The origins of my show Addiction: The Truth, lie in the many hostile responses I received upon the publication of a book I wrote called Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). I believe many of the common criticisms are based on misunderstandings, mistakes, and myths about addiction. I was a drug addict and an alcoholic myself for many years: different decades, different continents.
The subtitle of my show: The Truth – is deliberately confrontational, as is my declaration on the posters for my show which stress that I am a Doctor. I am a Doctor of Philosophy, yet one of the most frequent criticisms of my work is that I am not a ‘real doctor’, by which is meant that I am not a doctor of medicine. An important part of my show is to demonstrate that medical doctors deal only with the consequences of addiction: cirrhotic livers, sepsis, blood clots, heart attacks, frost bite, amputations…It is a long list. However, knowing how to deal with the many consequences of addiction gives nobody any kind of insight into the causes of addiction.
In my show I will trace the history of addiction and medicine, and the disastrous impact that medicine’s control over addiction has had, and is still having, on hundreds of thousands of drug addicts and alcoholics. I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied in the National Health Service and the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, or illnesses of any kind. I will further argue that neither of these hugely powerful institutions has the authority to tell hundreds of millions of people that addiction is not a moral failure. I will also query the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addiction to drink and/or drugs are attributable to causes that their specific fields of study are best suited to understand.
Instead, I claim that Philosophy, a subject often mocked for its lack of practical value, has much to offer on an issue of such enormous public importance as alcoholism and drug addiction. I will point out, for example, Philosophy’s insistence on separating emotions from thoughts, and its 2,500 year interest in Ethics. I will argue that the subject of ethics and morality can, and should be, totally severed from Christianity.
There is nothing religious, or medical, or mysterious and complex about addiction; it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language that is used to talk about addiction, however, by both professionals working in all aspects of addiction treatment and by the general public, is confused, contradictory, and confusing so I will also discuss the language of addiction.
I will also point out that substances, like alcohol and opioids, are not the problem: alcoholics and drug addicts are the problem. I am deliberately staging a show about alcoholism in licensed premises to dramatise my belief that because the huge, the overwhelming, majority of people drink sensibly, the problem cannot possibly lie with the product.
The show will focus upon these issues, as well as including a robust defence of the following, highly contentious, statements I make throughout my book:
Nobody, ever, “struggled” with drug addiction or alcoholism; addicts only struggle when they attempt to stop.
Alcohol and heroin are not medicines; therefore it is literally impossible to use these substances to ‘self-medicate’.
Of all the ingenious ways humans have devised over thousands of years not to cope with adult life, over-indulgence in drink and drugs are emphatically the most enjoyable.
Drug addicts and alcoholics are not “numbing the pain” or fleeing trauma; they are pursuing pleasure.
Alcoholism and drug addiction are not inheritable; no persuasive genetic evidence supports this dangerous belief.
I suggest alcoholism and drug addiction are not death sentences, but nor are they life sentences. They can both be viewed as wayward periods of one’s life; only that. Nobody is condemned to be an addict for life. I will demonstrate that thinking and speaking and writing more clearly about the language of addiction can have enormous value for both addicts themselves and for those professionally engaged in supporting addicts. I know from my own experiences of both drug addiction and alcoholism that the extremely successful ‘medicalisation’ of addiction has been a hindrance to recovery rather than a route out of it. I will show that the fresh, challenging perspective on addiction that I am offering is pragmatic, optimistic, and life changing.
Addiction: The Truth
Free and unticketed
The Walrus 10 Ship Street
Raised Room: MAY 8-9, 15-16, 22-23, 29-30 at 19:00 (60 min) – Free and Unticketed
Show 45mins, followed by 15 mins Q and A
