2016 Koppel JDS. This is an open-access post distributed under the regards to the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and recreation in any medium, supplied the initial author and source are credited. The ethical and medical designs, the dominant paradigms of drug dependency, disagree on the concern of responsibility. The medical design views it as the habits of a' pirated' brain. In the middle of efforts to decarcerate American prisons, the relative merits of these two models are being weighed. Which raises the concern of whether policy- makers must be resigned to picking one side of the moral/ medical dichotomy. In this commentary, the ethical and medical models will be seriously examined, and an alternative 3rd way, a multi-level design, recommended. The essential distinction in between them is where they put blame for an addicts' habits: the ethical model views drug addiction as the option of a complimentary and autonomous

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