Recent thoughts on the ecology of addiction

Date: Tuesday 4 November 2025
Time: 12:30pm - 2pm 
Location: Sociology Seminar Room
 

It is widely recognised throughout the scientific literature on addiction that social contextual factors play an enormously influential role in governing the initiation, entrenchment and waning of problematic patterns of drug and alcohol use. 

But the mechanisms through which contexts are said to cause addictive behaviour are invariably cast as diverse types of incentives or disincentives that induce addicts to behave as they do. As a consequence, addictive behaviour gets theoretically construed as the product of contextually informed cost-benefit analyses, or to use a term often found in the literature, ‘incentive sensitive.’ 

For many experts this provides strong evidence of the intrinsic, if notorious, rationality of problematic drug and alcohol use and its voluntary rather than involuntary nature. However, for those of us invested in promoting therapeutic rather than punitive societal responses to addiction it presents a rather serious crisis of legitimacy. For if addictive behaviour is indeed rational and voluntary, then on what grounds shall we argue that addicts are in need, and deserving, of compassionate and therapeutic interventions as opposed to mere punishment? 

In this talk, Prof Weinberg considered one particularly robust way the influence of context, or what he is calling the ecology of addiction, on addictive behaviour can be explained without thereby eviscerating the warrant for therapeutic intervention.  

Speaker biography:

Darin Weinberg is Professor of the Sociology of Medical Thought in the Department of Sociology, Cambridge University and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His recent research focuses primarily on concepts of addiction, and their application in various historical and contemporary contexts. He is particularly interested in how these concepts figure in state-sponsored campaigns of social welfare and social control, and in what their uses reveal about how and why people distinguish the social and natural forces held to govern human behaviour. 

His books include Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes (2014) which won the 2018 Melvin Pollner Prize from the American Sociological Association, Intoxication and Society (2013), Of Others Inside: Insanity, Addiction, and Belonging in America (2005) which won the 2011 Melvin Pollner Prize from the American Sociological Association and, most recently, On Addiction: Insights from History, Ethnography and Critical Theory (2024).

Access note: Historic building. The seminar room is accessed via two flights of steps/a lift and then a further two flights of stairs accessed through a heavy set of doors. There is no step-free access. The lift is not accessible to wheelchair users, but may assist with other mobility issues.