The “bad choices” view of addiction—which, if we’re honest, amounts to little more than “It’s Your Own Damn Fault”—is not only disastrously ineffective; it is utterly blind. I have never met anyone who, in any meaningful sense of the word, ever “chose” to become addicted, least of all my Downtown Eastside patients whose lives slowly ebbed away or were rapidly extinguished in the streets, hotel rooms, and back alleys of Vancouver’s drug ghetto.
