The disease model of addiction is popular among laypeople but has been viewed as a harmful (or as least less helpful) model by researchers for more than a couple decades.

The disease concept has been applied mainly to alcoholism, less often to drug use. Such medical models emphasize the role of physiological addiction anchored in genetic factors and leave aside the psycho-social aspects of the problem [34-35]. Thus, the future alcoholic is considered to have an innate predisposition to drink excessively even before the problem is manifest. Such a reductionist view treats alcoholism as a unitary and discrete category instead of seeing it as a complex multidimensional pattern of behaviour. Using the disease model oversimplifies the issue in a purely medical perspective [36]. Neuhaus [37] notes some logical inconsistencies in this trend of thought. Indeed, there is a circularity in reasoning by labelling someone an alcoholic because he or she drinks too much and explaining that he or she drinks too much because he or she has the disease of alcoholism. There is another inconsistency to note. The purely biomedical model sees people as not responsible either for the problem or the solution [38]. The claim that treatment must be complete abstinence, inherent in the belief that alcoholism is a medical condition, has, however, been made by Alcoholics Anonymous. This organization functions according to an enlightenment model which states that people are not responsible for the solution of their predicament but are blamed for causing their own problem. This again shows the shift from a biological defect to a moral defect. The disease model of alcoholism has been applied to drug issues but with less research effort to ground it on an empirical basis (even though findings on the hereditary origins of alcoholism have not been solidly established). Whenever theorists stress physical addiction exclusively, they operate within the same framework.

Addiction is not caused by drugs at all per se. The circumstances of a person’s life predict addiction overwhelmingly over the mere taking of a drug.

The corrective measure IMHO is UBI. But that reduces the ability of capital to exploit labour.