What Is The Empirical Grounding for Our Beliefs About Addiction?
Although historical and cross-cultural cases reveal that addiction is neither a universal concept nor a universal phenomenon, it is commonly held that a host of solid scientific evidence underlies our beliefs about the special addictiveness of narcotics. This supposed scientific validation allows us to claim most of the world’s population has been wrong about narcotics and alcohol, and instead ought to think like we do now about addiction. Because the United States is the world’s leading exporter of scientific ideas, a realignment of attitudes about alcoholism and addiction is occurring in many countries worldwide. Let us outline briefly what type of evidence would either support or disprove the idea that narcotics are drugs of addiction. If narcotics are addictive, people who take them should be inclined to take them more frequently, compulsively, and unvaryingly than do users of other, nonaddictive drugs, or to have fewer degrees of freedom than people reveal in ordinary (that is, no
