Legalize heroin
By Brian Earp Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. Forget about “medical marijuana.” Isn’t it time to legalize heroin in the United States? Recreational cocaine? Ecstasy? LSD? How about the...
View ArticleA moral argument against the war on drugs
By Julian Savulescu and Bennett Foddy Former Brazilian President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has argued that the war on drugs has failed and cannabis should be decriminalised. He argued that the...
View ArticleSin Taxes and Biomarkers
For years, ‘sin taxes’ – taxes on socially undesirable and/or addictive substances/activities like smoking, alcohol and gambling – have been a source of controversy. On the one hand, they...
View ArticleThe death of celebrities due to addiction: on helpful and unhelpful...
Philip Seymour Hoffman is dead. Probably due to an overdose of heroin. Hoffman didn’t have to die if he wasn’t so ashamed of his substance use that he did it in secrecy. Because he overdosed alone, no...
View ArticleNeil Levy on Addiction
In a fascinating paper presented at the St Cross Ethics Seminar in Oxford, on 27 March 2014, Professor Neil Levy (Oxford and Melbourne) sought to solve the following puzzle about addicts: on the one...
View ArticleStrange brew: opiates from yeast
A recent series of papers have constructed a biochemical pathway that allows yeast to produce opiates. It is not quite a sugar-to-heroin home brew yet, but putting together the pieces looks fairly...
View ArticleGuest Post: What’s wrong with obesity (and addiction)?
Written by Anke Snoek Macquarie University Many of us experience failure of self-control once in a while. These failures are often harmless, and may involve alcohol or food. Because we have experiences...
View ArticleGuest Post: Must we throw out the brain with the bathwater? Marc Lewis on...
Written by Anke Snoek Macquarie University When neuroscience started to mingle into the debate on addiction and self-control, people aimed to use these insights to cause a paradigm shift in how we...
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Guest Post: Pervitin instead of coffee? Change in attitudes to cognitive...
Written by Marcelo de Araujo State University of Rio de Janeiro CNPq – The Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development How does our attitude to drugs in general shape our...
View Article“The medicalization of love”– podcast interview
Just out today is a podcast interview for Smart Drug Smarts between host Jesse Lawler and interviewee Brian D. Earp on “The Medicalization of Love” (title taken from a recent paper with Anders Sandberg...
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Guest Post: “Gambling should be fun, not a problem”: why strategies of...
Written by Melanie Trouessin University of Lyon Faced with issues related to gambling and games of chance, the Responsible Gambling program aims to promote moderate behaviour on the part of the player....
View ArticleAddiction, Desire, and The Polluted Environment – Richard Holton’s 2nd Uehiro...
By Jonathan Pugh In the second of his three Uehiro lectures on the theme of ‘illness and the social self’, Richard Holton turned to the moral questions raised by addiction. In the first half of the...
View ArticleVideo Interview: Richard Holton on Addiction
Is addiction within or beyond our control? What turns something into an addiction? What should we do (more of) to tackle addiction? In this interview with Dr Katrien Devolder (philosophy, Oxford),...
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Is Addiction an Expression of One’s Deep Self?
By Doug McConnell Chandra Sripada (2016) has recently proposed a conative self-expression account of moral responsibility which claims that we are responsible for actions motivated by what we care for...
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