Points is thrilled to welcome Dr. Jaeyoon Park, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, for an interview about his book Addiction Becomes Normal: On the Late-Modern American Subject. Addiction Becomes Normal is a critical historical and theoretical intervention in the study of addiction in contemporary society.
Please tell readers a little bit about yourself
I am an assistant professor of political science at Amherst College. My field is political philosophy, and I write about ethical and political issues relating to medicine.
What got you interested in the history of addiction?
Initially, it was something I noticed in the public discourse, and even in some of the scholarship, on American drug policy. This was the frequent coexistence of two seemingly opposite beliefs. One was a belief in the power of addiction science to dictate right policy. The other was a belief that addiction science has always been a façade for, or at best an expression of, political biases. Noticing this, I wanted to write a more nuanced account of the real and possible dependencies between addiction science and drug policy. So I started with a simple research question: what is addiction science saying about us now? Very quickly, though, this question captured my whole attention. I became fascinated by just this: wait, what is addiction science saying about us, about human nature and life, right now?
What motivated you to write this book specifically?
When I started reading addiction science, I was struck by something I had not expected. As we know, much of addiction science frames addiction as a disease. But the experience of reading about this particular disease is unusual. For immediately, and consistently, one finds the scientists making huge generalizations, not just about addiction, but about all human nature. In an essay purportedly about the involvement of a particular brain region in addiction, one is told what the nature, quality, and wellspring of all human desire and attachment is. Or in an essay weighing the efficacy of different treatment modalities, one is told why the institution of punishment as a whole has always failed historically, and what the few real methods are for changing any of our despised or unwilled behaviors.
These generalizations that I kept encountering would not have consumed my interest if they had just seemed totally wild, or, alternatively, if their truth had seemed firmly established to me. But in fact, I had two reactions. On the one hand, I easily recognized the picture of human nature that addiction scientists paint for us. At the same time, I could see that this picture was in no way purely induced from, for it vastly exceeded, the empirical data that the scientists could furnish. So then I began to wonder: Where else have I seen this picture of the human? Where else might the producers of addiction science have encountered or learned it?
Explain your book in a way your bartender won’t find boring.
My book is an answer to the questions I’ve mentioned so far. It tries to shine a light on what addiction science now says about us, focusing on the claim that I find most startling, interesting, and persistent in the literature, namely, that the state of addiction is simply an intensification of, not a departure from, the natural dynamics and quality of all human experience. This is what I call the normalization of addiction: the reimagination of addiction, not as an exceptional state, but as a paradigm or magnification of what we are always doing in life, and hence as a window into normal human nature. The book argues, further, that the basic picture of the human that emerges from addiction science is not its unique invention. Instead, it is a picture that has become familiar to us from a wide range of sources in late-modern American life, including from wellness discourse, from new psychotherapies, from self-tracking technologies, and more.
Bio-medical and social constructions of addiction are often discussed as separate entities, but you advance a syncretic understanding. Why?
The simple answer is that the empirical reality that I studied itself crosses that strict separation. To be sure, there are deep differences among scientific, therapeutic, popular, judicial, and other constructions of addiction. But if you look for the specific objects that this book studies—a certain basic picture of the human presumed in accounts of addiction, and the idea that addiction resembles or magnifies ordinary life—you find that they appear across all those domains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, even as they vary in details.
You rely heavily on Foucault, to great effect. What does Foucault help you see in the history of addiction?
What Foucault offered me was a way to rigorously conceptualize what I have been calling a “basic picture of the human.” He offered me, as well, a way to think about the power of such basic pictures that we get from science, medicine, and elsewhere in our culture. These pictures, Foucault shows, do not simply stand before us as inert objects of contemplation. They act on us, and mediate our perception of ourselves and of others, and our sense of what it means to treat someone ethically, effectively, and well. So Foucault’s theoretical vocabulary enabled me to name my historical object, to track it across the conventional separations identified in your last question, and to specify its significance in our lives.
What ramifications should the normalization of addiction have for addiction scholars and health practitioners? How might this lens help us see what we’re missing?
At a practical level, I hope that my book can help readers see what ideas about the human are tacitly affirmed when we accept and implement the scientific theories, treatment modalities, or political framings of addiction that I characterize as carrying out normalization. At a theoretical level, I hope, among other things, to help reopen the question of what it means for addiction science, medicine, and policy to be pathologizing in their effects. For one lesson of the book is that constructing addiction as a disease can mean radically different things—that the group of processes that we often singly call “pathologization” covers diverse and incompatible realities, carrying a surprising variety of concerning ethical and political consequences.
What do you think is the most important takeaway from your book?
I hope that, if nothing else, readers come away with a desire to look with fresh eyes at what is now being said about addiction, and a new curiosity about the picture of the human that is being promoted in what is said.
Has this research led to your next endeavor—what else are you working on?
I continue to think about addiction, and am currently working on a book chapter about the figure of “compulsion” in addiction science and medicine. I am also exploring some of the same big questions that working on the addiction book raised for me, but in a new domain: that of gender medicine.
Based on your research and experience, what do you see as the future of the field of addiction history?
My home field is political philosophy, so I am a guest in addiction history. Hence, I am not well qualified to make predictions about this field. But I do think we are in a period of increasing collaboration among historians, sociologists, philosophers, and others who study addiction. Such collaboration has been enormously rewarding for me, although not always intellectually easy, and I hope that it becomes more common and institutionalized in future years.