NYT on treating addiction

I liked this NYT piece on alternatives to conventional abstinence-based programs for dealing with addition.

I've tried a few times to convince the students in my undergraduate program evaluation course that it would be interesting to read some papers from the related evaluation literature but they have not shown much interest.

My sense of the literature is that placebo effects and heterogeneous treatment effects both likely loom large in a way that makes forward progress on the scientific front difficult. It also seems to me that a treatment that requires you to, say, never have another drink has not really fully solved the problem.