Burning accused witches during the witch hunts may thus be compared to destroying confiscated whisky during Prohibition. – Thomas Szasz
Amsterdam’s ‘Centre for Drug Research’ ceased to exist as an independent drug research institution in 2004, but Peter Cohen left a few challenges to our thinking. Offering something completely different about our understanding of addiction, Cohen says
“I will offer an alternative description. I will try to create a definition that will make it possible to accept the behaviour we now call addiction and see it as a normal, although infrequent type of adaptation. Once we normalise the behaviour we no longer have to fear it, and organize massive and religious discriminations against this behaviour and its alleged cause, the drug.”
The person has been reduced to the enslaved bearer of a deranged brain.
In my world of learned control, the user is a rational being trying to reach rational goals by means of techniques that are hard to grasp for people who use other types of control to reach the same rational goals; that is to feel they master their environment, get a sense of belonging and to cope. In my view, people we call ‘addicted’ do the same things that people do that we call ‘not addicted’. The difference is their methods. It is like looking at homosexuals. They do the same things as heterosexuals, only their methods differ. To decide that they are ill, deviant, or self destructive is not science.
So, my pointing out that the word ‘addicted’ fits in a list of words like possessed, bedevilled or bewitched, is an attempt to change our way of explaining heavy drug use as the agent of magic, and to show that even ‘scientific’ approaches to this behaviour may mask devils and ghosts, and create Cardinals, Inquisitors, and Heretics.