Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for people under the age of 50. Additionally, each year there are approximately ½-million smoking-related deaths and another 120,000 alcohol-related deaths. The commonality among these causes of death is “addiction”. Ninety percent of addictions are estimated to occur in those who begin use of an addictive substance as a teenager, making early exposure the largest determinant of whether one will develop the disease of addiction. This is explained by the impact of these substances on the dopaminergic pathway of the developing teenage brain. Addiction is a complex disease that disrupts multiple brain circuits; it is also a chronic disease: one is not "cured" by simply abstaining from drug use for a few days or months. Therefore, treatments with demonstrated effectiveness tend to be multimodal and require long-term or repeated episodes of care. For many chronic diseases (e.g., diabetes) our healthcare system offers a lifetime of treatment; for addiction it offers at best 30 days. This presentation examines the physiological processes in the developing, adolescent brain that make it particularly vulnerable to addiction, delineates some intervention programs that, despite having shown positive outcomes, are not widely implemented, and discusses complexities and inequities of treatment for those suffering from substance-use disorders.