Abstract
When thinking about the harms of drug addiction, there is a tendency to focus on the harms of drug consumption. But not all harms associated with drug addiction are caused by drug consumption. There is at least another dimension of harm worth considering: what I call the linguistic harm of drug addiction. Starting with an analysis of ‘drug addict’ as it appears in the media, I argue that ‘drug addict’ is inconsistently applied to people with drug addiction and that this inconsistency reveals two important features of the term. First, being called a ‘drug addict’ is worse than being described as ‘having a drug problem’. Second, being called a drug addict exacerbates the challenges experienced by people with drug addiction. Referencing the ‘addict’ narrative, I detail how calling someone a drug addict can add to the marginalization of people with drug addiction and argue that to eliminate the linguistic harm of drug addiction, we ought to reduce it first. Using the analysis of ‘drug addict’ from the first half of the paper, I propose a novel harm reduction strategy that benefits people with drug addiction but calls on people who do not use drugs.
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Notes
For an especially troubling usage of ‘junkie,’ see [9], in which ants who choose morphine over nutrition are described as “true junkies”.
For this paper, I only use the term ‘drug addict’ for the sake of simplicity. However, my analysis holds for similar terms such as ‘druggie’, ‘drug user’, ‘drug abuser’, ‘junkie’, among others. I take these terms to be (relatively) interchangeable because they are all instances of disease-first (person-second) language. They identify a subject by their relationship to drug use instead of identifying a subject, first, as a person and then describing their behavior (i.e. someone who uses drugs).
It is especially telling that Oxford Languages, the world’s leading dictionary publisher, defines ‘drug addict’ as “a person who is addicted to an illegal drug” (emphasis, mine).
I detail the stigmatizing nature of the term ‘drug addict’ in section four.
A brief summary of the theories of social kinds are available in Table 1.
There are different ways to formulate response-addiction, but I have taken and modified Ásta’s version. See [34].
I refer to Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir as just Ásta because, in the Icelandic language, surnames do not exist.
Sveinsdóttir means daughter of Sveins. Following North American convention, then, it is more appropriate to refer to Ásta as just Ásta, much like how one would refer to people who only have one name.
This is an adaptation of Ásta’s formulation. See [34].
Ásta might try to revise my analysis by arguing that there can be two or more grounding properties and that the context-sensitivity of her framework leaves open the possibility of different subjects being conferred the property of ‘drug addict’ at different times. This attempt ultimately fails, however, because to adequately supplement my original formulation of ‘drug addict’ as a conferred property, she would either end up creating such a tight formulation that the conferral of ‘drug addict’ amounts to mere epistemic discernment or too loose a formulation that the conferral of ‘drug addict’ loses its epistemic objectivity. In the first case, Ásta may try to figure out just which grounding properties in which contexts are sufficient for the conferral of ‘drug addict’. However, in detailing such conditions, the conferral of a property would become meaningless. The subject who does the conferral is not conferring the constraints and privileges of ‘drug addict’ as much as they are determining who already has those constraints and privileges (re: description-dependent social kind). In the second case, Ásta would have to leave too much to the subject who does the conferral. A set of grounding properties may therefore be sufficient for some subjects to confer ‘drug addict’, but not enough or too much for others. In this sense, ‘drug addict’ would turn out to be too subjective – it appears that anyone could be made into a ‘drug addict’ since only the beliefs of the person who does the conferral matters (re: response-dependent social kind).
See page 1 for a brief summary of ‘the addict narrative’ and FN 2 for related readings.
The harm of being called a drug addict would thus fall under the umbrella of the harms experienced by people who use drugs, as opposed to the harms caused by drug use. See [19].
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Acknowledgements
This paper was supported by the funding provided by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. I am grateful to be a Vanier Scholar. I am also grateful to my two anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful suggestions. Finally, I would especially like to thank Shannon Dea, who offered me advice on earlier versions of this paper and encouraged me to publish it.
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Jones, J. What Do We Mean When We Call Someone a Drug Addict?. Health Care Anal 28, 391–403 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-020-00410-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-020-00410-0