ABSTRACT
Contemporary scientific and philosophical debates on addiction center on two models. In the brain disease model, drug addiction is a “chronic and relapsing brain disease that results from the prolonged effects of drugs on the brain” (Leshner 1997: 45). In contrast, the self or person model individuates addiction in folk psychological terms, as a kind of behavior marked by the repeated use of a drug of choice (DoC) and the difficulty involved in quitting (Satel and Lilienfeld 2013; Flanagan 2013a; Tekin et al. 2017). On the one hand, the brain disease model promotes cellular-level understanding, painting the addict as a biological organism. It takes seriously recent advances in brain imaging methods and the increased sophistication in the neuroscientific modeling of the brain’s reward system—the mesolimbic dopamine system—and promotes pharmaceuticals to target and rebalance the chemical anomalies in it. On the other hand, the self model sees the addict as a person or intentional system (Dennett 1971) who acts according to beliefs and desires and responds to complex historical, environmental, and interpersonal aspects of life. It points to the personal-socio-cultural markers of addiction and promotes social, psychological, and behavioral intervention strategies, e.g., encouraging the addict to change the interpersonal environment that triggers and perpetuates addictive behavior, to receive intensive psychotherapy, to cultivate meditation, and so on. 1
