ABSTRACT
When we talk about “addiction”, we generally think of individual people who experience it or suffer from it. The focus is on individuals. When it comes to the science of addiction, the dominant conceptions are psychobiological and the master disciplines are psychiatry specifically or the psych- and neuro- sciences more generally. That overarching framework is reflected in our preoccupations with such things as the personal histories of addicted individuals, how they get into the state of addiction, how they make decisions, experience conflict, and what treatments work for them. My argument in this chapter will be that the addiction-as-individual-abnormality approach is partial, fragmented and ultimately ineffective, and that it is so because it does not acknowledge the importance of power and therefore leaves distortions of power in place. I try to offer a more social model of addiction in which power is the central concept. A longer version of this idea can be found in my book, Power, Powerlessness and Addiction (Orford 2013) although here I go further by speculating about some of the consequences of taking the broader social view of addiction that I am advocating.
