The Princess of Wales is patron of The Forward Trust, a charity devoted to assisting addicts to remain abstinent from their drug of addiction. She has just spoken out forcefully against the view that addiction is weakness of will or any kind of moral problem.
“Addiction is not a choice or a personal failing,” she said, implying thereby that it was a medical condition like any other, such as Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis. She said that “people’s experience of addiction in still shaped by fear, shame and judgment, and that this ought to change”.
I am sure that HRH meant well, and that she feels genuine sympathy for addicts; but unfortunately, her view is simple, unsophisticated, dehumanising and empirically false.
It is dehumanising because, by denying that addiction is a choice, it deprives addicts of their agency both in theory and to a certain extent in practice. If, after all, you persuade someone that he does not make a choice in doing something, you also persuade him that choice cannot prevent him from doing it. He is not a human being like you and me, but a helpless feather on the wind of circumstance.
This turns him into an object, not a subject, both to himself and others. Such a view is implicitly degrading, demeaning and far from compassionate. It implies the need for an apparatus of care to look after him, much as one would look after an animal in a menagerie, with kindness but not with much respect.
Take the case of the injecting heroin addict and think what he has to do and learn to become such an addict. He has to learn where to obtain heroin and how to prepare it. He has to learn to disregard its unpleasant side effects. He has to overcome a natural aversion to pushing a needle into himself. This is not something that just happens to him.
Moreover, not only do most addicts take the drug for some time before becoming physically addicted to it, but they are fully aware in advance of the consequences of taking the drug long-term. Addicts are not “hooked” by heroin, as they often put it; rather, they hook heroin.
It is untrue that addicts require a professional apparatus to overcome their addiction. Millions of people have given up smoking, though nicotine is addictive. During the Vietnam War, thousands of American soldiers addicted themselves to heroin and gave up, with almost no assistance, one they returned home.
In 1980, Porter and Jick pointed out that people treated with strong painkillers as in-patients in hospital did not go on to become addicts once they left hospital. This was unfortunately interpreted to mean that such drugs were not addictive; but, on the contrary, it shows that addiction, in the sense of continuing addictive behaviour, is not straightforwardly a physiological condition.
At the root of the Princess’s misapprehension is the post-religious or secular view that if a person is the author of his own downfall, he is due no sympathy or compassion. It is a highly puritanical view, and since we do not want to be puritans, we make the problem a medical one instead. But since we are all sinners and the authors of our own downfall, at least in some respect or other, this also has the corollary that sympathy or compassion is due to no one when he needs it.
The Princess appears to think that if you say to an addict that he has behaved, and continues to behave, foolishly and badly, you are necessarily saying to him, “Go away, darken my doors no more”. She seems to think that the truth, far from setting people free, will imprison them until someone comes along with a technical key to unlock them.
Of course, some addicts benefit from assistance, but not for the reasons the Princess supposes. Medication may reduce their physical sufferings, and if we take once more the example of injecting heroin addicts, we discover that they may well have so destroyed their relations with everyone – their families and friends – that there is no one to whom to turn if they desire to change their ways. They thus need a helping hand, but this is not the same as removing fear or stigma (a very necessary, though not sufficient, aid to civilised life). Though she did not mean them to be so, the Princess’s words were not so much demoralising, as amoralising.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/51db8fdbd5d80cb6
The Princess of Wales is patron of The Forward Trust, a charity devoted to assisting addicts to remain abstinent from their drug of addiction. She has just spoken out forcefully against the view that addiction is weakness of will or any kind of moral problem.
“Addiction is not a choice or a personal failing,” she said, implying thereby that it was a medical condition like any other, such as Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis. She said that “people’s experience of addiction in still shaped by fear, shame and judgment, and that this ought to change”.
I am sure that HRH meant well, and that she feels genuine sympathy for addicts; but unfortunately, her view is simple, unsophisticated, dehumanising and empirically false.
It is dehumanising because, by denying that addiction is a choice, it deprives addicts of their agency both in theory and to a certain extent in practice. If, after all, you persuade someone that he does not make a choice in doing something, you also persuade him that choice cannot prevent him from doing it. He is not a human being like you and me, but a helpless feather on the wind of circumstance.
This turns him into an object, not a subject, both to himself and others. Such a view is implicitly degrading, demeaning and far from compassionate. It implies the need for an apparatus of care to look after him, much as one would look after an animal in a menagerie, with kindness but not with much respect.
Take the case of the injecting heroin addict and think what he has to do and learn to become such an addict. He has to learn where to obtain heroin and how to prepare it. He has to learn to disregard its unpleasant side effects. He has to overcome a natural aversion to pushing a needle into himself. This is not something that just happens to him.
Moreover, not only do most addicts take the drug for some time before becoming physically addicted to it, but they are fully aware in advance of the consequences of taking the drug long-term. Addicts are not “hooked” by heroin, as they often put it; rather, they hook heroin.
It is untrue that addicts require a professional apparatus to overcome their addiction. Millions of people have given up smoking, though nicotine is addictive. During the Vietnam War, thousands of American soldiers addicted themselves to heroin and gave up, with almost no assistance, one they returned home.
In 1980, Porter and Jick pointed out that people treated with strong painkillers as in-patients in hospital did not go on to become addicts once they left hospital. This was unfortunately interpreted to mean that such drugs were not addictive; but, on the contrary, it shows that addiction, in the sense of continuing addictive behaviour, is not straightforwardly a physiological condition.
At the root of the Princess’s misapprehension is the post-religious or secular view that if a person is the author of his own downfall, he is due no sympathy or compassion. It is a highly puritanical view, and since we do not want to be puritans, we make the problem a medical one instead. But since we are all sinners and the authors of our own downfall, at least in some respect or other, this also has the corollary that sympathy or compassion is due to no one when he needs it.
The Princess appears to think that if you say to an addict that he has behaved, and continues to behave, foolishly and badly, you are necessarily saying to him, “Go away, darken my doors no more”. She seems to think that the truth, far from setting people free, will imprison them until someone comes along with a technical key to unlock them.
Of course, some addicts benefit from assistance, but not for the reasons the Princess supposes. Medication may reduce their physical sufferings, and if we take once more the example of injecting heroin addicts, we discover that they may well have so destroyed their relations with everyone – their families and friends – that there is no one to whom to turn if they desire to change their ways. They thus need a helping hand, but this is not the same as removing fear or stigma (a very necessary, though not sufficient, aid to civilised life). Though she did not mean them to be so, the Princess’s words were not so much demoralising, as amoralising.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/51db8fdbd5d80cb6