I've seen this comment about "wasn't actually an addict" or "not really an addiction" in every discussion of this story, here and elsewhere.
I'm very curious as to why people say this, because it doesn't seem to add anything to the discussion or take it in any useful direction. I'm not trolling here: I really don't get it, and it bugs me a bit because it seems to distract the discussion from things that might be useful (and I've contributed to that distraction here, likely... sorry.)
Consider a similar case: small round blue cell tumours (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1867426/). These present identically in routine histology done on biopsied tissue, but in fact consist of four different types of underlying disease.
Neuroblastoma was identified in the 1800's. Non-Hodgin lymphoma wasn't fully classified until the 1960's. At no time did anyone say, "That's not actually a small round blue tumour" because that would have contributed nothing to the discussion.
If we treat "addiction" as a name for a set of symptoms that may arise from several underlying conditions, some of which can be corrected adequately by an act of will on the part of the individual and some of which cannot, we can start to ask interesting questions like:
1) How do we identify each type of underlying condition?
2) Are there more than two underlying conditions? Is there a more complex, more useful taxonomy?
3) Given the existence of a population that ages out or chooses to stop, are there ways that we can intervene to help them that exploit the specifics of their underlying condition that are different from what has proven to be effective in the population that does not age out and is not able to choose to stop?
And so on. All of these are useful, important, valuable things to say. "Then it's not really an addiction" is not.
I'm very curious as to why people say this, because it doesn't seem to add anything to the discussion or take it in any useful direction. I'm not trolling here: I really don't get it, and it bugs me a bit because it seems to distract the discussion from things that might be useful (and I've contributed to that distraction here, likely... sorry.)
Consider a similar case: small round blue cell tumours (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1867426/). These present identically in routine histology done on biopsied tissue, but in fact consist of four different types of underlying disease.
Neuroblastoma was identified in the 1800's. Non-Hodgin lymphoma wasn't fully classified until the 1960's. At no time did anyone say, "That's not actually a small round blue tumour" because that would have contributed nothing to the discussion.
If we treat "addiction" as a name for a set of symptoms that may arise from several underlying conditions, some of which can be corrected adequately by an act of will on the part of the individual and some of which cannot, we can start to ask interesting questions like:
1) How do we identify each type of underlying condition?
2) Are there more than two underlying conditions? Is there a more complex, more useful taxonomy?
3) Given the existence of a population that ages out or chooses to stop, are there ways that we can intervene to help them that exploit the specifics of their underlying condition that are different from what has proven to be effective in the population that does not age out and is not able to choose to stop?
And so on. All of these are useful, important, valuable things to say. "Then it's not really an addiction" is not.