Addiction and Disability

Abstract

The relationship between addiction and disability is complex, contextual, and often uneasy. The historical literature on addiction has origins in clinical research and religious scholarship; these associations, and the characterizations of disability implicit in medical and religious institutions, have profoundly influenced varied, interdisciplinary addiction discourses of the 21st century. In particular, much discussion of addiction concerns whether it constitutes a pathological “disease” or a pattern of poor “choice” (the former view frequently aligned with the medical model of disability and the latter with the moral model). When assessing which (if either) framework makes sense of addiction, much existing work presupposes that the medical metaphysics of disability is accurate. In that case, the claim that addiction is a disability reduces to a statement of support for the “disease” view. Though there exists an active nexus of critical scholarship around addiction, it is not in conversation with critical disability theory and hence shares the tendency to regard disability as natural and pretheoretical. Since 2020, however, the critical posture toward disability has gained traction in addiction scholarship, culminating in an insurgent intervention that approaches the topic of addiction in insightful and politicized ways. These promising developments signal a transformative future direction for addiction discourses and vindicate the pragmatic merit of placing addiction and disability in intentional conversation.