Psychiatric genetic research (PGR) holds great promise for preventing, understanding, and treating neuropsychiatric disorders - a source of immense societal burden and personal suffering. Such research poses many ethical challenges, and failure to perform systematic study of the ethical issues surrounding PGR may threaten societal acceptance of this important scientific work. To date, NIH has not funded any work on PGR that focuses on collecting empirical data about ethical issues.
Our primary goal in this proposed project is to examine and elucidate the ethical, legal and social implications of the use of drug addiction genetic information in criminal justice settings; our secondary goal is to provide related, needs-specific training, materials and resources to a stakeholder group comprised of criminal justice professionals.
Addictive disorders are increasingly conceptualized as biomedical diseases with genetic roots. While conventional wisdom has suggested that attributing addictions to genetics should have many benefits, there is reason to suspect that it could have some unintended, negative consequences. In particular, genetic explanations for addictive disorders could lead to the perception that people with addictions lack agency or self-efficacy to overcome their symptoms and to the belief that non-biomedical treatments, such as psychotherapy, are unlikely to be effective.