Is Addiction Always a Bad Thing?
Elizabeth F.S. Roberts on challenging our fear of dependency on drugs, food, and other people.
While Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Michigan, was doing fieldwork in Mexico City, studying the effects of chemical exposure, she happened upon a viewpoint that shook her world. In the working-class neighborhoods she was studying, addiction to drugs and alcohol wasn’t viewed as an inherently bad thing. After a lifetime in the US, where Roberts’s tendency to binge eat, and her sister’s dependencies on benzos and alcohol were surrounded by shame and subsequent isolation, she found this new perspective liberating. And so she switched the focus of her work to better understand this very un-American, un-Protestant view of dependency.
In In Praise of Addiction, Roberts uses her anthropological skills to uncover alternate views on drug use and dependence writ large. She found that in some neighborhoods of Mexico City, addiction was often viewed positively—as something that connects people together; and something that was considered very different than vice—a dependence that isolates people from each other.
“My grandchildren, my daughter, we were so relaxed. I can’t live without alcohol, you know? We have our drinks. Our beers. Our cubas. But not [my husband],” one woman in Mexico City who Roberts lived with during her research trips, told Roberts, explaining the difference between good and bad dependence. “There are good alcoholics who can live together, be convivial. Social! But [my husband] has one drink. Then he drinks alone for fifteen days.”
Roberts writes that for many people she interviewed in Mexico, addictions were “pleasurable, repetitive, compulsive devotions. These devotions were twofold—both to the object or activity, and to the people with whom they shared that object or activity. In fact, addiction to substances in communion with others was a sign of social maturity.”
The argument—that other populations see addiction in a much less harsh light than we do in the white, Western world—is no doubt a controversial one, but it’s also one based in historical fact.
In her book, Roberts dives deep into the history of capitalism and Protestantism in the Western world to argue that we too once saw addiction much more positively, or at least neutrally. It wasn’t that dependence on substances in the West changed, Roberts argues, it’s that under the rubric of industrial capitalism, complete individual control and sovereignty began to be valued above all else, and thus addiction went from a societal fact to an individual pathology.
The book is fascinating, and Roberts was kind enough to talk to me about it for Mental Hellth.