For many years, curbing illegal drug use has been one of the most contentious and complicated public-policy issues in this country. Everyone has an opinion. One side insists that we must control supply, the other that we must reduce demand. People see addiction as either a crime, a disease, or a failure of will.

None of this bumper-sticker analysis moves us forward. The truth is that drug abuse is "all of the above." Progress in dealing with drug issues will come only when our national discourse and our strategies are as comprehensive and complex as the problem itself. Addiction is both a public health and a public safety issue, not one or the other. We must deal with both the supply and the demand issues with equal vigor.

This brain-based view of addiction has generated substantial controversy, in part because some people wrongly think that it somehow absolves addicts of responsibility for their own behavior. But these people still believe that biological and behavioral explanations are alternative or competing ways to understand this phenomena, when in fact they are integrated and inseparable parts of the picture.

Individuals who have this brain disease certainly are not simply victims of their own genetics and brain chemistry. Although genetic characteristics predispose a person to be more or less susceptible to becoming addicted, genes do not doom one to become an addict. Addiction to illegal drugs begins with the voluntary behavior of drug use. This is one major reason that efforts to prevent drug use are so vital to any comprehensive strategy to deal with the nation's illegal drug problems.

Moreover, all addicts can and must participate in and take some significant responsibility for their own recovery. This brain disease does not erase self-control, but it does significantly erode one's ability to exert control over his or her behavior. This helps explain why an addict cannot simply stop using drugs by sheer force of will alone and must have treatment.

Once one is addicted, the characteristics of the illness - and the treatment approaches - are not that different from other brain diseases. Research shows that the best drug-addiction treatment approaches address the entire individual, combining the use of medications, behavioral therapies, and necessary social services and rehabilitation. These might include such services as family therapy to enable the patient to return to successful family life, mental health services, education and vocational training, and housing services.

The message from the now very broad and deep array of scientific evidence is absolutely clear. If we as a society ever hope to make any real progress in dealing with drug problems, we are going to have to rise above the moral outrage that addicts have "done it to themselves" and develop strategies that are as sophisticated and as complex as the problem itself.