Drugs of Choice.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Review

Addiction Is a Choice, by Jeffrey A. Schaler, Chicago: Open Court, 179 pages, $42.95/$19.95 paper

How to Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z, by Ann Marlowe, New York: Basic Books, 297 pages, $24.00

Jeffrey Schaler and Ann Marlowe probably would not get along very well. He is an addiction psychologist whose unabashed libertarianism clashes with the leftish sensibilities of other drug policy reformers. She is a rock critic who writes for The Village Voice and views capitalism with ambivalence. He seems to spend a lot of time online, vigorously defending his iconoclastic views against all comers. She hangs out all night in hip, grungy New York clubs. He likes "a glass or two of wine or scotch, and occasionally more than two." She doesn't much care for alcohol; until about five years ago, her drug of choice was heroin. His writing style is relentlessly logical and straightforward, while hers is impressionistic and elliptical.

Despite the stark differences in their perspectives and approaches, Schaler's polemic, Addiction Is a Choice, and Marlowe's memoir, How to Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z, come to strikingly similar conclusions about the nature of addiction, a term that is hauled out with alarming frequency these days to explain away irresponsibility and justify paternalism. "I deny that there is any such thing as 'addiction,' in the sense of a deliberate and conscious course of action which the person literally cannot stop doing," writes Schaler, who deals with drug problems as a psychotherapist, college instructor, writer, and expert witness. "People are responsible for their deliberate and conscious behavior." Marlowe, a Harvard graduate who started snorting heroin in her early 30s and continued for seven years, using it almost every day for months at a time, is no less adamant about individual responsibility. "Not for a minute can I subscribe to the popular view...of addiction as uncontrollable need," she writes. "Still le ss can I take addiction as an excuse for bad behavior."

Much of what Schaler and Marlowe have to say about addiction will be familiar to readers of theorists such as Thomas Szasz and Stanton Peele. All see addiction as a pattern of behavior that can be understood only in the context of a person's values, circumstances, and choices. In this view, addiction is about much more than pharmacology.

Indeed, for Schaler, "addictions are dispensable." Harking back to the original meaning of the term, he defines addiction as "a fondness for, or orientation toward, some thing or activity, because it has meaning, because it is considered valuable or even sacred." Addiction, then, is not inherently good or bad. "Addictions--and only addictions--can open us up to all that makes life rich and fulfilling," Schaler writes. "Yet addictions can also have appalling consequences. The moral is clear: Choose your addictions carefully!..Addictions we approve of are called 'virtues.' Addictions we disapprove of are called vices.

Schaler's approach sweeps away a fog of pseudoscientific obfuscation and reveals the moral issues at the heart of this subject. "Addiction is the expression of a person's values," he writes. "Therefore, whenever we talk or write...