hypnosis, psychotherapy and one memorable afternoon in a hospital where he and other smokers sat in a locked room smoking cigarette after cigarette trying to make themselves sick.

My mother has never smoked regularly and never really understood why it was so hard for my father to quit his habit. She responded to my father’s addiction by refusing to allow him to smoke inside the house, practically a death sentence during Minnesota’s long winters. In her heart of hearts, she told me, she believed my father’s inability to quit was simply a lack of will.

The latest science on addiction and behavior is proving my mother wrong, but Americans’ beliefs surrounding addiction have not yet caught up to the research.

Like my mother, many still act on a deeply embedded assumption that addiction is ultimately a choice.  And if it’s a choice, being unable to beat an addiction is more of a moral than biological failing. And if it’s a moral failing, it’s the addict’s responsibility to get sober or kick his habit.

Experts say this attitude towards addiction is hindering treatment options and stunting research.

I recently attended an addiction studies program specifically for journalists put on by Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Any assumptions I had about substance abuse left me by the first coffee break.

As more and more researchers explore human genetics and neurobiology, our understanding of how the brain reacts to a chemical substance is like a growing wheel of Swiss cheese — impressively huge, but full of holes.

Deni Carise, a clinical psychologist and the chief clinical officer at the Phoenix House rehabilitation program, illustrated this problem when she discussed an addiction story which leaves people uncomfortable in its ambiguities.

In the 1960s and 70s, thousands of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam became addicted to heroin.  Upon returning home, roughly half of those users went through withdrawal and never used again; the others became “junkies.”

Carise used this example to introduce the idea that some people have genetic markers primed towards addiction.

The Vietnam vets who were able to stop using had repeatedly used heroin in an “addicted behavior pattern.” For them, addiction was a learned behavior rooted in a particular environment.

Once their supply was gone and their environment changed, recovery was possible. For the “junkies,” the drug use had flipped a switch on a genetic predisposition that made recovery a much more arduous process.

But the American health care system doesn’t allow for distinctions between addictions — all addictions are treated the same. The model for recovery only defines success one way: detox, rehabilitation and abstinence (the “AA” route).

Carise and David Friedman, a professor of pharmacology at Wake Forest University, said the medical community needs to see addiction as a chronic health state like hypertension or diabetes.

“No doctor would say to a person with high blood pressure, ‘If you don’t do well on this diuretic, which is proven to work for a lot of people, we have no other options for you,’” Friedman said.

“But that’s what we do with addicts. We must acknowledge that like other chronic disease, addiction has genetic and environmental components.”

As journalists, we often cover famous addicts who fail at rehabilitation and relapse in the public eye. We contribute to the conversation that deems these people “hopeless.”

But science and statistics prove that the more times an addict attempts rehabilitation, the more likely he is to be successful — eventually.

Both Carise and Friedman emphasized that a successful recovery is attainable for addicts, even for those who have a genetic predisposition to use. But it might not look the way we want, or expect it to.

Just look at my father.  It took him six years of false starts to kick his addiction.  But for more than twenty years he hasn’t smoked a cigarette, and he hasn’t robbed any gas stations. He kept trying. Eventually, he succeeded.

This article was reported as part of the J560 Medical Journalism course at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.