Name: You've Been Lied to About Addiction | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2026-03-10T16:38:16.000Z
Duration: 47 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

Is it intended to be a rhetorical question?

Because I gotta say, if I was alone in a cage.

No, what you have just done, what else are you gonna do?

So what you've just done is exemplify the point of the title, Right?

One is to kind of stop people, people and make them actually think for themselves about what the effect of a certain environment on their drug taking would be.

She's a professor of philosophy and bioethics.

Not a pair you often see together, which is very cool.

She's wrote a book about addiction with one of the most amazing titles I've ever seen in my life.

What would you do alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine?

That is my description of your title and what you do.

I mean, I'm happy to be described by the title.

And I'm a bit unusual as a philosopher, not just because I work also in bioethics, but

because I work in a really interdisciplinary way.

And I spent a decade working for the NHS in the UK as an assistant therapist in a specialist service for people with personality disorders and complex needs, many of whom had drug and behavioral addictions.

So I'm quite anchored in philosophy, but also interdisciplinary, and had this second anchor in the clinic.

And the book kind of tries to reflect all of those influences.

That title, is it intended to be a rhetorical question?

So, I mean, what you have just done is exemplify.

So what you've just done is exemplify the point of the title.

One is to kind of stop people and make them actually think for themselves about what the effect of a certain environment on their drug taking would be.

Because being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine is a kind of good metaphor for the social, economic and material circumstances that not all, but

So the book is, in ways, quite iconoclastic, although it's deeply connected to addiction science.

It also really makes the case that to understand addiction to, we have to think way more humanistically and psychologically and use our imaginations.

So the book is really supposed to make the reader stop and think for themselves about what they might do in relation to drugs.

But it's also a shout out to the history of animal models, which is a really important part of addiction science, because one of the seminal early experiments about addiction Literally put rats alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine to see what they would do.

But I guess what's so interesting about that history is that that was really interpreted as providing evidence for a brain disease model where we see the rats drug taking behavior as stemming from the way in which cocaine can hijack the brain and compel them to use.

Well, when we do the imagination in our own case, it's not like you're imagining doing a lot of cocaine alone in a cage with nothing else there, because you're thinking of cocaine as hijacking your brain.

You imagine doing cocaine because you're living in isolation and you're bored and you know there's nothing but suffering for you in that.

And cocaine is the only thing that offers relief.

In some sense, it allows you to, by yourself, generate an alternative hypothesis about what might be going on for the rats than the one that, at least traditionally, that experiment led people to conclude.

Was there something that bothered you about the way people talk about addiction or think about addiction that felt wrong or incomplete or maybe even worse?

Basically, I think there are deep misconceptions about addiction, Both in public discourse and in addiction science.

Those misconceptions, in my view, span the political divide.

And having spent time working with people with addiction, I guess in some sense, my ultimate concern is the way in which the rest of us misconceive.

It actually, you know, impacts the kind of treatment and attitudes that we take towards people with addiction themselves.

And of course, the, you know, in some sense, the.

The misconceptions that I want to correct, really the idea that there are two and only two different kinds of models or approaches we could take to addiction.

One is this antiquated moral model which basically just sees drug use and addiction is no different from ordinary drug use.

No scientist or policymaker really holds that model, but it really has contaminated, I think, the cultural air.

I think all of us, at some level, have, like, just little sort of unconscious bits of that model in us that can come out.

And then the supposed antidote to it is the brain disease model of addiction, which really gained ascendancy in the 90s and really has positioned itself as a way of combating the stigma that has been associated with the moral model.

But the brain disease model is rife with its own problems and also, in my view, not doing what we need for people with addictions.

So the book really tries to hold something new and distinctive and sort of much less black and white and simplistic, which, you know, is kind of a middle ground.

So do you think of addiction as a disease in any conventional sense of that term, or do you think that that.

Or do you think that term is actually obscuring more than it's revealing about the phenomenon?

So what you just did was move from brain disease to disease.

And so, you know, just to be a pedantic philosopher for one moment, I definitely think it's.