The science of addiction recovery is advancing, bringing greater precision to how recovery is conceptualised, measured and explained, and strengthening efforts to reduce persistent harms. Achieving this requires sustained investment in the scientific, institutional and infrastructural capacity needed to advance recovery research and practice. White and Kelly 1 systematically weave together the core elements necessary for the development of a robust and sustainable recovery research agenda. These elements are articulated through 12 carefully delineated research dimensions, each of which advances a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse pathways and underlying mechanisms of recovery. In doing so, the authors direct the field toward greater precision in the conceptualisation, measurement and explanation of recovery as a complex, multi-dimensional process. This aligns with broader conceptualisations of recovery that extend beyond symptom reduction, stabilisation or abstinence alone. However, although these accounts are increasingly well developed at a descriptive level, they remain less consistently operationalised in ways that support cumulative and testable scientific inquiry. More fundamentally, the science of recovery continues to be produced within the epistemological frame of addiction science. In practice, this means that recovery is still examined through snapshot designs, short funding cycles and an implicit focus on individual risk and behaviour. Yet recovery capital is not a discrete event or a bounded treatment outcome. It is a longitudinal, system dependent processes that unfolds across years, often decades. This creates a structural misfit between the phenomenon and the methods used to study it. When the unit of analysis remains the individual, observed at limited points in time, the knowledge produced is necessarily partial. It captures fragments of recovery trajectories and capital rather than identifying the conditions that sustain them over time. Building on the authors' important contribution, I set out to extend their argument by focusing more explicitly on the scientific, institutional and infrastructural systemic capital required to advance the study of recovery. This requires a reorientation of research priorities and infrastructures. First, there is a need to recognise and invest in the value of addiction recovery science. Funding bodies must move beyond short term, intervention bound grants and support longitudinal cohort infrastructures capable of tracking recovery functioning over extended time horizons. In the context of large scale programmes focused on health, longevity and wellbeing, such as Horizon Europe, there is a significant opportunity to advance understanding of neurobiological and social recovery processes across millions of individuals, families, and communities. This should be treated as a scientific priority rather than a peripheral concern. Second, higher education institutions and research centres must support genuinely interdisciplinary programmes that integrate clinical science with social policy, systems modelling and lived experience expertise. Recovery trajectories cannot be adequately understood within disciplinary silos. Third, data systems must be reconfigured to enable cross sector linkage across health, housing, justice and social care. Without this integration, recovery capital remains analytically invisible as a system outcome and is instead misattributed to individual capacity alone. Fourth, people in recovery must be repositioned not merely as subjects of study, but as knowledge holders and partners in scientific design. A meaningful commitment to open science is required to ensure parity in whose knowledge counts and how it is used. Finally, governments must align policy with evidence by recognising that recovery functioning is produced through sustained conditions, including housing stability, income security and continuity of care, rather than through time limited treatment interventions alone. A useful parallel can be drawn with health equity, where the call to action has been to embed health in all policies 2. A comparable ambition is required here. Recovery must be considered across all relevant policy domains (i.e. recovery in all policies). At both Irish 3, 4 and European drug strategy 5 levels, there remains a gap between rhetorical commitment to recovery and the coordinated action required to implement the science in practice 6. Without these shifts, addiction recovery science will remain constrained by the very paradigms it seeks to move beyond, generating insight without the capacity required to translate that knowledge into sustained systemic capital. None. None.
Jo‐Hanna Ivers (Sun,) studied this question.