Lee Robbins' Vietnam study found that 20% of soldiers became heroin-dependent, but only 1-2% stayed addicted after coming home. The speaker argues this shows people can quit harmful habits without formal recovery programs, pointing to family ties and personal responsibility as the real drivers.
And there's more studies that shows that humans naturally move on from drug usage themselves. So for example, the Vietnam Veteran Studies done by Lee Robbins in the 1970s to 1990s, where they saw that US soldiers reported that almost half of the US soldiers in Vietnam tried heroin, tried this hard drug, and over 20% of them became dependent on that drug according to criteria. And so that caused a lot of fears because they thought that the US soldiers will come back to America and will come back as junkies that were just like addicted to drugs. So Lee Robbins and her team followed the US soldiers when they returned home, and they tracked their drug use essentially during the war and again after coming back to the US. And they found out that only 1 to 2% of them remained addicted long term. Most of them simply stopped after getting back to the US. And that shows that as humans, we naturally move on from things if we don't have this recovery-like approach, this fear-based approach around drugs, as they didn't have that. They naturally moved on as they had responsibilities as they had families, and they decided it would be better to not keep this habit in their lives.
