How can friends and family members best support someone who is struggling with opioid addiction? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

In “Dopesick,” I watched so many addicted people fall through the cracks. I watched them alienate family members, so many of whom I watched struggle with the concepts of “enabling” versus so-called “tough love.” Opioid addiction takes advantage of such fissures. With the users I followed, very few were able to achieve recovery without the added help of medication-assisted treatment. The few abstinence-based examples I did see were among wealthy families who had the ability to spend hundreds of thousands on multiple months and even years of rehab and after care. Rehab simply isn’t a scalable solution in an epidemic this large.

Tough love, in my reporting experience, simply doesn’t work. Families are so worn out by their addicted loved one’s behavior, I get that. Parents have often been stolen from, lied to, and even been in physical fights provoked by addicted loved ones.

If this was happening to my son — and I was as worn out by his behavior as the families I’ve written about in “Dopesick” are — I would do everything I could to get him into a good outpatient MAT program, with counseling and social supports. I would reach out for help and get counseling myself, as well as talk to other parents who are going through this. I would lobby for the expansion of Medicaid, which is the number one way to help the addicted (many of whom are homeless and/or indigent or among the working poor) access treatment.

I would volunteer with grassroots community coalitions both to help others and to keep myself informed of treatment options, which are changing swiftly with more states expanding Medicaid and new treatment options opening up all the time. I would read and educate myself as much as possible. I would encourage siblings and other family members to talk openly about how the addicted person’s behavior is affecting them. I would encourage everyone not to give up on the addicted loved one and to remind them that he/she is a person with a disease worthy of medical treatment just as someone with diabetes deserves to have insulin or someone with heart disease deserves to be able to see a specialist for his or her care.

I would remind them that addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease, and it takes the average person addicted to opioids eight years and four to five treatment attempts to achieve one year of sobriety. Harm reduction, not tough love, is the answer. You can’t “recover” if you’re dead. And it’s not safe to wait for a person to “hit bottom” in an era of fentanyl because, too often, bottom means dead.

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