Adria Volta
One morning, a podcast and a commentary on the London Underground made me acutely aware of the contradictions in our approaches to discussing addiction.
The podcast was an episode Sympathy for the Devil featuring mental health and addiction experts who compassionately examine the struggles and death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones through the lens of his childhood, environment, and trauma. The commentary was a muttered word, “junkie,” directed at a man asking for money in our train car. The word obscured the deeper questions in the podcast: What led this man to his situation? How complex was…