A new series of public-service ads from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) portray addiction as a disease that needs treatment -- not willpower -- to cure, the Houston Chronicle reported Aug. 5.

"It'd be better if I had cancer; then you wouldn't tell me what I'm going through is just a phase," says a man appearing in the "Hope, Help & Healing" ads, which state that addiction is a disease worse than AIDS, cancer, or diabetes. "You wouldn't see my condition as a lack of willpower, but the disease that it truly is."

PDFA executive vice president Ginna Marston said that the ads are aimed at fighting stigma against people with addictions. "Science, in the last decade, has come through so strongly that we know the brain chemistry is altered with chronic use," she said. "We literally know what the brain is like on drugs."

After being successfully test-marketed in Houston, the ads are slated to go national.