These well-intentioned gambit fails to recognize the fact that the term 'addiction' is merely a political concept in a country that embraces the hypocritical moral standards of the Drug War. As Thomas Szasz pointed out in his 1974 ground-breaking book entitled 'Ceremonial Chemistry', President John F. Kennedy and his wife regularly used amphetamines during the early '60s, courtesy of Dr. Max Jacobson, in order to keep them fresh for their whirlwind schedules, yet they were never considered addicts. They were just taking a medication, don't you see? Meanwhile, had the no-name poor indulged in a similar habit, they would have been instantly labeled as addicts, thrown into jail, subjected to moralizing counseling sessions (in which folks like Gabriel Maté would have searched for their 'inner pain'), and been sent to 12-step programs to be reminded how helpless they were in the face of powerful chemical substances. Meanwhile, the poor people's 'pusher' would have been thrown in jail and labeled as 'vermin,' the same term that the NAZIs reserved for Jews and homosexuals. 
Do you know why I pulled you over? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. That, and the fact that you were about to drive right by the following essays related to the addiction topic broached above:
Not so fast. Effexor is much more insidious than I gave it credit for. I am teetering on the edge of a relapse. "The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p xvi13
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
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