The cultural turn in understanding ‘addiction’

• Published in: The International journal of drug policy 2024-07, Vol.129, p.104473, Article 104473
• Main Authors: Maarefvand, Masoomeh, Ghiabi, Maziyar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Addiction; Addiction history; Behavior, Addictive - psychology; Critical drug studies; Cultural turn; Culture; Decolonisation; Drug history; Epistemology; Global south; Habit; Humans; Iran; Substance-Related Disorders; Useable past
• ISSN: 0955-3959; 1873-4758; 1873-4758
• DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2024.104473

In this essay we want to foreground a question: what happens to ‘addiction’ when we take seriously cultural scripts informing its trajectories? Can this bring us to unthink addiction as problematic notion and move it onto new paradigms that fit better the now acknowledged fluidity and pluralistic episteme of ‘addiction’ and more broadly of chronic life conditions? Indeed, ‘addiction’ has become a pivotal concept in the contemporary world. A powerful diagnostic framework in interpreting human behaviour, for some ‘addiction’ has become the ‘new normal’ with chronic relations with different things such as food, sex, gambling, and mind-altering substances touching upon the lifestyle of a majority of individuals, making everyone ‘addicts in practice’. Perhaps this has something to do with the constituent force that ‘habit’ – as in ‘addiction’ – has in defining our present and future. Though ‘addiction’ goes beyond the question of mind-altering drugs, the politics of ‘addiction’ is intimately tied to substances such as opioids and opiates, cocaine, cannabis, and psychedelics that have been the object of durable systemic political control and security repression. Contextually the line between licit/illicit substances is softening and blurring, the ‘dual’ purpose that drugs serve is now recognised in scientific and popular analysis moving the question of ‘addiction’ beyond the medicine/drug dichotomy. Yet, culture is generally absent in understanding ‘addiction.’ When it is referred to, this happens in diminutive terms limited to Anglo-American modern culture. Culture matters and it matters with different weights and measures as it moves across the world. There are cultural environments of health informed by practices and epistemologies of well-being that have evolved in lines opposites from or only intersecting with the Anglo-American, and generally Western, world. Exploring these spaces and cultural scripts enables our scholarship on drugs and ‘addiction’ to move the barycentre of discussion towards novel considerations around the historical trajectories and potential futures of our diagnostic terms and policy interventions.