Empowerment and the Addiction Economy

Addiction Economy thought for Today - Is this model just a sad admission of lack of agency or an empowering model for action?

Michael Woudenberg made a great point on yesterday's post that the Addiction Economy framing appears to give us 'zero agency. You are merely the puppets of the elites. How sad'.

He is right, in one way it could be a bleak and disempowering framing. But I would argue it is the most empowering of all!

So to give it a go, broadly, and narrowly speaking (!) there are currently 3 models of addiction:

* The Social Model sees addiction as a response to circumstance and social context, eg 'poverty is the reason for your addiction'

* With the Biological, it's a disease, which takes away some stigma, but is more deterministic - it's your genes or the way your brain works, 'hard luck, you've got an addictive brain, have a pill '

* The Psychological views addiction as a consequence of character and personality, 'your addiction is a weakness in your character, you just have that sort of personality.'

We are proposing a 4th, Economic Model which says 'you are addicted because someone has spent lots of time, effort and money to create and market an addictive product to try to make you that way, so they can make some money'. This could be seen as less deterministic and the knowledge could give you more agency in the process of un-addiction. Some research shows that the realisation that they are addicted just to make other people money is a great catalyst to getting un-addicted. Alternatively it could feel quite fatalistic 'I'm addicted because it's addictive, nothing I can do about it'.

So each of these different models attempts to understand and describe the many different factors which contribute to addiction. Anyone who has been addicted to something, or even felt a bit too dependent will recognise that it is probably an individual and unique combination of these.

But without the economic model, there's nothing to be addicted to, so we argue it comes first. And when it comes to un-addiction at a population level, addressing the Economic model appears to be by far the most effective route.

Grant Ennis and others might argue that my view of addiction as 'multifactorial' is just wrong and opening the door to company power and confusion!

Love any thoughts!