Addiction: It’s Not Just About Drugs Anymore

ADDICTED TO EVERYTHING –

Mar. 23, 2022 – The parents of a 13-year-old middle school student brought their son to a counselor of my acquaintance. “He spends all of his time after school—night after night—playing Mortal Kombat,” they said. “He has no friends and has fallen behind in all of his courses.” They were beside themselves with worry.

It’s a familiar tale. And our analysis of such behaviors pervades modern addiction theory⁠—raised once again by Evaluating the Brain Disease Model of Addiction, a monumental collective work published this month.Non-substance addictions are important to understand and mitigate in their own right. But they are also central to the case against a reductive concept of drug addiction that hampers recovery and underpins the drug war.

Archie Brodsky and I first refuted what was then a heroin-centric, biological model of addiction in Love and Addiction in 1975. We then deduced:

If addiction is now known not to be primarily a matter of drug chemistry or body chemistry, and if we therefore have to broaden our conception of dependency-creating objects to include a wider range of drugs, then why stop with drugs? Why not look at the whole range of things, activities, and even people to which we can and do become addicted? We must, in fact, do this if addiction is to be made a viable concept once again.