Four reasons why Addiction is a political term

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Four reasons why Addiction is a political term

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 28, 2023

cartoon of man in front of two doors: on the left, the door to Addiction Services, decorated with depictions of souls in torment; on the right, Maintenance Meds, with picture of perky angel blowing trumpet

Addiction is not an objective term, it is a political term. It is another Drug War invention designed to pathologize the victims of prohibition.

To see this, let's first consider the way that the term is defined in Webster's Dictionary.

addiction: 'The quality or state of being addicted -- specifically : the compulsive uncontrolled use of habit-forming drugs beyond the period of medical need or under conditions harmful to society.'

Author's follow-up for November 14, 2025

Now let's consider four problems with that definition:

1) It's a little 'rich' to pathologize the 'compulsive uncontrolled use' of drugs with the pejorative label of 'addiction,' given that we live in a world where multibillion-dollar agencies are tasked with the job of making drug use as dangerous as possible. If, on the other hand, drugs were re-legalized and users had a smorgasbord of psychoactive options from which they could choose freely and were taught to use them safely, this 'compulsive uncontrolled use' would arguably not exist. A drug that caused undue compulsion would be replaced by other less compulsion-causing drugs. (Obsessive use of a contaminated Fentanyl ¹ supply could be replaced, for instance, with a relaxing nightly session of uncontaminated opium smoking.) But this is something that the Drug Warrior cannot imagine, of course, because their puritanical presumptions make it unthinkable to fight drugs with drugs.

2) 'beyond the period of medical need.' This qualification ignores the whole reason for USING psychoactive drugs in the first place: they are not used for medical purposes but rather for the very human purpose of attaining self-transcendence in life. By defining addiction in terms of 'medical need,' we put scientists and doctors in judgment of a decision about drug use that only the user is competent to make. Only the user can decide if use of a certain psychoactive drug can be justified by a cost-benefit analysis given the user's own priorities in life, given what they personally consider to be the 'summum bonum,' a good life. The scientists and researchers may advise the would-be user about physical risks of a given drug, but they cannot decide whether that risk is worth taking because they do not know what the user most values in life. (Perhaps the user is like the opium ² -loving physician Avicenna, who was said to have valued 'a short life with width to a narrow one with length.') Sure, the scientists and doctors can say that such illegal use would be wrong, morally speaking, as most would probably do these days, but that is not medical advice, that is legal and/or religious advice.

Even the determination of the amount of pain relief required in a given medical case is not a medical decision, except insofar as the doctor ensures that the dosages in question are not going to prove palpably injurious or lethal to a patient. Assuming that the patient's comfort is the goal of pain relief, then the decision about proper dosage must be informed by the patient's subjective experience of pain. This experience is in turn shaped in various ways and to various extents by social norms, as Ivan Illich discusses in Medical Nemesis. In other words, the patient is the expert when it comes to the amount of pain relief they require for a certain situation. It's barbarous that his or her preferences would be overruled by bureaucrats who intimidate doctors into prescribing niggardly doses of medicine in conformance to some supposed 'objectively correct dosage' based on a supposedly average patient. Such politically correct dosing ignores the obvious fact that every patient is both different and unique in how they tolerate and even define 'pain.' They should not be punished for having outlier reactions to pain based on a Bell's curve depicting statistically typical reactions.

3) 'under conditions harmful to society'? Who decides what is harmful to society? This is a subjective judgment. The Christian Scientist believes that any drug use is harmful to society, as do most politicians. The typical politician will also point to open-air drug markets and the mis-called 'opioid crisis' as signs of harm, but this is a mere political charge in a world in which the harms of prohibition are never acknowledged, let alone discussed. The Drug Warriors blame drugs for the downsides of prohibition in order to divert attention from the real culprit: prohibition itself, which limits choices, contaminates the drug supply, and refuses to even speak about safe use.

4) The definition implies that there's something wrong with habit-forming drugs. But this is not an obvious truth. Coffee is habit-forming and use is encouraged. Alcohol is habit-forming, cigarettes are habit-forming. 1 in 4 American women use SSRIs every day of their life. And we don't even call that a habit. To the contrary, we call that 'responsibly taking care of one's mental health!'

Author's Follow-up: October 28, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

Drug warriors will no doubt point to the case of hospital patients who are given a substance for pain relief and then become psychologically and perhaps even physically dependent on that drug. I have just three comments to attempt to pacify these statistically-challenged worrywarts.

1) The world is not perfect. We can never save everybody. Horse riding kills hundreds every year. Thousands of people die every year after taking aspirin. We have to put these things in perspective. It's cruel and unusual idiocy therefore to outlaw the use of time-honored godsends merely because they pose dangers to the unwary and thereby make children suffer in hospice. Even as I type this, there are many hospitals in India that do not stock morphine ³ because of the Chicken Little fearmongering of puritanical American demagogues. Just think of all the terminal patients that are going through hell right now thanks to the irresponsible idiocy of stateside politicians. The Drug Warrior's answer is to deny adequate pain relief and relaxation (and spiritual quests, etc.) to billions and billions in order to save a handful of cases that can be portrayed on 48 Hours to a sound track of sobbing violins. This makes as much sense as denying food to your family because junior once choked on a chicken bone. It's also Christian Science gone mad.

Rehab patients sitting on beanbags where they use substances that make it easy to withdraw from unwanted substances.

Rehab patients sitting on beanbags where they use substances that make it easy to withdraw from unwanted substances.

<2) When all drugs are legal and we have pharmacologically savvy empaths (instead of pill peddling psychiatrists), then such 'addictions' are not going to be the end of the world for anybody. If anything, they may lead the supposed 'addict' on a voyage of self-discovery with the responsible and guided use of empathogens and psychedelics. This is common sense -- but it's something that the Drug Warrior cannot imagine, for their puritan mindset renders them incapable of even thinking of fighting drugs with drugs ⁴. So much for the psychological aspects of so-called 'addiction.' The physical aspects can be treated by sleep cures of the kind that Jim Hogshire mentions in Opium for the Masses ⁵ , and such cures can be expanded and perfected once we dump the anti-drug mindset that discourages such progress. In short, addiction need not be hell -- but Drug Warriors actually want it to be hell. Why? So that they can parlay the addict's pain into morality tales about the supposed evils of drugs.

3) Finally, as Carl Hart reminds us ⁶, the vast majority of drug users use drugs safely, despite the fact that their government is spending billions of dollars for the purpose of putting them in jeopardy.

Author's Follow-up:

November 02, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The fearmongers keep scaring white parents with the bugbear of dependency -- and yet Big Pharma antidepressants cause far more dependency than do most outlawed drugs, including opium, cocaine, and even heroin. Around 34% of Vietnam vets made generous use of heroin while overseas, and yet only 5% required help getting off the drug when they returned to the States ⁷. 5%. Compare this to the SNRI called Effexor (Venlafaxine), which my own psychiatrist tells me has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users, as per an NIMH study ⁸. 95%. Personally, I doubt whether any long-term user can EVER get off of Effexor, except at the risk of cognitive impairment. And I write this from personal experience. I was off the drug for three months this year, and finally had to go back to using, not just because depression came back with a vengeance, a depression far worse than I had experienced prior to using the drug, but also because I could no longer THINK straight.

This "scientifically" created drug had mucked about with my brain chemistry, such that I now needed to take it daily merely to function in life. But don't hold your breath waiting for stories like mine to spark public outrage in this country wherein science -- or rather pseudoscience -- is a god. If a pill is thought to be scientific in the west, my job -- indeed, my medical duty -- is simply to take it: otherwise I am viewed as some kind of pharmacological Luddite. Just ask Jim Hogshire, who evinced nothing but disdain for the enemies of Big Pharma meds in his 1991 book Pills-A-Go-Go -- a fact which reminds us that even the brightest and bravest among us can be bamboozled by Drug War propaganda ⁹ ¹⁰. He failed to notice the huge difference between antidepressants and outlawed drugs: namely, that for antidepressants, dependency is a feature, and it is lifelong dependency at that; whereas for drugs like cocaine and opium, dependency is a mere bug and by no means a necessary outcome of rational use.

And what about cocaine? Clinical depression would scarcely be "a thing" in America had self-interested doctors not demonized the drug by focusing only on its rare misuse, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by studying only alcoholics. Cocaine is a cure for depression for most people, as Sigmund Freud well knew -- a cure ¹¹. The problem was that doctors did not want to cure depression -- there was no money in that -- they wanted to treat it instead, preferably over the course of a long and remunerative relationship with their depressed patients. And so they launched an op-ed campaign to destroy the drug's reputation, meanwhile ignoring all benefits of the drug, like the fact that its symptomatic use could keep hundreds of millions of people from leading lives of quiet desperation. Naturally, they never thought to ask the depressed how they felt about the drug. Doctors were to be the experts on cocaine. What do patients know? The patients need to just shut up and take their meds.

Yet the positive effects of symptomatic cocaine use were so self-evident to everyone that physicians knew they had to invent a plausible and deep-sounding excuse for ignoring them. And so they adopted a strategy of mystification. They began making the pedantic claim that cocaine use was just "treating the symptoms" of a hidden psychological problem, whereas talk therapy and/or antidepressant use (especially antidepressant use) was going to treat the REAL problems! According to this pretentious canard, drug use was a mere copout. We were children running away from reality. Of course, by this same logic, we might upbraid the blue collar worker for reaching for a beer after a long day at work, or the psychiatrists themselves for stopping by Starbucks for a Caramel Frappuccino prior to showing up at the clinic. If they need a jolt from a drug like caffeine in order to face the day, then surely they should be addressing the "real" reason behind that addiction.

It turns out, however, that these doctors did not know what the hell they were talking about. Even mainstream science now admits that we do not know how antidepressants work ¹² -- assuming that they work at all, of course -- so how can they say that they are treating the real problems? Besides, treating the real problems is a crazy option in a world wherein drugs like cocaine are available, especially when we consider that life is short. Why should a depressed person put their life on hold and spend entire decades expensively trying to achieve a positive attitude through talk therapy and the use of dependence-causing "meds" (drugs whose method of action is a mystery even to the manufacturers themselves) when they could succeed in life right here and now with the motivating help of a mind-improving drug, thereby creating virtuous circles of productive behavior and so turning success into a habit?

None of us may ever know the "real" reasons why we behave the way that we do. This is not surprising because life is complicated, notwithstanding the western scientist's penchant for liberally tossing out variables in order to give themselves a false sense of mastery on matters of human psychology. Our behavior is the result of a mind-boggling array of interacting influences, coming from our biochemistry, our genetics, our upbringing, our unique personality, and so forth. Yet simplistic psychiatrists would have us spend a lifetime looking for a smoking gun that will explain everything. Such a search can quickly degenerate into a fishing expedition for scapegoats. Even if we were to discover past reasons for present problems, it does not follow that our non-productive behavior in the present will improve as a result. If aspiring actors experience debilitating stage fright, their performances are not going to improve merely because they understand how their parents' squabbling might have aggravated their penchant for self-doubt. This, indeed, is the problem with psychoanalysis: it is based on the demonstrably false assumption that we can put an end to irrational fears simply by understanding how they originally came about.

Would talk therapy and antidepressants have turned Robin Williams into a compelling actor, or Sherlock Holmes into a deductive genius, or Sigmund Freud into a prolific author?

Amazingly, some psychiatrists claim that SNRIs are great because they do not cause addiction. By this they mean that the drugs do not cause cravings. I fail to see their point, however. Cocaine does not cause cravings for most people. Nor do I see any big difference between a drug that causes cravings for those who give it up and those which simply make them feel like hell for doing so. But then psychiatrists have a strategy for avoiding the issue of antidepressant dependency altogether. They simply insist that the drugs that THEY prescribe are meant to be taken for a lifetime. Problem solved. You will never have problems getting off of Effexor if you never even attempt to do so.

We could just as easily say that heroin should be used for a lifetime, or opium, for that matter. Indeed, heroin only became the opiate of choice because the government outlawed the peaceable smoking of opium at home. Then, of course, we had the crackdown on heroin, leading to the use of still more powerful opiates in the form of oxy and Fentanyl.

This is why I say that drug prohibitionists are like the police officers in those Leslie Nielsen movies. They force the bystanders back from a crime scene in order to protect them, only to end up pushing them off the edge of a cliff.

That said, even drugs like Fentanyl and oxy can be used wisely. Indeed, they would be so used in a world in which we spread the news about wise drug use and allowed for drug choice and regulated product. Not everyone would use wisely, of course, just as not everyone drinks wisely. But only when it comes to "drugs" do we use this well-known fact as a reason to repeal democratic freedoms, to destroy inner cities, and to deny the right to heal to hundreds of millions of Americans, thereby shunting them off onto drugs for which lifelong dependency is a feature and not a bug.

Author's Follow-up:

November 14, 2025

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

pesnive young woman with question marks appearing over her head

Imagine a country that outlawed meat. Meat eaters were punished in the same way as America now punishes drug users, by removing them from the workforce (via urine testing) and by throwing them in jail if they were found consuming meat.

Yet despite these tough laws, some people insisted on eating meat, even though the meat market was now completely unregulated and subject to contamination. Eating meat was now dangerous for other reasons as well, especially the fact that meat was now being peddled by the local gangs, who are not exactly known for customer service and quality control. How could society explain this desire to eat meat when meat-eating was becoming so dangerous? Why would people persist in the face of such dangers?! Along comes the self-interested medical establishment with the answer: it turns out that this stubborn penchant for carnivorism was due to biological factors. These meat eaters actually had a disease -- a gastrointestinal imbalance that made them desire meat more ardently than did their law-abiding neighbors. These offenders were, in reality, meat addicts. They were suffering from an illness, just like scarlet fever or the measles. (Who knew?!)

The do-gooders in the community agreed in part: yes, these determined meat eaters were addicts and they needed help, but what they needed most of all was spiritual and/or motivational renewal and a belief in a higher power. They needed, moreover, to admit that they were sick and could do nothing by themselves. They could not give up meat on their own. What they really needed, in other words, was a 12-step group where they could speculate with their fellow addicts about the "real" causes of their passion for meat. And then maybe... just maybe... at least some of these 12-steppers could start taking Big Pharma meds, in an obligatory nod to the scientific triumphalism of our times. It would be a win-win solution: both the busybody helpers and the medical community would get their cut.

Well, you see the problem here. These attempts at medicalizing and moralizing "the meat problem" are really serving to normalize a great injustice: namely, the outlawing of meat. The fact that people were still eating meat despite prohibition should have been seen for what it was: a tacit protest against the policy of meat prohibition! But society makes the protest itself disappear by refusing to view it as such. Instead, they view the offender's actions as an expression of a pathology, thereby letting the prohibitionists off the hook through the time-honored practice of victim-blaming.

Now, it may actually turn out to be true that some people do have an uncommonly strong craving for meat based on their peculiar biochemistry, but that is completely beside the point here. The only reason these people are having "trouble" with meat is because of meat prohibition. A craving for meat does not cause problems by itself, it does so only thanks to bad social policies like meat prohibition.

It will be objected that there are indeed people who have a stronger-than-usual craving for certain drugs thanks to their biochemistry and/or genetics. To which I answer, of course it's true: just as there are indeed people who have a stronger-than-usual craving for meat thanks to their biochemistry and/or genetics. But to qualify as an "addict" according to most dictionary definitions of the term, a person's drug use (or meat use) must be problematic -- and we cannot fairly determine whether use is problematic when prohibition is being enforced, since prohibition is all about making use as problematic as possible! How? By refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product, and in the case of drugs, refusing to allow for true drug choice whereby users could find desirable drugs while yet avoiding those substances that are contraindicated in their particular case thanks to their own unique biochemistry and/or genetics.

The moral of this story can best be stated in the following simple syllogism:

PROPOSITION 1: An addict is someone whose substance use is problematic.
PROPOSITION 2: A Drug War society does everything it can to make substance use as problematic as possible.

CONCLUSION: It is therefore wrong to label a drug user as an "addict" in a Drug War Society. It is a political label masquerading as a medical diagnosis.

Addiction

Notes for essay entitled Four reasons why Addiction is a political term:

1: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
2: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
3: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
4: Fighting Drugs with Drugs DWP (up)
5: Opium for the Masses by Jim Hogshire DWP (up)
6: “Drug Use for Grown-Ups by Dr. Carl L. Hart: 9781101981665 | PenguinRandomHouse.Com: Books.” n.d. PenguinRandomhouse.Com. Accessed August 29, 2026. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534657/drug-use-for-grown-ups-by-dr-carl-l-hart/. (up)
7: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
8: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
9: Pills-a-go-go : a fiendish investigation into pill marketing, art, history and consumption Hogshire, Jim, 1999 (up)
10: What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs DWP (up)
11: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
12: Shpancer, Noam. 2022. “Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain | Psychology Today.” Www.psychologytoday.com. July 24, 2022. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202207/depression-is-not-caused-chemical-imbalance-in-t (up)

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All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.

Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.

If opium and cocaine were re-legalized, hospital buildings would no longer be the secular cathedrals of our time. Some of that wealth would actually go to healthy people.

The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"

Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

Videos about science and psilocybin are funny. They show nerds trying to catch up with common sense.

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

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Four reasons why Addiction is a political term

Author's Follow-up: October 28, 2023

Author's Follow-up:

November 02, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

November 14, 2025

Addiction

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Diary of a Drug Fiend