What Do We Mean When We Call Someone a Drug Addict?
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What Do We Mean When We Call Someone a Drug Addict? Janet Jones1 Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
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. Keywords Addict · Drug addiction · Stigma · Social metaphysics · Harm reduction · Linguistic harm Matthew Azimi appeared to be sensible and stable. He was a homeowner who maintained a pool in his backyard for his two young daughters and a teacher at a Bronx high school for the disabled. So, it was a surprise to many—to the point where it made the headline of a New York Times article—when Azimi was found dead of a heroin overdose in the washroom of the school where he taught. As New York Times writer Michael Wilson put it, it is difficult to reconcile Azimi’s life story with his death because “[his] story does not neatly fit into the addict’s narrative” [43]. Most
* Janet Jones [email protected] 1
University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave., W, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada
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of us are familiar with some version of ‘the addict’ narrative: if Sally tries drugs, then Sally will get addicted. And if Sally gets addicted to drugs, then Sally’s life is effectively over—she will become diseased, destitute, and eventually die [1, 40].1 Azimi’s life thus presents a conundrum: was he in fact a drug addict? Can we call him a drug addict if, despite his drug addiction, he had a career, a family, and a house with a pool? Just what do we mean when we call someone a drug addict?2 The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, I will show that ‘drug addict’ is not a neutral term. It looks like it simply means ‘having a drug addiction’, but I will argue that it actually masks the intersection of stigma with other axes of discrimination and that it can aggravate the marginalization experienced at those intersections. The inconsistent application of the term ‘drug ad
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