Status Updates From In the Realm of Hungry Ghos...

“Drugs do not make the addict into a criminal; the law does.”

“Addictions can never truly replace the life needs they temporarily displace. The false needs they serve, no matter how often they are gratified, cannot leave us fulfilled. The brain can never, as it were, feel that it has had enough, that it can relax and get on with other essential business.

“There is no such thing as a good addiction. Everything a person can do is better done if there is no addictive attachment that pollutes it. For every addiction—no matter how benign or even laudable it seems from the outside—someone pays a price.”

“ If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I have to be responsible for my own fear of emptiness. The fear is not personal—on the contrary it’s pretty much universal—but I got the void I got, and it’s not going anywhere. When I can recognize that, I don’t make the mistake of confusing it with who I am, or worse, expending a lot of energy trying to make it go away by any available means.”

If genetics ruled our fate, we would not need to blame ourselves or anyone else. Genetic explanations get us off the hook. The possibility does not occur to us that we can accept or assign responsibility without taking on the useless baggage of guilt or blame.”

“We human beings don’t like feeling responsible: as individuals for our own actions; as parents for our children’s hurts; or as a society for our many failings. Genetics—that neutral, impassive, impersonal handmaiden of Nature—would absolve us of responsibility and of its ominous shadow, guilt.

“Why, then, are narrow genetic assumptions so widely accepted and, in particular, so enthusiastically embraced by the media? The neglect of developmental science is one factor. Our preference for a simple and quickly understood explanation is another, as is our tendency to look for one-to-one causations for almost everything. Life in its wondrous complexity does not conform to such easy reductions.”

“It’s not that genes do not matter—they certainly do. It’s only that they do not and cannot determine even simple behaviors, let alone complex ones like addiction. Not only is there no addiction gene, there couldn’t be one.”