Most addicts are outsiders, in that they don’t fit in, they disdain how insiders deal with pain and pleasure, life and work, purpose and ambition, private and public. An outsider is alienated.. not part of the social glue that sticks ‘ordinary’ people together, someone whose worldview is at odds with any consensus.

It won’t go away. Addiction keeps mocking me to come up with some way of thinking about it that will accommodate the varied views that vie for supremacy in my head. Addiction just won’t sit still and be conceptualised.

William Pryor, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, was a heroin and then alcohol addict for twelve years in the sixties and seventies. He brushed death several times, but, against overwhelming odds, survived, and, in 1975, was one of the first patients at the first American-style addiction treatment centre in Europe. His experiences - and subsequent transformation to non-addiction - have given him a unique insight into the world of hard drugs and addiction.

Whether it touches our lives directly or not, addiction is a price we all pay for living in freedom. Not any old idealistic freedom, but the liberty championed by politicians of every hue in the 21st century.

Brief information on the first international, multi-disciplinary and iconoclastic enquiry into the very nature of addiction.  Also, links to Podcasts - edited excerpts from the conference recordings.

The theme of the Unhooked Thinking 2007 conference in Bath [England] will be: “Love and Baggage – the part love, families and relationships play in addiction and its treatment”.

Addiction is, beneath the drama, more a philosophical problem than anything else. Its medical, psychological, neurochemical, sociological and criminal manifestations are waves on the surface of a much deeper ocean.

An Unhooked Thinking look at how addiction and relationship go together.

At the root of all addiction is pain, just as it is at the root of being human; a pain that is especially prevalent in this consumerist age, in which meaning, love and a coherent, stable self are very hard to come by. ... Addiction is not an illness, and can be a catalyst in the search for what it is to be truly human.

Addiction is a construct of modernity, one that knows no boundaries of class, circumstance or intellect, a mythic construct that seems to explain what is nigh on inexplicable, our strange response to the pain of being human.