Addiction

by Gene M Heyman

This is an attack on the ‘brain disease’ model of drug use. And that believing that brain imaging will tell us all about addiction – the theory of Alan Leshner, who was director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and is now pretty much dogma – is wrong. So is the notion that drug consumption by people with bad drug habits is involuntary, in the same way as the tic of Tourette’s or the tremor of Parkinson’s.