I think addiction is pretty cut and dry. Someone that unnecessarily takes drugs despite being harmed by doing so.
Why does someone unnecessarily take drugs? And is it actually something unnecessary? It may be necessary to them, which is why they take them. Who defines what is necessary and what isn't? Someone smoking a baggie of weed and someone smoking a baggie of heroin, which one is necessary? Depends who you ask. Okay so who decides ultimately what is unnecesary and what isn't? Who gives them the right to do that anyway?
So you could then ask why would you discriminate against someone for choosing to take drugs in the first place? And now you're back at the place where most people start when judging people who take drugs. And in order to get beyond that you have to dig deeper and understand the relationship between drugs and the person and that inevitably involves their life history and what put them on that trajectory. It involves getting beyond the limitations of culture and societal conditioning towards a more counter-cultural and impartial and open-minded place. You have to challenge the normal way at approaching things. That is what drug harm reduction and recovery is all about, the shit that works anyway.
Now you're not talking about something cut and dry because nobody's life is cut and dry. To say that is to reduce someone down in order to you to feel better about not having to know the intricacies around why they do what they do because, for example, it makes you feel uncomfortable or you have particular prejudices etc. Too many people are uncomfortable around the truth around drug use and abuse. And I don't mean the stigma (although that's a big part of it). They are uncomfortable around looking at the other person as a human with a story because then it throws their warped, inflexible and detrimental world views into a tailspin. All of a sudden much of what you believed is bullshit and most people can't stomach that. Drug use is something built into the human condition and we have sought to use drugs throughout our history. That inevitably involves using them for anything from enlightenment to escapism. Whether it's to open the mind or close it. It's still part of who we are.
Isn't that the reason why we have problems around facing the drug issues we have in society? Because it's simply cut and dry, as you say?
Cut and dry to me implies putting a stamp on everybody and bundling them together. Forget the details. Just bag and tag. You take drugs and you're addicted to them and it's not good for you and that's all you need to know.
No room for adding the humanity to the conversation. It's like saying child abuse is just a hand raised and then the end result. Forget the bits in between, particularly the bits that may have actually catapulted you down the road to addiction, because it's cut and dry. Those parts don't matter, right?
Maybe it doesn't matter because it's actually something difficult to process and be open about and again, because of conditioning culturally and socially to view this topic as something taboo and therefore impure, immoral and indicative of some kind of fatal flaw. It's a projection of the dogma of society and culture being transmitted through the person. And that's okay, we are all vessels of culture and the social constructs and artifacts of our worlds. But we have to challenge those in order to assess whether they are conducive with reality and also with how we want to see them if we weren't so blind to the influences of such forces.
People need to learn to tend to each other and that involves being able to come into the other persons frame of reference. Better still, their shoes. Enough denying the complexity of what exists underneath and start learning to be with another person to uncover the parts that mean the most to them. And the most important parts are not the addiction. That's illogical. Their life story sent them down a path TOWARDS addiction. The meaning is in that story, whether they are currently capable of acknowledging that or not.
