People say addiction is a brain disease. Decades of struggling with alcohol and drugs convinced Owen Flanagan that it’s something different and more complicated.
"After Alan I. Leshner, then head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, published a manifesto called “Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters” in 1997 [people have called addiction a disease].…More than a quarter-century later, however, there is no agreement whatsoever on what that brain disease is, although most everyone says that it is one. Scientists and psychologists studying addiction …have not identified a single neural syndrome or profile that might be the disease of addiction."