Addiction: The Troublesome Concept

Abstract

The concept of addiction has been misused and misunderstood probably more than any other term relating to alcohol and drug use. Addiction is a troublesome concept not only in the arena of public discourse, but recently even in the professional and research literature. The traditional concept emphasized physical dependence as the central component of the concept, but newer definitions have broadened the concept to include any hard-to-stop habit and any drug use that one wants to condemn. I suggest that the newer concepts have an ideological component to them which tends to reduce precision in the interest of getting on the right side of the war on drugs. The clearest example of this is what happened in the 1980's in the redefinition of cocaine from a non-addictive drug to an addictive drug even though the most recent research evidence on cocaine continues to find that it does not produce physical dependence. I propose a definition of addiction for theoretical and research purposes that is basically a reiteration of the traditional concept.