‘Define Your Terms’

Abstract

In this chapter, I carefully define the terms that are central to the book’s argument. There is a particular emphasis on the title itself: Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury. I argue that “addiction” in modern addiction discourse is not actually understood as a disease, literally or metaphorically, but is being represented largely by the rhetorical device of personification. The word “narrative” is evaluated and from there I move into accounts of the most ubiquitous of the narrative modes employed throughout addiction narratives: autobiography. The phrase “Savage Usury”, my subtitle, refers to the “interest” drug addicts and alcoholics must pay for their dependencies. In this chapter, I make it clear, against modern thinking, that alcohol and heroin are not at all the same sort of drugs. Alcoholics drink primarily to gain the courage they lack to enter affably and equally into the community. I suggest that drug addicts, on the contrary, use opioids to escape the same community.