It’s been an unusual week. It’s not often that I get to exchange opinions with a renowned conservative columnist on my blog, but that is what has been happening. Further to my previous post documenting a conversation on Twitter with Peter Hitchens about addiction, he personally responded to my points at great length in the comments section. To which I replied. To which he replied. To which I replied. To which he replied. To which I replied. To which he replied again. It’s all here and makes, I think, for an interesting read.

It was also unusual for me in that, after starting from a resolute position on the subject of addiction and continuing with this theme for most of the conversation, I suddenly found myself having enormous doubts about my stance when I attempted to respond to his following request:

You’re going to need to strip the whole thing down to bright metal, and ask yourself to answer the following question with a clear, unambiguous definition. ‘What is “addiction”?’

In short, I couldn’t do it. It slowly dawned on me, while trying to construct a watertight definition, that it wasn’t logically possible. The language involved is either blatantly self-contradictory or intellectually inconsistent.

I’ll try to summarise my newly found position. Addiction is commonly understood as being some overbearing and unstoppable illness that renders its victims completely unable to withstand its temptations. In response to his debate on the subject with Hitchens on Newsnight, for example, Russell Brand (famously an ex-heroin user) wrote a comment piece in The Spectator. Here, he wrote:

…the mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless (my emphasis) over their addiction and, unless they have structured help, they have no hope.

But this simply cannot be true from a logical point of view. If addiction really did render addicts “completely powerless” then nobody would ever give up any addiction, would they? Addiction would be a one way destination, impossible to return from. So addiction cannot mean this, we must dismiss that definition. So instead of words like ‘compulsive’ or ‘irresistible’ what should we use? Powerful? Gripping? What we have now is a watered down version of addiction which is self-contradictory. If it is a compulsion then that is absolute. We cannot then say it’s a compulsion that can be defeated – that is nonsensical. Therefore we downgrade it to mean “something that is very difficult to resist”. Difficult, yes. Impossible? No. Either way, we have either a definition of addiction that is blatantly false or a mishmash. The first option removes the notion of choice or will or determination. The second definition contradicts the first and relegates addiction to something that requires lots of willpower.

As Peter Hitchens said in one of his replies:

Of course, as I know well from dozens of these debates, you will now start to redefine ‘addiction’ for *this* part of the argument, saying that it doesn’t actually mean total compulsion. But you will retain the original definition, of an overmastering irresistible power, for the other part of the argument, the one you use to excuse the alleged ‘addicts’. This is called ‘inconsistency’, and in a serious argument it loses you lots of points.

In this argument, because conventional opinion and majority opinion are behind you, and because you (and intellectual fashion in general) have a deep dislike of the concept of free will and full human responsibility, you can dance around it and pretend that you haven’t committed an offence against reason. Most people listening or reading will applaud you. But you will still have lost the point.

This was the killer blow for me: it clanged like a bell in my head, arousing the dormant logician within. I had unwittingly fallen into a semantic bear trap of claiming that it is a truly powerful force that compels the user to continue but not so powerful a force that it negates free will entirely. It cannot be one *and* the other and I had to acknowledge this.

From everything I have read so far on the subject, much of it on Mr Hitchens’ own blog but also elsewhere, similar nonsensical positions are advanced on such a routine basis that it’s staggering that the contradiction is not more frequently pointed out.

In this piece, for example, which heralds a new definition of addiction by the American Society of Addictive Medicine (ASAM), there are a number of inconsistent statements in the very first page: (the words in bold are my emphasis)

If you think addiction is all about booze, drugs, sex, gambling, food and other irresistible vices, think again. And if you believe that a person has a choice whether or not to indulge in an addictive behavior, get over it. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) blew the whistle on these deeply held notions with its official release of a new document defining addiction as a chronic neurological disorder involving many brain functions, most notably a devastating imbalance in the so-called reward circuitry. This fundamental impairment in the experience of pleasure literally compels the addict to chase the chemical highs produced by substances like drugs and alcohol and obsessive behaviors like sex, food and gambling.

So the person does not have a choice, they are literally compelled. If this is true, if this is really what addiction means, then there is nothing that can be done is there? Once addicted, there can be no way out. But how does this square with the fact that many people do overcome their addictions? Not easily, not without setback and almost certainly not without support – but they do it.

There’s more (in this quote the italics are the emphasis of the original article, not mine):

In other words, conscious choice plays little or no role in the actual state of addiction; as a result, a person cannot choose not to be addicted. The most an addict can do is choose not to use the substance or engage in the behavior that reinforces the entire self-destructive reward-circuitry loop.

In the preceding quote, it was claimed that it’s not possible to believe that a person has a choice whether or not to indulge in an addictive behaviour. Yet in the same the article, just a paragraph or two later, they unwittingly water down the definition by saying that conscious choice plays “little or no role”. They’ve let a chink of light in there – they’d just told us that there is no choice, but now there’s at least the possibility that choice can play a little role. Well, which is it? Such language, in my admittedly limited reading on the subject (hell, I’m no expert, but I can spot inconsistent language, even if I didn’t originally see it in my own) is routine.

Peter Hitchens debated the subject recently with Damian Thompson who uses similar contradictory terminology, stating that addiction is compulsive behaviour but it remains a matter of choice. It can be compulsive, it can be a matter of choice, but it cannot – by definition – be both.

I have written much more here than I intended to do. Indeed, anyone still reading this rambling post might conclude that I am crazy to a) reach consensus with Peter Hitchens after publicly baiting him about the subject and b) then write a lengthy follow-up post that details just how wrong I now consider my original position to have been. And they may be right. Nonetheless, my exchanges with Mr Hitchens were educational and forced me to forgo my original complacent position and to delve a little deeper into a subject that is extremely ambiguous.

My initial exchanges were based on a misunderstanding of what I thought Peter Hitchens meant by saying that he doesn’t believe that addiction exists. I think this is a common misunderstanding by his critics, many of whom, I suspect, choose to misunderstand him deliberately. I initially thought that by denying its existence he was actually denying the reality of being drawn to a substance. But of course he doesn’t mean any such thing (at least, I don’t think he does). Such feelings, cravings and desires are as real as any other. But this isn’t ‘addiction’ in the popular understanding of the term, because it can be conquered by anyone determined enough to do so. Some people won’t overcome these desires, some won’t even try, but others do.

At the risk of being accused of wanting to have my cake and eat it I’m still not sure that I would state with absolute certainty that “addiction does not exist”. I don’t know enough about neuroscience or the validity of studies of the brain’s so-called “reward circuitry”. However, I am able to say that I haven’t come across a definition of addiction that stands up to rigorous logical scrutiny and on the semantic point of “what is addiction?” I now understand Mr Hitchens’ argument.

If you don’t agree with me, let me know. And if you can conjure up a satisfactory definition of addiction, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The 1992 horror film Candyman is based on an urban legend: if you look into a mirror and say ‘Candyman’ five times, the eponymous protagonist will appear from nowhere and slaughter you with the hook on the end of his arm. In 2013 there is a less violent but equally chilling phenomenon on Twitter whereby if you use the words “Peter Hitchens” in a tweet there is a strong possibility that you will get a reply sometime later from the man himself if, as is likely, he’s not happy with the content of your tweet.

He uses the Twitter handle @ClarkeMicah (alluding to the book Micah Clarke by Arthur Conan Doyle) and by all accounts it really does seem to be the man himself.

I experienced this on Friday when I posted a couple of tweets about his pronouncements that addiction does not exist. He had a notorious argument with Russell Brand on the subject on Newsnight and also, more recently, the journalist Damian Thompson in The Spectator (they have both written books on the subject, drawing opposite conclusions).

My tweets were irreverent, but I was trying to make the point that denying the existence of addiction is as absurd as denying the existence of any number of things.

A little while later I received the following response:

Now, for anyone unfamiliar with how Twitter works there is only really one way Mr Hitchens could have become aware of these tweets. They did not specifically mention his username so he would not have received any notification. It is not possible that he would have seen them retweeted by another user as, in keeping with his obvious contempt for the platform, he doesn’t actually follow anybody. No, he clearly uses Twitter for one purpose only: to search for his own name, see what other people are saying about him and reply in kind. His prerogative of course, but this is akin to walking around a pub and eavesdropping on conversations to determine if people are talking about you, then taking them on if they are.

I’ve been aware of this phenomenon for a while as Micah Clarke is renowned for popping up in conversations with the immortal opening line “This is Peter Hitchens”, something for which, along with constantly referring to himself in the third person, he has been frequently lampooned for.

So while I was aware that this does happen, I was still surprised to get a response. And rather an unusual one really. Was he really suggesting that I genuinely do not know the difference? Was he taking me literally? He’s not renowned for his sense of humour or appreciation of irony but surely he doesn’t think anyone could be serious about this?

So I replied.

And in return I received:

“You’re just not as clever or funny as you think you are.” Ouch! A a punch in the kidneys! (But not literally a punch in the kidneys. You see, Mr Hitchens? I really can distinguish between the material and the non-material world.)

I responded again. What the hell, this was more interesting than work and besides, how often do you get to debate with a Hitchens?

And, dispatched from Mr Hitchens, one for one:

Of these responses, the first is the most curious.

“You say it exists. Burden is on you to prove it. Science needs objective description, repeatable experiments, prediction.”

The burden of proof. No objection whatsoever to this claim, and he is right. What makes this particularly interesting is that this would be the line of reasoning taken by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and, yes, Christopher Hitchens when debating the existence of god. As a renowned Christian and frequent debater on the subject I don’t ever recall Peter Hitchens acceding to this point on the issue of his own faith. Religious faith, it seems, is immune to this kind of scientific enquiry. It’s got a special permit. But here, the tables are turned. ‘Addiction’, something experienced by millions of people, must be scientifically proven otherwise he’s not going to believe in it? A staggering logical volte face there.

What Hitchens (how strange it feels to use that name and not mean his brother) means is that what we call ‘addiction’ is nothing more than a lack of self-control on the part of the ‘addict’. That by succumbing to the concept of ‘addiction’ we absolve the ‘addict’ of responsibility. It’s not their fault. They can’t help themselves. Up to a point he is correct. The first step that any addict would need to take to deal with their substance dependence would be to recognise that they have a problem with it and either seek professional help or resolve to give it up. But this overlooks a couple of uncontentious facts. Firstly, many substances do create dependence in an observable, biological sense. To use a mundane example, anyone who has ever been a regular smoker can testify to this. The desire for that first cigarette in the morning is not just habitual, there is a tangible, nagging craving in the body every bit as real as any physical sensation: accelerated heartbeat, salivation, twitchiness until the need for nicotine is satiated. Secondly, and of course this follows on from the first point, if addiction is a fallacy, how then to explain withdrawal? If addiction doesn’t exist then, presumably, it is not possible for anyone to become physically dependent on a substance. I think five minutes in the presence of an alcoholic at the end of a binge or a heroin addict going through cold turkey would rid him of that fantasy. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps they just need to pull their socks up and keep a stiff upper lip. They are just weak, after all. It’s a bizarre position to take.

Following his logic it would be possible to claim that depression or any number of mental illnesses are not real either. Perhaps he does believe this. After all, he has argued that ADHD and dyslexia are non-existent conditions, like some austere Victorian physician who thinks anything can be overcome by just bucking your bloody ideas up.

I made these points in some subsequent tweets:

I didn’t get a further response. Fair enough, I’m sure he’s a very busy man with better things to do than argue with strangers at great length on the internet. I disagree with him on this and nearly every subject under the sun, but it was still interesting to have the exchange. That said, it’s a bit rich to be told that I’ve been taught what to think but not how to think. What he really means is that my thought process must be substandard as I haven’t come to the same conclusion as him. Presumably my own personal experiences don’t count for anything either. Oh well. And I don’t care if he did think it was ‘feeble’ I liked that Asperger’s analogy and it worked just fine.

I finished with one final remark:

I didn’t want to be rude. Despite everything I can’t really help liking him. Decca Aitkenhead made a similar point in an interview in The Guardian last year. Yes, he’s every liberal’s bogeyman and his opinions sometimes make me foam at the mouth, but he does it so well. It’s an uncomfortable fact, but liberals NEED Peter Hitchens.

Face it, we are addicted to him.