ABSTRACT
Multiple shifts in the conceptual practices of addiction research have occurred over the past century—from battles over addiction’s proper name to the waxing and waning of an array of hypotheses about etiology, neural mechanisms, importance of social and environmental context, and the role of learning, memory, motivation, and reinforcement. In the 1990s, addiction was reified as a brain disease at an ontological level in which permanent and irreversible changes to brain structure and function were considered inherent in a unified object—the “addicted brain.” Then-director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) proclaimed addiction a “brain disease, and it matters” (Leshner 1997). Yet today addiction stands as the epitome of a disorder of neuroplasticity, modelled upon brain disease but no longer equated with it (Volkow, Koob & McLellan 2016). No longer cast as stable, rigid, or closed, the “addicted brain” is portrayed as exemplary in its “exquisite[. . .] open[ness] to its milieu” (Rose & Abi-Rached 2013: 52). This chapter traces one of the multiple histories of addiction research, acknowledging how diverse commitments of addiction research indicate the complexity of addiction as an object of knowledge.
