Best of the Spectator The Book Club: A Philosophy of Addiction
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Feb 21, 2026 Hanna Pickard, a philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins, offers a fresh take on addiction. She challenges the broken-brain view and highlights how environment, choice, and identity shape drug use. She also recounts a revealing morphine experience and explains why community and compassionate responsibility matter for recovery.
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Addiction As Harmful Behavioral Pattern
- Addiction is best defined as drug use that persists despite evident severe costs and undermines a person's own good.
- This frames addiction as a pattern of behavior 'gone wrong' rather than automatically as brain disease.
Rats Choose Company Over Cocaine
- Classic rat experiments showed isolated rats self-administering cocaine to death, inspiring the 'hijacked brain' idea.
- Later studies found rats prefer saccharin or social contact over cocaine when offered alternatives, challenging that interpretation.
Environment Drives Addictive Use
- The rats' behavior reflects environmental poverty and psychological state, not irresistible drug compulsion.
- Pickard uses the 'cage with nothing but cocaine' as a metaphor for the social conditions that drive human addictive use.
