People say if you help someone with addiction, you enable them. I say if you help someone with addiction, you offer them a chance.

A common misperception is that addiction is a choice or moral problem, saying “all you have to do is stop.” It’s not as easy as simply stopping or exercising greater control over impulses.

You cannot incarcerate away addiction either. People need much more than good intentions or willpower. The brain changes with addiction. The more drugs and alcohol you’ve taken, the more disruptive to the brain. Addiction is a devastating long lasting and complex brain disease with a relatively high death rate and serious consequences.

Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is the most effective, evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder. MAT offers about a 90% sobriety rate, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As of August 2025, approximately 1,827 inmates at Utah state prisons are estimated to struggle with addiction. Roughly only 370 inmates are receiving treatment. Overdose is the third leading cause of death for individuals incarcerated in Utah prisons and the leading cause of death post release, according to the Utah state legislature.

Despite the high risk, access to treatment within Utah prisons has been described as severely limited. The $1 billion-plus Utah State Correctional Facility, opened in 2022, was promised to be a modern rehabilitative campus focusing on rehabilitation, education, and medical care rather than just incarceration. It aimed to improve inmate success to reduce recidivism, according to the legislature.

The 2025 legislative session authorized $1.25 million (one-time) from the Opioid Settlement Fund specifically for opiate use disorder treatment within Utah’s prisons as well as ongoing yearly funding, yet only 370 people are being treated.

Medication assisted treatment isn’t controversial in medicine. It’s only controversial in opinion. Nobody shames someone for taking medication to stabilize their brain chemistry, unless it comes to substance abuse disorder. Addiction is not defined by how it looks on the outside. It’s defined by loss of control, compulsive use, cravings and altered brain chemistry.

For those of you who have struggled, watched someone struggle or lost someone to the struggle of addiction we need you more than ever to be the voice for change, change in our communities, change in our correctional facilities, change in the lives of everyone it has or will affect.

It’s not a funding problem, understaffing or resource constraints; it’s an opinion problem.

If you would like to see your loved ones get a chance to do better, be the change.

I will be conducting interviews with people who have lost someone from addiction or struggled with addiction inside the system as well as outside, people who have first-hand experiences of addiction and what MAT did for them. The purpose is educating everyone about addiction and the evidence-based treatment that works so more families can be together and less lives will be lost due to addiction and incarceration.

Misty Spell is a resident of Ogden.