We Should Praise Addiction, Not Condemn It, Says Anthropologist Elizabeth Roberts

The title of Elizabeth Roberts’ new book, In Praise of Addiction, is likely to catch your attention, maybe even set off some cognitive dissonance in your mind. But the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Roberts doesn’t want you to be unhealthy or take up new habits that can hurt you and others, she just wants you to consider that maybe we haven’t been looking at addiction with the clearest of eyes. Why are some substances and habits tolerated and others scorned, their users told by society to abstain and isolated until they do? In her time living in Mexico, she noticed a big difference between people who drank or did drugs to cut themselves off from society versus those who used substances to connect with one another. She offers her analysis on how this was impacted by NAFTA and the War on Drugs in Mexico and puritanism and capitalism in the United States. This is a complicated issue but it’s pretty healthy to challenge assumptions and to take a look at how those assumptions came to be established in the first place.

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