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what is the effect of addiction on moral culpability for addiction related actions?

I agree that we use the "disease" card often to escape personal responsibility. But as you mentioned free will is at question. Do we have it? How much?
 
I find this thread fascinating and curiously uplifting. I applaud SKL for both his efforts to communicate as well as his thick skin and I applaud everyone else that is contributing for sticking with it and expressing nuanced views. I agree with some of what SKL is saying but see the language as judgmental and not helpful. Addicts struggle with so much shame and self-hatred. I don't like to see that beast get fed. But stepping outside of addiction's grip means being ruthlessly honest while maintaining ultimate compassion and faith in oneself. This is a difficult tightrope to walk.

I do see being owned by a need--whether that need is for a drug or anything else--to be a human failing. Moral failing? Not necessarily--to me that implies conscious intent. What I mean is that we fail ourselves and this often has terrible consequences to others. I have never been addicted to any drug but I have acted immorally (by my own understanding of right and wrong) out of other needs that owned me. I have been selfish and greedy and self-serving. I have hurt others in order to protect my own ego. I have done all sorts of harm to myself and the greater world, including those closest to me, when I have not acted out of a place of compassion but out of a place of insecurity and fear.

Sometimes it is hard for me to look underneath someone's language, especially religious terms like "sin". But in the polarized world we find ourselves in today, I think looking for bridges is always more fruitful than shouting and pointing at walls. I come from an extended family of right wing, semi-fundamentalist religious people that have a world view as far from my own as possible. It's been a great training ground for me to be able to look for those bridges. Had I just gotten into a shouting match years ago they would have just written me off as a delusional hippie and I would have written them off as delusional neocons and we would have both lost the opportunity to try to understand what we still do not agree with.

But here is the bottom line as far as I'm concerned: addicts (drug or non-drug) have the right to confront their addictions in whatever way works for them. If it helps you to call yourself a junkie then go for it. If it hurts you and holds you in a place of shame to call yourself a junkie (or hear yourself referred to that way) then stand up for that. We need to make space for each other. That is where true connections happen and true connections are what we all need to confront these machines of culture we have built around us that hold us all caged in our own agonies.
 
After reading at least half of this thread I still don't know where or how to jump in. SLK you have done a formidable job covering different perspectives on the subject; don't mind the haters I feel like they are just playing Devil's Advocate.
I could provide my own experience. Yeah, when I wasn't addicted physically to any drugs I never did anything unconscionable. Yet when the severity of my opiate addiction reached a certain point after many years, I did cross a line and ended up doing things to get my 'fix' or otherwise 'stay straight'. Thankfully I quickly saw where that would have headed and jumped back into my suboxone program. The only reason I reached that point was because I tried stopping said suboxone program before I was really prepared to. I guess the moral of my story is that these programs are all double-edged swords. Yes, they can transform the most depraved addicts in our society into functional members who are able to live normal lives, but I don't think we have really figured out how to successfully get all of those people from the maintenance stage into a phase of complete sobriety, and that is where we need to be researching a lot more using any resource available. I was on suboxone for 18 months the first time, and conditions were such that I wasn't able to maintain sobriety in the four months after stopping the program. I could argue many situations, such as if MXE and other arylcyclohexylamines were more available to me in the months proceeding my suboxone taper, maybe I could have been more successful getting past the extended PAWS of suboxone withdrawal, but it is all hearsay until more research is done in getting people successfully off of maintenance opioids, which at the moment studies show have pretty abysmal success rates after 6 months.
 
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The bottom line IMO is the addict doesn't really do anything that everyone else doesn't do to one degree or another. The whole question is moot IMO. I'm going to relax and get loaded now. Fortunately I'm well off and retired so I won't need to be doing any B&E just before bedtime.
 
I agree you shouldn't refer to them as sins, but only because of the religious connotations of the word. You should acknowledge that an immoral act is immoral whether it was done in the throes of addiction or not.

^ That's from the Aussie Moderator, sorry, I don't know how to 'properly' take individual chunks of text and put them in my here post :)

Anywho, I agree completely. I spent two years in jail reflecting on my immoral actions (armed robbery), and to this day often lie awake at night wondering where I went wrong, if I can right those wrongs, if my largely sober life is tantamount to doing that and so on....

I often wonder where these morals actually come from? Are they organic? Like, as in inherent. Or are they a by-product of living in a social community? If a man was born, and raised himself and lived alone, would anything he does seem immoral? I suspect so but who can be sure? Or are they spiritual in nature? All of the above?

Does my head in sometimes!
 
SKL said:
^ Bullshit.

"Addiction is not a moral failure," people say. Maybe in some abstract biological sense.

The vast majority of addicts are, however, moral failures, as are most of the posters in this thread or most likely all of Bluelight.

That's why we need to change. That's why we need Christ. That's why we need whatever we need to get of this fucked up cycle.
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Two thumbs up. I was dead wrong for everything I did on drugs. I turned to Christ and am working on becoming a new man.
 
willy33 said:
I often wonder where these morals actually come from? Are they organic? Like, as in inherent. Or are they a by-product of living in a social community? If a man was born, and raised himself and lived alone, would anything he does seem immoral? I suspect so but who can be sure? Or are they spiritual in nature? All of the above?

Does my head in sometimes!
Click to expand...

I recently made a thread which addresses these kinds of questions, you can find it here.
 
SKL said:
I'm going to write a rather lengthy P&S type response, but first of all with regards to the religious tangent, I'd like to highlight to anyone who might have missed it that this discussion began as a tangent in itdrlg a thread from DC called Confess Your Drug Sins, which accounts for a great deal of the religious phraseology I have used in this thread, especially early on. Some people react in a rather agitated manner pretty much whenever God or religion is mentioned, and the responses tend toward a predictable and sophomoric statements about theodicy ("what kind of God would allow x," "if your God y, then I would never worship him," etc.)
Click to expand...

If these questions are so predictable, I guess this is because they have been asked many times before. Why is it so difficult for Christians to provide an answer to them?

But, you are right, this is not really the topic for this discussion. Sorry if I offended you or god. :D

SKL said:
  • we are moral beings;
  • we have free will; and
  • we have moral obligations.
In terms of principles generally universally held we could add a proposition that we are obligated to follow the law, respect authority and the normative practices of society, but that's not one which will be very popular here for obvious reasons, so we'll omit it.
Click to expand...

I wonder about the second clause there. Do we have free will? I think we do have a limited sense of it. Maybe. But, I think drug addiction actually negatively disrupts the ability or understanding of one's freedom of choice. In the midst of withdrawals that you do not want to to experience, did not prepare for and come upon you out of the blue (ie. a dealer vanishes, whatever) it was, for me, very difficult to tell myself I had much of a choice in my behaviour. The sickness, the self-loathing was so strong. All animals are wired, genetically, to try and avoid pain (it is why we experience pain, to avoid suffering/physical trauma) be it physical or mental- the behaviour of a drug addict, be it human or rat, is influenced by desperation, a completely understandable desire to avoid further suffering. People who are desperate, for whatever reason, have a certain caveat which does not excuse their behaviour but does explain it.

I think it is more unethical for drugs and drug uers to be criminalised. That, to me, is the reason why drug crime exists. It can't be that there is all these bad people out there who simply enjoy stealing things. An addict who steals is not a moral failure, but has failed morally in that instance. The criminal justice system says that a person who steals is a thief/criminal. I'm convinced that humans are not the summation of one or a few limited actions; our moral 'success' is better gauged by assesing behaviour over a long period of time, in situations free of duress, self-imposed or otherwise. But, we have not evolved in a sitation of leisurely freedom so we actively seek duress at times. When I was deeply addicted to heroin, I spend so much time obtaining the drug and when I did, I would experience a deep satisfaction, a contentment that my NEED was soon to be met. This contentment I have yet to find elsewhere. I think addiction plays on the resource-gathering instinct of humans, our single minded focus on the thing we perceive as keeping us alive which for most of our history has been food/shelter. I don't know about you guys, but when I gather to myself a whole bunch of different drugs, I feel a satisfaction unrivalled even by the effects of the drugs. I feel like I am prepared for the future (short term at least). I'm trying to break that instinct but I think it is the instinct that ensures survival in the wild, natural world which has been repurposed for drugseeking and is therefore very powerful and very difficult to overcome through sheer willpower. It puts one's surival up against the potential for being immoral; what do we think will win out, more often than not?
 
I think there could be an expression if free will somewhere in the human mind. There has to be some decision that isn't propogated by a chain reaction of thought stimuli.

Proving that is a different story.

Where has Turkalurk gone?
 
Re: Free Will- I really connected recently with Jon Lilly's revelation of the 'Earth Coincidence Control Office'. So, there are some entities pulling some strings here and there (perhaps we are in a simulation as Elon Musk is so sure about), and these entities engineer coincidences, or synchronicity, and nudge people on to paths occasionally, but that is not to say we are doomed to fate and without free will. We actually have a great deal of control especially in the short term. It is only the long-term engineered coincidences that we don't have so much control of, too much chaos to see through all the data. Read #6 and #7 from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly#Earth_Coincidence_Control_Office_.28E.C.C.O..29
6. You are in our training program for life: there is no escape from it. We (not you) control the long-term coincidences; you (not we) control the shorter-term coincidences by your own efforts.
7. Your major mission on earth is to discover/create that which we do to control the long-term coincidence patterns: you are being trained on Earth to do this job.
 
^The invocation of entities as being responsible for physical occurrences is a cop out to my mind. How do these entities even interact with physicality without transgressing laws of physics? Think about all the vast elements that actually need to be bought together to engineer a coincidence. If it is so, you have no free will and science can be disregarded.

Dissociatives seem to interrupt normal temporal processing so cause and effect can seem less linear. That does not mean they actually are though.

Damn it, I think humans are responsible for the messes we find ourselves in :)
 
Yeah I've had crazy synchronicity shit happen on dissociatives.

That's why they're so addictive for many you feel like you're on the verge of some type of breakthrough.
 
Swilow, the invocation of entities can be understood as metaphor if the literal interpretation is a bit too much woo-woo to swallow. It makes sense to me in either context.
 
I'd credit Lilly for the invention of isolation tanks but that's about it. The other stuff just seems more or less like the other woo-woo nonsense that other people that have fried their brands doing too much psychedelics profess. Like the whole notion that there's a group of cosmic entities behind the scenes controlling things... Give me a break.
 
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The ECCO could be seen as a metaphor for the things we can change VS. the things we can not change. In any situation there are things we can control, but there are many things we either have no control over, or that we choose to have no control over. The fun stuff happens when there is a play between these two forces.
 
That's fine but I can think that without thinking there's some sort of galactic entities doing it. lol
 
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